KJC Korea
Journal Central

This study examines the word-initial stop variation in the speech of speakers who were born in North Kyungsang province and moved to Seoul after the age of 20 and that of speakers who were born in Seoul and moved to North Kyungsang province after the age of 20. Specifically, this study investigates whether Seoul Koreans moving to North Kyungsang have acquired the NKK-like word-initial tensification in any of the two contexts - wordlist and reading passage. Moreover, this study explores whether North Kyungsang Korean moving to Seoul have lost the NKK-like word-initial tensification in the two contexts. Finally, this study examines whether social factors, including gender, length of stay in a new region, attitude toward the first and second dialects, and awareness of the word-initial tensification affect the acquisition or loss of the second dialect feature. A major finding is that both mobile groups do not show the NKK-like word-initial tensification in wordlist and reading passage speech. With respect to the effect of the social factors, male Kyungsang Koreans in Seoul produce tensified stops more than female counterparts. Meanwhile, none of the social factors are significant in the speech of Seoul Koreans in North Kyungsang.

The advent of CLT in the 1980s led to the CLT-SLA debate which continued unabated for the last forty years. This paper asks, Does the now dominant Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) promote Second Language Acquisition (SLA)? In addressing this question, the paper first reviews and explains the social academic history of CLT; different versions of CLT (strong, weak); how CLT operates; its relationship to SLA, such as perceptions of SLA that have contributed to the development of CLT pedagogy (communicative competence, input, output, interaction hypothesis); and techniques used in CLT. Next, it deliberates on the most controversial issues of the CLT-SLA debate, including language forms, corrective feedback, teachers' perceptions of and approaches to CLT, and classroom conditions, followed by a discussion of the ease/difficulty of implementing CLT. It concludes with a discussion of how teachers can best practice CLT in their classrooms.

This study examines the concept of Korean ethnicity by looking into how the Choseonjok, ethnic return migrants from China, are perceived in online news comments. Data were collected from 3,109 comments, which were written in response to 28 news articles regarding the Choseonjok, and analyzed using a Python-based text-mining technique and critical discourse analysis. The findings show that the commenters perceived the Choseonjok negatively, including as potential criminals or social vice. They not only placed the Choseonjok in an inferior position to pure Koreans but also excluded them from the category of compatriots, arguing that speaking the same language and sharing a similar appearance were not enough to make the ethnic return migrants Korean compatriots. This study critically demonstrates how a group of ethnic return migrants is depicted in online public discourses and how this portrayal can shed light on the conceptualization of Korean ethnicity in this era of multiculturalism.

This study examines the relationships between referring expressions and their referents in English and Korean language. Using the Accessibility as well as the Givenness frameworks (Ariel, 1991, 1994; Gundel et al., 1993), this study investigates the distribution of the referring expressions in each language and how they are related to the framework. Unlike most languages, in Korean, third-person pronouns are rarely used and definite constructions are not used, with the absence of definite and indefinite articles. With these differences in mind, this study aims to examine whether the framework of Gundel et al. (1993) bears its universality to account for the actual use of the distant languages such as English and Korean. Following Mulkern (1996) and Lee (2010), this study restricts its data in political news media discourse from the contrastive perspective. The data consists of ten English political news articles and twenty Korean political news articles published in 2017. The result confirms that both languages follow the general convention of news discourse to introduce a new entity with full names and prefer family names in subsequent mentions. However, further investigation is needed in terms of the use of pronouns in Korean because the distribution from this study differs from Lee's (2010). More contrastive research on different languages in different discourse contexts would shed more light on the universality of the Accessibility and Givenness frameworks.