Earticle

After a decade of neglect, following the 2008 National Elementary School English Curriculum reading and writing are now introduced from the third grade. Research evidence has shown that the most significant predictors of success in reading and writing are knowledge of the letters of the alphabet and phonemic awareness, which are the foundation of phonics. One goal of this study is to develop a better understanding of the role that oral reading plays in the development of reading skills. Oral reading is important for EFL learners. Listening to target language helps students sharpen their listening skills and hear the phonetic variations of the English language, which in turn helps them improve their reading, writing, and oral skills. Listening is an important aspect of the oral reading process. Another aim is to provide elementary school English teachers with essential background knowledge for teaching phonics in the elementary school English classroom. Unless children are taught systematically and explicitly to read aloud words, it is unlikely that they will develop the basic reading ability by chance or automatically.

The purpose of this study is to examine the influence of native English speakers on Korean university students' English proficiency in TETE classes. To investigate participants' listening improvement, TOEIC tests and language attitude questionnaires were given to 60 intermediate level students who were enrolled in 3 native speakers' classes. The results of the study showed that the subjects' listening proficiency was closely related to their speaking proficiency. The students who received high scores on the listening test showed high scores on the speaking test as well. In addition, the results of the language attitude questionnaires showed that the students were gaining self-confidence and motivation while they used practical English. The results from the study indicated that native English speakers' TETE classes are effective on university students' English proficiency.

The main purpose of the present study is to explore the possibility on how effectively the discourse understanding of linguistics can be applied in English education. For this purpose, this study starts with the review of previous understanding of language. Restricted to the sentential boundary, traditional approaches to the linguistic analyses have had their own limitations to explain linguistic varieties. To get over sentential approaches to linguistic data, discourse-functional approach has been based on the real use of linguistic data. Linguistic understanding beyond sentence can provide the better insight into what had been ignored in linguistic analysis. Some discourse-based ideas have been introduced: context, communicative ability, discourse flow, etc. With this kind of background, the present study tries to look over how discourse-functional approach can be applied in real English education with some specific linguistic examples.

This study attempted to investigate the effect that the chunking activity through mind map improves students's English language ability. The experiment study was conducted for 32 weeks with two classes of 6th graders in D elementary school in the city of Seoguipo, Jejudo. First, the chunking activity through mind map showed rather remarkable and meaningful difference in the improvement in passive vocabulary and active vocabulary. Second, the chunking activity through mind map showed rather remarkable and significant difference in the improvement in passive vocabulary of students at three different levels of competence - high, middle, and low. Especially, the lower level group's students revealed a high degree of significant difference in passive vocabulary than the others. Third, the chunking activity through mind map impacts on the changes of positive attitudes toward vocabulary learning. It is not only improving an English language abilities but also having interest and confidence in the learning of English and communication ability.

For successful academic life of second language students in English-medium universities, ‘academic literacies’ approach needs to be introduced in English for Academic Purposes (EAP) classes. The reason may be that only study skills are not enough to guarantee successful academic life in the situation of doing many writing assignments in English-medium universities. For outstanding writing assignments, it is important for students to be assimilated to discourse community of their disciplines because disciplines have different terms, genres, values, goals and ways of thinking. This coincides with ‘academic literacy’ approach, a more discipline-sensitive and discourse-based approach considering learning as acculturation into a new culture. What is more, as disciplines are more specified, EAP teachers need to use ‘academic literacies’ approach, focusing on discourse community and socio-cultural context of particular discipline because each discipline has technical, field-specific terms, and different ways of arguing, interpreting data and drawing conclusions.

Some properties of case markers in Korean are observed that distinguish them from postpositions. Syntactically, case markers are not projected as the head of a phrase, while postpositions function as the head of a maximal projection. Specifically, the dative, the genitive, and the conjunctive markers are discussed. The dative marker manifests some properties of both case markers and postpositions, which I assume to result from fuzzy argumenthood of indirect objects. The genitive and the conjunctive markers also possess their own characteristics, part of which come from the fact that they express relations between NPs. A phrasal affixation approach and a multi-modular analysis of case markers will be compared. In the multi-modular analysis proposed in this paper, case markers are not syntactically realized elements. In syntax, they exist only as case features on NPs, and their morphophonological realization is presented in the morphological component. Finally, I will briefly comment on a possibility of treating case markers as improper or special clitics.

The purpose of this paper is to show what tense and aspect systems English and Korean have and what similarities and differences the two languages show in terms of tense and aspect. Korean tends to simplify tense and aspect markers in a verb phrase when tense and aspect are predictable on the basis of adverbials and contextual information. Thus, a lot of Korean sentences have verb phrases containing neutralized tense and aspect markers because of time adverbials and contextual information, while English sentences contain unambiguous tense and aspect indicators in verb phrases. English verb phrases expressing tense and aspect strictly determine what adverbials they can be co-used with within a sentence. English tense and aspect markers in verb phrases do not bring about the possibility of misinterpretation. However, Korean tense and aspect are likely to be misinterpreted because they should be individually or subjectively determined depending on how readers interpret time adverbials and contexts in Korean sentences. For this reason, the interpretation of Korean tense and aspect in sentences has been ambiguous and controversial.

It is no doubt that the main function of language is for communication. Communication consists of literal and nonliteral interactions. For nonliteral interactions, figurative expressions are used a lot for the better understanding of successful communication. Recently, it is noticed that cognitive linguistics has been concerned with metaphoric notions. This paper aims to make a cognitive analysis of the emotional attitude of 'fear' from a metaphorical conceptualization. For this study, the basic idea related to 'fear' was selected from the horror story. The findings show the followings: 1) Fear metaphors are related to human beings, 2) non-human creatures are introduced to represent humanistic attitude and emotions. Therefore, it is said that the fear metaphor is of experiential basis, because it is motivated by language users' experiences and knowledge about their world.