The purpose of the present study is to investigate the difficulty of English grammar features by Korean EFL learners such as past tense of verbs, passive, 3rd person singular -s, comparative adjectives, yes/no question, auxiliary verbs, many/much, for/since, articles, subjunctive mood, dative alternation, infinitives. gerunds, participles, and relatives. To this end, a fill-in-the-blanks test of English sentences and a set of English proficiency tests were administered for 67 college students in Ulsan, Korea. The results showed significant differences in accuracy for gerunds between high and intermediate levels of learners. In the comparison of accuracy by high and low levels of learners were found significant differences for passive, 3rd person singular -s, yes/no question, auxiliary verbs, many/much, for/since, dative alternation, infinitives, gerunds, participles, and relatives. On the other hand, no significant difference was found for past tense of verbs, comparative adjectives, articles, and subjunctive mood across the groups of learners. Based on these findings, the study suggested that pedagogical priorities should be established to help Korean EFL university learners, particularly with past tense of verbs, subjunctive mood, and 3rd person singular -s, articles, and relatives. Finally, the study discussed difficulty in comparison with those of Rodriguez Silva(2017) and Cheng and Lee(2020).

The present study aims to investigate lexical coverage of General Service List (GSL)/Academic Word List (AWL), 2015 Basic Vocabulary of Ministry of Education, and 10 BNC/COCA word frequency lists in 2021 EBS-linked textbooks and CSAT. For the purpose of the study, AntWordProfiler was used to analyze the data. First of all, the word tokens in CSAT included higher percentage of GSL than those in EBS books in both reading and listening corpora, but the word tokens in both EBS and CSAT had high percentage of AWL(7-9%) in the reading corpora. Secondly, the word tokens in the reading corpora of both EBS and CSAT cover between 94% and 96% of 2015 Basic Vocabulary of Ministry of Education, and those in the listening counterparts also cover between 97% and 98%. Finally, Korean high school students need to know 4,000 and 6,000 word families of BNC/COCA to understand the reading corpora of EBS textbooks, compared with 2,000 and 3,000 families in the CSAT counterparts respectively, based on 95% and 98% figures. On the other hand, based on 95% and 98% lexical coverage figures, they need to know 3,000 and 4,000 word families for listening comprehension, while they need 2,000 and 3,000 word families respectively. Findings and implications are discussed at the end.

The current study aimed to compare the reading passages in the prescribed textbooks (Middle School English 3 and High School English 1) and in high school 1st graders' National Achievement English tests (mock tests) implemented for three consecutive years (2018-2020). In doing so, the L2 Syntactic Complexity Analyzer (L2SCA) and two dissimilar readability indices, Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level (FKGL) and Flesch Reading Ease (FRE), were utilized. One-way ANOVA and a post-hoc test (Scheffe test) were conducted on 104 passages for Middle School English 3, 92 for High School English 1, and 276 for the mock tests. The results revealed that the reading passages in the mock tests were syntactically the most complex across the 14 measures. In addition, in terms of readability, much greater difference was observed between the Middle School English 3 and the mock tests than between the Middle School English 3 and High School English 1. These results imply that the difficulty levels in the textbooks should be adjusted and that similar to the high school setting, a mock test needs to be considered for the middle school, so that learning burden of students can be lessened.

The purpose of this study was to investigate the perceptions of Korean teachers and supervisors in local office of education on curriculum completion standard setting for elementary and lower secondary school period. Curriculum completion standards consisted of two main elements, attendance rate and subject content completion criteria in English education, on which three research questions were focused. For this study, a questionnaire was administered to 1187 research participants including 1059 school teachers(elementary 602, secondary 457) and 128 supervisors in charge of curriculum implementation in 17 provincial office of education. An independent t-test and a One-way ANOVA were performed to explore whether there was a statistically significant difference between the teacher-supervisor groups and among four teacher groups. The results showed that, even though significant differences were found in some parts, most of all teachers and supervisors had favorable opinions towards setting both attendance rate and subject content completion criteria as curriculum completion standards in relation to English education. Noteworthy was that the result revealed that the higher the level of school year grade, the more setting of curriculum completion standards were required. The findings of this study will contribute to an understanding of the perceptions of teachers in elementary and secondary schools and supervisors in the local office of education, which can be utilized when setting standards of curriculum completion as national educational policy in Korean context.

The present study reports on the effects of English proficiency, working memory, meta-cognition, English writing, and Korean reading on English literal and inferential reading. To this end, a total of 256 high school students participated in the study, and the relationships between the predictors and English reading were analyzed using structural equation modeling. Results of the study indicate that Korean literal reading, English proficiency, and working memory made a significant impact on English literal reading, whereas English narrative writing and meta-cognition failed to explain the significant proportions of variances in English literal reading. For English inferential reading task, Korean inferential reading, English argumentative writing, English proficiency, and meta-cognition significantly affected English reading, while working memory made a non-significant effect on English reading. Pedagogical implications were provided.

This study draws on findings in conversation analytic (CA) research to evaluate middle school English textbook dialogues and make recommendations for improvement. This study examined thirteen second grade middle school English textbooks of the revised 2015 national curriculum and compiled a collection of 19 disagreement sequences present in six of those textbooks. The final collection was analyzed by making comparisons to CA insights on disagreement and found that many of the textbook dialogues were interactionally inadequate. The majority of the scripted conversations lacked dispreferred components and consisted of bald, literal formulations of a disagreeing stance. A few others included delaying devices and turn prefaces that showed awareness of preference organization, yet some of their features were divergent from CA descriptions of doing disagreement. Only one dialogue appeared to closely resemble natural interaction by including prefatory talk with agreement. The analytic findings thereby illuminates the need for incorporating knowledge about the actual workings of spoken interaction into scripting textbook dialogues and ends with implications for language materials design.

This paper is to identify the use of interactional devices employed in English research article (RA) abstracts from a cross-cultural perspective. A total of 120 English RA abstracts written by Korea-based writers and US-based writers were randomly selected from leading academic journals (30 from English Teaching, 30 from Korean Journal of Applied Linguistics, 30 from TESOL Quarterly, and 30 from Applied Linguistics). A concordance program, AntConc 3.5.8, was used to identify the makers. The results showed that hedges are the most frequent marker in both groups. The most significant cross-cultural difference was found in the use of self-mentions in the academic texts. Korea-based writers tended to avoid of mentioning selves in their texts, whereas US-based writers used self-mention markers frequently to construct authorial identity and to emphasize their contribution to the field and their research claims. This study provides an intercultural understanding of academic texts from a cross-cultural perspective with implications for academic writing in the field of English for academic purposes.