2020, Vol.21, No.3

Modern English Education 2023 KCI Impact Factor : 1.55

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

The purpose of the study is to investigate various ways of enhancing critical thinking ability (CTA henceforth) for EFL. It reviews definitions of CTA, linguistic features in terms of rhetorical device analysis, strategic procedures, interactive activities, and the teachers’ role in CTA. The findings indicate that the development of both language and CTA entail complementary cognitive relationships, and one of CTA’s primary features is linguistic sensitivity. Therefore, the process of CTA implementation may be factored in linguistic elements such as rhetorical device analysis matched to EFL learners’ language proficiency. As CTA develops from less to more sophisticated reasoning, the study proposes 8 procedural steps —PICA-EIOR— starting from probing problems to reflecting on conclusions. The study advocates EFL discussion and inquiry and proposes preliminary interactive CTA activities prior to PICA-EIOR. The study argues that for CTA implementation the teachers’ role is critical in terms of providing a cooperative learning environment, presenting CTA materials, providing questions, being a facilitator, and offering tutorials.

This study aims to identify differences between newspaper editorials of Korean, American, and British university students in order to shed light on more ‘native-like’ writing, and give pedagogical implications for L2 writing. The comparison between two native English groups could suggest which different results of linguistic aspects result from non-nativeness of Korean-English. The corpora consist of 209 English editorials of Korean, American, and British university students from student English newspapers, and then the editorials are analyzed. Coh-Metrix 3.0, which is a computational textual assessment tool, is used to measure the basic count of texts, lexical characteristics, syntactic complexity, discourse features, and readability level. As for the basic count, the sentence and paragraph length indices clearly show the remarkable difference between Korean-English and English-English editorials. Korean university students tend to write more sentences per paragraph. As for the lexical characteristics, the Korean EFL learners use the easiest words among the three groups. As for the syntactic complexity, the Korean students used significantly less complex syntactic patterns. As for the discourse features, the Korean students utilized connectives as cohesive devices the most. As for the readability level, the English editorials of the Korean students are less difficult than native English speakers.

Previous studies on rater variability have shown that the amount of attention directed towards each rating criterion was associated with rating criteria order in analytic rating scales. Thus, this study attempts to explore whether rating criteria order affects the amount of attention directed to rating criteria using think-aloud protocols. To achieve a research goal, 11 novice Korean raters rated two essays in two different rating criteria orders. In the standard-order rating rubric, the rating criteria of textual aspects of the essays, including Content and Organization, were first evaluated. Then, the rating criteria of grammatical aspects of the essays, including Vocabulary and Language use, were evaluated. This rating order was precisely reversed in the reverse-order rating rubric. The overall results of this study show that heightened attention from the raters was directed toward either the first- or last-presented rating criterion depending on the quality of each essay. Specifically, a differential amount of attention was directed towards Content and Language Use when rating a poor-quality essay. A significant implication of the study is that rating criteria order should be considered in developing analytic rating scales, and in training newly recruited raters.