The present study explores contributions of working memory, attention, and English language proficiency to incidental vocabulary acquisition. Participants were 53 Korean undergraduate students and they were instructed to read a short story containing 21 unknown words. During reading, their eye movements were registered by an eye tracker. They then responded to three types of unannounced vocabulary tests: (a) form recognition, (b) meaning recall, and (c) meaning recognition. Finally, they performed a backward digit span task. Multiple regression analyses showed that the combination of three variables (English language proficiency, working memory, attention) explained 26.1% of the variance in form recognition test scores, with all three variables contributing to the prediction to a significant and similar degree. In contrast, English language proficiency was the only significant predictor of meaning recall test scores and explained 12.9% of the variance, whereas none of the three variables were significant predictors of meaning recognition test scores.

This study explores the relationship between newly developed indices of lexical sophistication and essay scores written by Asian college students. The study employs the Tool for the Automatic Analysis of Lexical Sophistication(TAALES) program. A total of 440 essays written by EFL students from Korea, China, Japan, Thailand, Taiwan, and Indonesia were selected from the ICNALE(International Corpus Network of Asian Learners of English) corpus. The following two research questions were addressed. First, what is the best lexical sophistication predictor of essay scores? Second, what are differentiating lexical sophistication indices among high-, mid-, and low-level EFL students? Two statistical analyses such as the stepwise regression analysis and the discriminant function analysis were performed using the SPSS version 26.0. Results showed that 'age of acquisition content words' turned out the best predictor of essay score, indicating that essays with content words that on average are perceived to be learned later received higher scores. Also, two multiword units such as 'COCA magazine trigram strength of directional association' and 'COCA magazine bigram mutual information' contributed to distinguishing among EFL students with different English proficiency levels. Therefore, EFL students who produced two-word and three-word phrases with stronger associations were classified as the high proficiency group, hence judged to be more proficient in writing.

The purpose of this study is to analyze the linguistic difficulty among Highschool English textbooks with 2015 Revised National Curriculum, EBS-CSAT prep books, and College Scholastic Ability Test. The Coh-Metrix features used in the present study are lexical features, syntactic complexity, and readability. Each of the five types of EnglishⅠ and EnglishⅡ textbooks based on the revised 2015 curriculum, seventy five reading materials in the English section from 2019 to 2021 CSAT and those in EBS-CSAT prep books were built as a corpus and analyzed with Coh-Metrix. Overall, the results show that linguistic difficulty levels of EBS-CSAT prep books and CSAT are higher than those of revised version of 2015 English textbooks in terms of lexical features, syntactic complexity, and readability. In addition, the findings reveals that the continuity among English Ⅰ, EnglishⅡ textbook, EBS-CSAT prep books, CSAT is not well-organized based on the Coh-Metrix indicies. It would be desirable to keep a balance the difficulty among the materials for students to prepare for CSAT only through the National Curriculum.

This study aims to explore the Korean public's perceptions of British TV dramas and their self-motivated English learning patterns using social big data analysis. For this purpose, texts containing the phrase 'British TV drama' from Twitter and YouTube were extracted and analyzed employing network, frequency, and semantic analyses. The results showed that (1) whereas the public shared information about British TV dramas on Twitter, their opinions and ideas about learning English using British TV dramas were primarily discussed on YouTube; (2) the public seemed to be most interested in improving their British English pronunciation when studying English with British TV dramas; and (3) the public seemed to utilize YouTube as a tool for self-motivated English learning as well as a place for sharing fandom culture. Pedagogical implications are provided.

Visual information plays an important role in listening comprehension. However, most listening tests are conducted as audio-based assessment, which undermines the validity of listening assessment. In order to improve the authenticity of listening assessment, this study attempts to apply virtual reality technology to listening testing to allow examinees to have a sense of presence as if they are in the site of communication and look at whichever direction they desire. Listening assessment tasks that differ in input and expected response depending on the type of virtual reality technology are developed. In addition, validation procedures are developed using the argument-based approach to discern whether the use of virtual reality listening test results is appropriate. For each step of inference, a warrant licensing the inference, the assumptions that the warrant entails, and backing are presented.