2018, Vol.26, No.1

The Sociolinguistic Journal of Korea 2023 KCI Impact Factor : 0.57

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

On the basis of KakaoTalk conversation data, this paper investigates the variations found in the use of honorific final endings, expecially haeyo and hapsyo styles. For this study we collected 3,087 tokens of honorific final endings from the dialogue of 8 KakaoTalk group chat rooms. Through multivariate analyses using Goldvarb and LVS, we examined whether the linguistic and external constraints, which were claimed by Kang (2011) to constrain the usage of haeyo and hapsyo styles in spoken language, also operate in the KakaoTalk dialogues. The results of the analyses revealed not only far more variants in the KakaoTalk data (12 variants of haeyo and 6 variants of hapsyo) than in spoken language but also various additional variants realized with pronunciation spelling and partial omission of final endings. As in the spoken language, ‘sentence type’, ‘speaker's gender’, ‘rituality of utterance’, and ‘formality of situation’ were analyzed as constraints which had a strong effect on the variation. In the data examined, besides haeyo and hapsyo styles, new honorific styles of hao, hasoseo, seupjyo, handayo, hasem/hasam were also found. Two new types of variants which was not yet discussed in previous studies, were also observed in the data: variants of ‘syam’ and ‘syeom’ of hasem/hasam styles and two variants of ‘yo’ realized with consonant addition to the onset position.

This study explores the Theme types and the thematic progression in the formal email writings of Korean EFL college learners, based on the Theme-Rheme analytical framework of Systemic Functional Grammar (SFG). Data was collected from 99 college students, enrolled in an English Writing Composition course during the second semester of 2017 via a cyber university in Korea. Their main writing activity involved email writings in the form of requesting primarily based on the Genre Approach. Text analysis was conducted with the comparison of the high- scoring group (15), the medium-scoring group (15) and the low-scoring group (15), based on assessment of the course assignment. Employing the coding step of identifying the Theme and Rheme of each T-unit, the text analysis sought to figure out which Theme types were used for each T-unit and which thematic progression patterns were used for overall text flow and cohesion. The key finding was that there were certain discourse-specific thematic patterns of formal email writing. Among the range of thematic features, this study will highlight marked Themes, interpersonal Themes and thematic choices of nominalization for the purpose of formal email writing texts.

The purposes of this study are to investigate how TOPIK students perceive the writing area and analyze it from the point of critical assessment, and to suggest improvement directions of TOPIK writing assessment and Korean writing education. For this, 80 test-takers were conducted a questionnaire survey, and 20 of them were interviewed to elicit their thoughts, attitudes, perceptions about the TOPIK writing. As a result of analysis, the power of high - stakes testings such as TOPIK has a great influence on learners. TOPIK test-takers had difficulty and great anxiety about writing. They thought that to study for TOPIK writing is only for the sake of examination and that extra study was needed to improve their actual writing ability. Although the test-takers showed a willingness to write well in Korean, they had a negative attitude about studying writing. To solve this problem, it is necessary to solve problems of difficulty level in writing assessment such as ambiguous assessment criteria. In addition, it is also need to pay attention to the phenomenon of ‘test-oriented learning’ in Korean writing education, and to study the motivation of interest which attracts Korean learners' attention and let them have a positive attitude about writing.