This study investigated the transition of English education after the 2007 revised curriculum in South Korea. This research focused on Dong-A Ilbo newspaper articles across three major political regimes: Presidents Lee Myung-bak, Park Geun-hye, and Moon Jae-in from March 2007 to June 2022. The research questions are 1) what are the prominent themes in English education in the three political regimes? and 2) what are the implications of these changes to the current English education in South Korea? A total of 522 newspaper articles were categorized into five major themes: 1) Experience of English education, 2) English education policy and its perception, 3) English instructors in and out of school, 4) English education curricula, and 5) English for the entrance exams in South Korea. Regarding political regimes, Lee Myung-bak administration emphasized English education by introducing English village, Jeju Global Education City, and the National English Ability Test (NEAT). Park Geun-hye administration applied criterion-referenced English test in the College Scholastic Ability Test (CSAT). Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, significant changes in English education during Moon Jae-in administration are not identified except for AI-appled online distance learning. This paper concludes with educational implications for future research.

This study examines the foreign language reading anxiety of Korean students and its relation to reading comprehension. Furthermore, it investigates the main sources which affect foreign reading anxiety. Forty-eight students participated in a survey, in which they took the Foreign Language Reading Anxiety Scale (FLRAS) and an English Reading Comprehension Test (ERCT). Their scores of each FLRAS and ERCT were compared to see the correlation. The result found that there was a positive relationship between reading anxiety and reading comprehension. In addition, the primary factors that affect reading anxiety were text-related reading anxiety which becomes the first rank of the causes of anxiety followed by cognitive anxiety including feeling intimidated in understanding and remembering while reading. This study is implicative for understanding L2 learners' psychological aspects such as apprehension and having an appropriate attitude and approach in guiding students with fears in foreign language learning.

This study investigates how syntactic features can be used to distinguish essays written by Korean college students from NS college students. Essays from the ICNALE(International Corpus Network of Asian Learners of English) corpus were analyzed using TAASSC(the Tool for the Automatic Analysis of Syntactic Sophistication and Complexity) program. Two statistical analyses were performed. First, a multivariate analysis of variance(MANOVA) was employed to examine whether there are statistically significant differences in noun phrase complexity features between NS and Korean students. Second, a stepwise discriminant function analysis was performed to classify into two groups(i.e., NS and Korean students) in terms of noun phrase complexity features. Results showed that Korean and NS students significantly differed in terms of various noun phrase complexity indices. The best four predictors for distinguishing Korean students' essays from NS students' essays were dependents per object of the preposition, relative clause modifier per nominal, prepositions per object of the preposition, and dependents per nominal. It was shown that NS students produced more syntactically complex essays than Korean students by employing phrasal embedding. Implications of this study for English writing instruction are discussed.