2020, Vol.21, No.1

Modern English Education 2023 KCI Impact Factor : 1.55

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

Metadiscourse, as a key component of academic writing, communicates the writer’s stance and engages the reader in the text. Despite much research on metadiscoursal realizations in EFL writing, little attention has been given to how EFL students’ metadiscourse use changes over time as their academic literacy develops. The present study is, therefore, designed to document EFL students’ metadiscourse in alignment with their semester-long learning of research papers. The researchers recruited 31 EFL college students and collected two research papers from each—one submitted in the 7th week and the other in the 16th week of the semester. With a focus on research paper introductions, the student papers were analyzed in both quantitative and qualitative ways. The findings indicate that there are general patterns identified in the overall frequency of metadiscourse, which is contingent on genre constraints. In terms of the students’ developmental changes, the number of metadiscourse use did not significantly increase, but the ways they employed metadiscourse changed over time. And their writing development was found to reflect the degree to which they situated themselves in academic discourse. The present study discusses how metadiscourse can be incorporated into writing instruction to help EFL students’ build an academic identity.

The present paper investigates the durational patterns of English fricatives /f, v, θ, ð, s, z/ produced by native English speakers and Korean learners of English. The contrasts of voiceless and voiced fricatives, fricative sequence across word boundary, stress placement, and place of articulation were taken into account to identify the durational changes and the durational patterns that are characteristic for Korean learners of English. Example phrases for the production experiment are “say foot” and “safe foot”. The recorded speech was measured to get the durations of the target fricative intervals. The study results show that the variability of the durational patterns is smaller in magnitude and the mean durations in general are longer for Korean learners of English. The speech of Korean learners of English shows that the overlapping and shortening effect for the fricative sequence is greater and the lengthening effect of stress is smaller compared with those in native English speakers’ data. The results of the study are discussed in relation to the phonological contrasts of English and Korean, and some pedagogical implications of the study are presented.

This study attempted to survey English teachers’ perceptions on elementary school English education in order to identify issues and reality of elementary school English education and propose policy implications. The participants of this study were 186 elementary school teachers from 100 elementary schools, stratified by 17 provincial and metropolitan Offices of Education. The survey results indicated that the majority of teachers think the amount of English class hours and the level of English learning contents are sufficient. Teachers also believed that teaching more reading and writing to the 3rd and 4th grade students is needed, in order to enhance the elementary school students’ written language skills. Furthermore, teachers pointed out that the most serious problem about elementary school English education is a large proficiency gap among students, particularly in the lower grades (grades 3 and 4). Based on these findings, this study suggests that teaching more written language in the 3rd and the 4th grades English classes is required while enhancing students’ motivation in learning the language at the same time. This paper argues the need for reformation of National Curriculum from sequential learning of the four skills to balanced learning of the four skills from the early stages.