This study examined Korean learners' production of intervocalic English biconsonantal clusters consisting of /p/, /t/, /k/, /m/, /n/, or /□/ followed by /l/ or /□/. The results of the production experiment showed several factors influencing Korean learners' production. First, Korean learners' production was influenced by their L1 sound inventory. The mispronunciation of a liquid (i.e., /l/ as [□] and /□/ as [l]) was observed and this will be due to the fact that [l] and [□] are not contrastive in Korean. Second, L1 phonological rules affecting a post-consonantal onset liquid influenced Korean learners' production of English consonant clusters containing a liquid. The cluster /tl/ was mostly pronounced as [ll] and /nl/ as [ll] or [nn]. In addition, the nasalization of a stop consonant before a liquid was attested. Next, Korean learners' production also exhibited the influence of phonetic similarity between the two members of a cluster by illustrating relatively lower production accuracy for /tl/, /t□/, and /nl/ consisting of two alveolar consonants. Finally, familiarity with the test words seemed to be a factor influencing Korean learners' production. Korean learners illustrated relatively lower production accuracy for the words outlet and online which are frequently used as loanwords in Korea.

The present study examines the influence of social distance and power factors on the use of internal and external mitigating devices and strategies in the production of requests by Korean learners of Russian. The data was collected by using a Discourse Completion Task (DCT) containing twelve situations that varied in the facts of power and social distance. The results of the study indicated that the learners showed preference for the use of interrogative, modal verb moch' ('can') and politeness marker pozhalujsta ('please') among internal mitigating devices, and grounder and apology among external mitigating strategies. On the other hand, the learners demonstrated an underuse of such devices/strategies as negation, conditional/interrogative particles and imposition minimizer, which are frequently employed by native Russian speakers. It was concluded that the social distance and power factors influenced the choice of mitigating devices/strategies in the requests produced by Korean learners of Russian. In general, the learners employed more internal and external mitigating devices/strategies in the situations with greater social distance and greater social power.

This paper reports on how a prominent American football player, Joe Burrow, from the state of Ohio adopts the Cajun English spelling system used in Louisiana, a southern state in the U.S., in a symbolic and innovative way during his short stay there when he relocated to Louisiana from Ohio for the final two years of his college career. In previous studies of language attitudes toward English dialects in the U.S., Michiganders evaluated the English used in the Great Lakes area (including Ohio) as the best variety while judging the English spoken in the South (including Louisiana) as the worst. Although Burrow may not carry such language attitude, it is implicitly demonstrated in media coverage related to his college football career. Despite the harsh folk evaluation and rather negative portrait from the media of the Southern U.S. English, Burrow's accommodation to the Cajun English spelling was a means to express his gratitude to the state of Louisiana and resonated through the U.S. in various ways.

Drawing on the cultural background of the East (i.e., Korea) and the West (i.e., U.S.), I aimed to investigate the influence of L1 culture on L2 writing by focusing on the usage of “I” and the logical structure in the participants' English writings. Ten Korean university students learning English as a foreign language (L2) participated in this study. The data was collected through questionnaire, interviews, process logs, and the participants' English writings (They wrote four English essays and one personal narrative). The number of the essays that did not use “I” at all was 13. Five participants did not use “I” at all in at least one of their essays. Nine participants wrote “Chun” (deviation form) in their English writing. All participants employed the combination of English (e.g., U.S.) rhetoric and Korean rhetoric: The rhetorical structure of introduction-body-conclusion (English rhetoric) was mixed with ki-sung-chun-kyul (Korean rhetoric). A new converged mode of writing appeared when there was a fusion between a collectivist culture-based writing and an individualistic culturebased writing, which I coined as “Convergent rhetoric.” The convergence of Korean rhetoric and English rhetoric yielded diverse writing styles, yet a general pattern was graphically represented.

This study aimed to identify second language (L2) developmental indices while controlling for the effects of first language (L1). More specifically, this study investigated the differences in the use of metadiscourse markers among learners from different L1 backgrounds. The following research questions were explored: (1) Which metadiscourse markers can be used as developmental indices to predict learners' proficiency levels? (2) How strongly do learners' L1s impact their L2 development? To answer these questions, multilevel ordinal logistic regression analysis was performed comparing the metadiscourse in English essays written by three Asian learner groups (i.e., Japanese, Thai, and Taiwanese). The results suggest that the frequencies of transitions and self-mentions are the best predictors of language development of metadiscourse categories. Additionally, this study showed that the multilevel regression model can measure the significance of each metadiscourse category more accurately than the single-level model. Therefore, we must consider the influence of learners' L1s for precise detection of the linguistic features that predict their proficiency levels. Through this application of multilevel ordinal regression analysis to learner corpus research, this study illustrated the effectiveness of multilevel analysis for tracking the language acquisition process.

The purpose of this study is to determine whether a vocabulary size test is a valid and reliable measure of longitudinal growth in vocabulary size (VS), and to investigate the relationship between growth in VS and use of vocabulary learning strategies (VLS). Kasahara's (2006) revised version of Mochizuki's (1998) Vocabulary Size Test (VST) was administered to 209 Japanese senior high school students at three time points during their course of study. In addition, a VLS questionnaire based on Schmitt's (1997) taxonomy was administered and used to investigate the relationship between vocabulary growth and patterns of strategy use. Cronbach alpha for the three administrations of the VST ranged from .79 to .85, indicating adequate reliability of the VST. A cluster analysis of strategy use yielded three distinct patterns: low, medium, and high frequency use of strategies. A two-way mixed ANOVA with year as the within-subjects factor and strategy cluster as the between-subjects factor found a significant mean effect for year and strategy use, but no effect for the interaction. The large effect size for year supports the claim that the revised VST is a valid measure of vocabulary size for Japanese high school students. The relationship between VS and strategy use confirms the potential of the revised VST for investigating theoretical and pedagogical factors affecting vocabulary growth.