2015, Vol.16, No.1

Modern English Education 2023 KCI Impact Factor : 1.55

pISSN : 1598-0782 / eISSN : 2586-6141
https://journal.kci.go.kr/meeso

This study examines whether phonological memory (PM) of adult Korean learners ofEnglish correlates with their proficiency levels in L2. Previous studies have shown that PM is significantly related to L1 and L2 learning, mostly with regard to vocabulary and grammar. The present study measured PM with both English words and English-based nonwords in order to examine its relationship with L2 proficiency. Twenty Korean learners of English at different proficiency levels performed serial recognition tasks of PM words and nonwords. According to a repeated measures analysis of variance(ANOVA) and Pearson correlation, both accuracy and reaction time data revealed asignificant relationship between PM words and L2 proficiency. The high group wasmore accurate and faster than the low group with PM words. However, no significantrelationship was found between PM nonwords and L2 proficiency. The results indicate the high group learners’ better performance with PM words was not replicated in PM nonwords. Additionally, the two groups exhibited different reaction times with different pair types in words, with the high group showing faster reaction time. No differencewas observed with different pair types in nonwords. The findings of the present studyimply that words and nonwords are differently processed by the high group L2 learners of English unlike the low group.

The study aims to explore how discourse markers, kind of and sort of, are used inmodern American English. For the purpose, the spoken section of the Corpus ofContemporary American English (COCA) was investigated to examine the frequencyand functions of the target discourse markers chosen for the study. By frequency, kind of was more frequently used than sort of. Compared to the usage of the target discourse markers in the spoken portion of the British National Corpus (BNC), it was found that modern American English prefers kind of to sort of. The analysis of COCA produced that both discourse markers showed high frequency in the corpus and they playedvarious roles such as a face-threat mitigator, a delay device, a compromiser, and asoftener depending on which constituent the marker modifies. Out of these functions,no prevailing function was identified as the instances of the target discourse markerstaken from COCA were too many to be analyzed in detail.

The purpose of this study is to examine interactional markers such as hedges, boosters,and attitude markers employed in English-authored research article introductions andKorean-authored English texts in the field of Applied Linguistics. The corpus for thisstudy was comprised of 38 research article introductions selected from an internationaljournal, Applied Linguistics, and 57 English research articles written by Korean-authorscollected from a national journal, Korean Journal of Applied Linguistics. Hyland’s(2005) model of interactional resources was used as the basis for the analysis. Theresults showed that hedges were the most heavily used interactional marker in the twolanguage groups. The cross-cultural analysis revealed that a slightly higher frequencyof hedges was found in English-authored English texts and more boosters and attitudemarkers were used in Korean-authored English texts. Korean writers tended tohighlight their claims in an assertive tone and to involve the readers in the writers’argument. This study suggested that the cultural contexts of publication may influenceL2 writers’ use of hedges, boosters and attitude markers in writing academic texts.