2013, Vol.21, No.1

The Sociolinguistic Journal of Korea 2023 KCI Impact Factor : 0.57

pISSN : 1226-4822
https://journal.kci.go.kr/socioling

Students’ silence is a common phenomenon in Korean or EFL classes, and is associated with a stereotypical image of Korean students as passive and uncritical learners. This article explores the dynamics of an English writing class in Korea, and attempts to understand what students experienced as well as uncover the variables contributing to their silence. One writing instructor and seven Korean students were involved in this qualitative study. The results indicate that the writing professor and the students had different interpretations of the classroom silence, which had an impact on their view of the intention of communication. It also shows how the students were actively engaged in learning to write but had unresolved questions that could have been dealt with if they had availed themselves of the professor’s help. A range of variables were used to analyze the silence of the seven students in depth. Some valuable pedagogical implications are provided for teachers to investigate this phenomenon and to achieve a better understanding of student silence (166).

By analyzing retrospective autobiographic essays, this study aims to investigate factors related to English learning motivation, demotivation, and remotivation. Participants were 30 graduate students majoring in English education at a graduate school located in Seoul. They were asked to write retrospective essays on their English learning from kindergarten to the present day. In order to analyze their essays, we used reiterative reading by Miles and Huberman (1994) based on grounded theory. As a result, we identified four factors (instruction method, teacher, colleagues, tests) as the factors for English learning demotivation. Remotivation factors included teaching methods befitting students’ learning styles, instructor’s individual attention and kind words/encouragement, good interpersonal relationship, grade, and foreign country experience. Regarding factors of enhancing the level of motivation, five factors were identified: foreign country experience, high test score, teacher, salient goal, and university English-classes. These results indicate that demotivation and remotivation take different psychological routes and the importance of teacher needs to be fully considered for boosting students English-learning motivation since teacher factor could affect English learners either positively or negatively.

This paper analyzes the elements and properties of the discourse in the main text of Korean textbooks. The main text conveys ‘discourse knowledge’ that constitutes the communicative competence of Korean language on the basis of the fundamental properties of discourse rather than on unnatural sentences and conversations constructed only to present vocabulary and grammar. It consists of ‘discourse type’, ‘background knowledge’, ‘language use’, and ‘conversation organization’. As a result of this research, we found that the main text contains the following properties of discourse. First, the main text whose discourse type students frequently encounter is selected and language befitting that type is used. Second, the background knowledge of the discourse is presented. Third, the conversation of the main text is organized with the turn-taking system. The characteristics as a textbook are also taken into account in the main texts that we reviewed. These comprise dealing with limited discourse patterns, regulating language use, and the regular and restricted turn-taking system. The above analysis shows that the main text is constructed utilizing both aspects of education and discourse. The findings of this study will be helpful for textbook users in developing instruction and studying strategies and for textbook developers in constructing main texts.