2021, Vol.22, No.3

Modern English Education 2023 KCI Impact Factor : 1.55

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

The study aimed to investigate pre-service English teachers’ teacher talk in microteaching and the factors affecting its configuration. To this end, it included ⅰ) more elaborated categorization of teacher talk, ⅱ) more comprehensive research focus unbound by particular types of teacher talk, and ⅲ) more factors beyond English proficiency that may affect the configuration of teacher talk. Thirty pre-service English teachers participated in the study and their microteaching was audiotaped. Based on the analysis of teacher talk using ANOVA, the study confirmed that the configuration of teacher talk varied both in terms of major types and sub-types. Among the major types, ‘Instructing’ was used the most while ‘Cognitive structuring’ was the least used during microteaching. Concerning sub-types, ‘Neutral instructing’ was used most among the ‘Instructing’ and ‘Referential question’ was used most among the ‘Questioning.’ The study using Kendall’s tau-b correlation and a Fisher’s Exact Test confirmed the factors affecting the teacher talk: the pre-service teachers’ oral English proficiency, their experience as a teacher and as a student in an English- medium class. The results suggest that the pre-service teachers with higher oral proficiency, more teaching experience in English, and more learning experience in an English-medium class used the types of teacher talk that can better promote not only instruction but also interactions with their students.

This study aims to identify differences of English reading passages in the National Assessment of Educational Achievement (NAEA) for middle and high school students. For this study, 208 NAEA English reading passages from the five consecutive years from 2015 to 2019 were extracted. The two research questions consider the differences of two tests, and correlations among the selected Coh-Metrix indices such as descriptive measures, lexical characteristics, syntactic complexity, discourse patterns, and readability level. The extracted reading passages were analyzed based on 17 selected Coh-Metrix indices related to each selected index. As for the differences of two tests, descriptive measures, lexical difficulty and readability level showed clear differences, whereas lexical diversity, syntactic complexity, and discourse patterns did not present critical gaps between the two tests. As for the correlations, the positive correlations between readability level and descriptive measures were inevitable in that the way to estimate the Flesch Reading Ease score and the Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level is based on the average number of syllables per word and words per sentence. Lexical diversity was negatively correlated to all the indices of discourse patterns. The implications and limitations of the current study are included.

The current study aimed to explore the effects of reading fluency on reading comprehension abilities. In doing so, different levels of reading fluency (i.e., word and text level) and different measures of reading fluency (i.e., oral and silent reading fluency) were considered. A total of 31 advanced Korean EFL readers in high schools were opted for, and the data were analyzed with hierarchical and multiple regression analyses. The results showed that oral reading fluency, which includes word and text level reading fluency, did not take up unique variance when silent reading fluency and vocabulary knowledge were taken into consideration. However, these results were mainly attributed to word reading fluency, revealing that text level reading fluency was a significant contributor to reading abilities. To be specific, while both oral and silent text level reading fluency took up additional predictive power when controlling for each other, the predictability of the latter was larger than that of the former. These results imply that for advanced readers, rapid reading of a passage silently as well as orally will positively affect their reading comprehension abilities, while silent text reading fluency has a more crucial role in boosting their reading abilities.