2019, Vol.27, No.2

The Sociolinguistic Journal of Korea 2023 KCI Impact Factor : 0.57

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

In spite of the benefits of English oral presentations on EFL learners' proficiency and competence, English presentations have not obtained much attention as instructional medium in the field of English education. With the belief that EFL learners' experience of English presentation performance can provide valuable insights for educators and researchers, this study intended to describe how EFL learners perceive their presentation performance through their reflective self-assessment. In particular, adopting Otoshi and Heffernen's (2008) rubric of evaluation, this study examined what a group of Korean EFL learners were concerned in regard to their presentation performances and how they evaluated them. The data collected were 41 reflective self-assessment papers written by 41 Korean college students. The papers were coded, categorized and interpreted. Findings showed that voice quality is the area the students in this paper were most concerned about. Negative evaluations of their presentation performance outweighed the positive evaluations except in the area of Power Point use. Lastly, rehearsal and visual aids education sessions as well as differentiating spoken and written English were suggested as instruction implications for educators.

This study examines multiple language-identities embedded within the emerging professional teacher identity of international graduate students teaching Korean as a foreign language (KFL). Situated in the context of Korean classrooms at an American university, this study draws data from two rounds of interviews with three instructors (one nonnative and two native Korean speakers). The qualitative analysis reveals that their professional teacher identity revolves around multiple language identities grounded in their L1 cultural norms and perceived English language proficiencies. Their views and undertakings of local cultural norms indicate the varying ways in which these instructors projected their L1 and L2 identities onto their emergent teacher identity. Given the vexed relationship between notions of teacher authority in her L1 Japanese culture and the local norms of interaction, the nonnative teacher maintained authority by establishing a certain distance from her students. By contrast, the native teachers accommodated the local understandings of teacher authority and (re)shaped their view of a teacher to the locally-defined professionalism, a teacher like ‘a friend’. The negotiated identity of the KFL teachers improved classroom interaction and engendered positive view about teaching. The findings are discussed to highlight foreign language teacher identity in a teacher education program.

In this paper, two Korean textbooks that are most widely used in American colleges are analyzed for representations of gender, race and nationality. Literature review shows that representation in textbooks does matter for learners and that representations of gender, race, nationality, ethnicity, cultural diversities, disabilities, sexualities, non-nativeness, occupations, age, socioeducational backgrounds, etc. have been concerns of the researchers. While there have been a lot of studies on representations in EFL/ESL textbooks, such research on KFL/KSL textbooks is relatively new, even though representation is an important issue to the Korean language education in the era of globalization and multicultralism. The main characters who have names, conversations and illustrations and keep appearing throughout the analyzed textbooks are investigated. The main characters' number of appearances, firstness-the number of times to be presented first in exericses, examples or sentences-occasions, all speaking turns and I (initiation in the IRF sequence, Sinclair & Coulthard (1975))s are tallied, and it is explored if the numbers are relevant to the gender, nationality and race of the characters. Some analyzation of conversations and illustrations are also done for more discussion, which includes how KFL/KSL textbooks could be better in terms of representation.