2022, Vol.23, No.2

Modern English Education 2023 KCI Impact Factor : 1.55

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

The importance of collaborative activities has been recognized for increasing learning opportunities in language classrooms. However, benefits of collaborative writing in university writing classrooms have not been robustly reported yet. Thus, the purpose of this study was to investigate students’ perception of a collaborative writing project and its instructional benefits during a course devoted to teaching transitions from writing paragraphs to essays in an EFL classroom. The project involved 15 students in an intermediate-level writing class at a university in Korea. Each group was assigned with different types of paragraph. Other groups gave suggestions on how to transform the paragraph to a five-paragraph essay in a series of peer feedback workshops. Results of surveys and interviews of participants clearly revealed that the collaborative project helped them develop a positive attitude towards writing in L2 English and working in groups. This study contributes to the practice of academic writing by showing that collaborative writing allows students to achieve the goal of understanding composing processes and the goal of producing a presentable essay. For teachers who are reluctant to implement collaborative writing projects in EFL settings, this study provides useful guidelines for project design and practical applications for the classroom.

This study explores the potential of lexical bundles (LBs) as a way for investigating academic writing development of EFL students. This study used a corpus of essays by Korean EFL students in high school or the first week of college divided by school-level group into three subcorpora (first-year high school; second-year high school; and third-year high school/incoming college). It investigated how groups used LBs in context by examining these LBs’ semantic prosodies and preferences. Findings showed marked differences in structures and functions of bundles favored by first-year high school students versus two higher school-level groups, with the former using more bundles characteristic of colloquial spoken language. On the other hand, a contextual analysis of LBs shared across subcorpora showed more similarities between the first-year group and the second-year group regarding semantic prosodies and preferences. These two adjacent groups tended to project positive, neutral, and negative affective meanings via LBs at similar rates that differed from rates of the third-year/incoming college group. These results shed light on learners’ developmental trajectory toward being proficient academic writers in terms of their use of formulaic multiword sequences in academic prose.

The objective of this exploratory study was to investigate vocabulary size of Korean high school learners of English. The relationship between their vocabulary size and performance on English tests was also explored. With 97 Korean high school students of 10th and 11th grades, the Vocabulary Size Test (Nation & Beglar, 2007) was employed to measure their vocabulary size. Their performance on English tests was assessed through a school’s English reading test and the Preliminary College Scholastic Ability Test. Results revealed that 10th and 11th graders knew an average of 3,282 and 3,733 word-families, respectively. These two groups showed a 451 word-family difference in vocabulary size, suggesting that high school students, at least for participants of the current study, gained around 451 word-families over a year. While a large number of students achieved a vocabulary size of 4,000 to 6,000 word-families, a significant number of students seemed to have difficulty in learning the most frequent 2,000 word-families. The study found that the vocabulary size played a crucial role in learners’ English academic performance, most markedly in reading comprehension, in line with previous L2 vocabulary research.