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The dominance of North American (U.S. and Canadian) English is widely prevalent in Korean English language teaching (ELT). Students show more positive attitudes towards American English than any other English variety (Jung, 2005; Yook & Lindemann, 2013), and teachers impart and reinforce American English norms (Ahn, 2017; Ahn, 2011). Administrators and employers consider American English as the sole model for Korean ELT (Ahn, 2013; Harrison, 2010; Jenks, 2017; Song, 2013). Koreans’ preference for American English dates back to the 1950s, when the first national ELT curriculum explicitly favored American English over British English (Lee, 2015). Since then the status of American English as the standard among all varieties of English has been strengthened due to Korea's strong political, military, and economic ties with the US (Harrison, 2010; Yim, 2007).

Most recent research on teacher identity in the TESOL field has focused on how non-native English-speaking teachers (non-NESTs) view and position themselves vis-à-vis native English-speaking teachers (NESTs), and which factors influence their construction of their professional identities. However, the perceived native speaker/non-native speaker (NS–NNS) dichotomy greatly oversimplifies a complicated phenomenon by representing it as solely linguistic and disregarding sociocultural and political issues. Beyond the question of nativeness versus non-nativeness, race, ethnicity, nationality, and cultural identity have played key roles in how teachers position themselves within English language teaching (ELT). These other factors may be critical in how others judge the capability of a teacher of English and authenticity of his/her English.

Attitudes toward the global spread of English have been one of the major issues in research on the development of world Englishes. Because language attitudes construct an invisible language policy that influences the use of English in a local speech community (Curdt–Christiansen, 2009), many studies addressing the spread of English into non-English contexts have focused on the attitudes of diverse English users toward their local variety and other varieties of English (Ahn, 2014; He & Li, 2009; Wang & Gao, 2015). However, among the core components of language attitudes, that is, the cognitive component (i.e., belief system), affective component (i.e., attitudinal system), and behavioural component (i.e., behavioural intention), little research attention has been paid to the behavioural component other than by Ahn (2014), even though non-native speakers’ actual use of their local English is the process by which English spreads into non-English-speaking communities. Thus it is necessary to explore the factors influencing the speakers’ behaviours while using the local variety of English. In addition, previous research has not identified the mechanism by which the speakers’ beliefs and attitudes have influence their actual behavioural intentions in relation to their attitudes toward their own English. For example, Ahn (2014) reported that whereas Korean English teachers expressed positive attitudes toward Korean English, they were hesitant in their behavioural intentions to use it as a teaching model. However, this study did not deeply address associations among beliefs, attitudes, and actual behaviours in relation to the use of Korean English. In response to this gap, the present study provides an integrated framework for investigating the spread of English into local speech communities by modelling diverse factors of individual speakers’ decision-making processes in adopting the local variety of English.

This study explores how interlocutors from different linguistic and cultural backgrounds employ the five translingual negotiation strategies of envoicing, recontextualization, interactional activity, entextualization and transmodality to communicate in online marketplaces. Informed by conversation analysis and translingualism, three computer-mediated communication (CMC) data sets were analyzed. Findings are as follows: 1) Korean speaker’s envoicing strategy was used to reveal his non-native English speaker status, which softened the impression of discourtesy. It set the co-constructed conversation stage where English speaking counterparts would be implicitly requested to speak more intelligibly; 2) recontextualization strategy was presented through emojis, emoticons, transliteration and translation to turn a business transaction into a friendly conversation between translingual speakers from different cultures where non-verbal cues of hospitality can be delivered in written forms in online one-on-one chats; 3) interactional strategy was observed when speakers did not share a culturally-bounded speech act of “conversation closers.” Misalignment was partially solved by mutual efforts to close their online conversation; 4) entextualization strategy was shown from Korean speakers’ asynchronous communication to confer on appropriate English expression by seeking help from other online community members; and, 5) transmodal strategy refers to the practice of shuttling among different on/offline modes and platforms to encode and decode languages, emotions, and cultural perspectives by depending on a wide range of resources and multiple strategies to accomplish meaningful interaction in online marketplaces. This study shows the translingual characteristics of English-medium online communication, suggesting an extended model of translingual meaning negotiation strategies in CMC contexts.

The number of Korean students studying abroad has dropped drastically in the last decade. In 2014, 10,907 students ranging from age six to 18 went abroad, just over one-third of the total in 2006 when the number hit its highest peak at 29,511 (Korea Herald, 2015). There are a number of reasons for this apparent trend. First, study abroad students have a hard time adjusting themselves to life in the host country, and it is also common for them to experience readjustment difficulties when returning to Korea. Second, parents believe that children can learn ‘authentic’ English in Korea: various English immersion programmes are now available for young learners. Third, studying abroad no longer guarantees children's future success. Returnees are not preferred in the job market due to their in-between identity.

This study examines the use of conjunctive adverbials (CAs) in the research articles (RAs) written by American (ENL), Hong Kong/Singaporean (ESL), and Korean (EFL) scholars. Specifically, this study aims to identify and analyze the overall frequency of CAs and usage patterns of the four semantic categories of CAs occurring in the three groups as well as any patterns of overuse, underuse, and misuse by each group. The results indicate that the overall frequency of CAs used by the Korean EFL scholars was significantly greater than that of the ENL and ESL scholars. They overused adversative and causal categories of CAs most often, while the frequency of use of CAs in all semantic categories was nearly identical between the ENL and ESL scholars. With a closer examination of the actual use of individual CAs, some misuse of CAs was found in both the ESL and EFL groups, but the amount of misuse was greater in the EFL writing. The problematic use of CAs was found to be due to a misunderstanding of semantic and grammatical functions which may have led to a failure in developing logical relation in writing.

One of the recent trends in Korean English Language Teaching (ELT) is that Korean parents are sending their children to countries in which English is a second language (ESL). Among these countries, the Philippines is the most preferred country due to its low tuition costs, low cost of living, and a population of well-educated ESL teachers. Every year, approximately 30,000 Korean students study in universities, elementary and secondary schools, and language academies in the Philippines. 10% of this student population consists of student visa holders and 90% are Special Study Permit (SSP) holders. SSPs are issued to international students studying non-degree special courses for a period not exceeding one year, and 90% of Korean students are presumed to enroll on short-term intensive English programs. The exodus of Koreans to the Philippines to learn English is being led by private language academies, which are founded and run by Koreans, solely targeting Korean students. In 2011, the number of such private language academies was estimated to be 280 (Kim, 2011). Furthermore, it was reported that Korean students were spending over 425 million US dollars annually in the Philippines (KEDI, 2012).

This study examines the areas and types of feedback Korean EFL students would focus on in online peer feedback sessions and their implementation and perception of online peer feedback. Fifteen students in a two-month-long TOEFL beginner class participated in the study. They were asked to make comments on their peers` writings on the online blog after class. Most of their comments were found in the local area. In the local area the greatest frequency was observed in alternation while suggestion was the most frequently occurred in the global area. Similarly, more revisions were made in the local area than in the global area. Most of the comments which pointed out grammatical or lexical errors were implemented in their final drafts. Their perceptions of online peer feedback were investigated through interviews. In general, they found online peer feedback beneficial for the improvement of their writing abilities, but simultaneously they hesitated to give and receive peer feedback because of the possibility of incorrectness.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the dynamics of a peer response group in a mixed-level Korean EFL writing class. Although some...

This study examined the feedback types that students focused on during one peer feedback session with TrackChanges in MS Word and the interactions that the students made in synchronous computer-mediated communication (SCMC). For this study, we investigated 10 university EFL students who were highly proficient levels of literacy in English. They were asked to use the tool of TrackChanges in constructing feedback on student writing and then to hold online conference with an online chatting tool. Data sets included peer`s written commentary with TrackChanges and transcripts of online conferencing. The findings indicated that the students focused primarily on the feedback types of wrong word, style, verb errors, sentence structure, and content. Also, they clarified their feedback in SCMC, although all of the feedback types guaranteed the subsequent revision. The implications of this study were discussed.

In this study, theses written by Korean master’s students (MTs), dissertations written by Korean doctoral students (DDs), research articles written by Korean experts (KRs) and research articles written by native English-speaking experts (ERs) are analyzed in order to identify the organizational traits coming from different academic proficiency levels and the first language variable. Fifty papers from each academic discourse community are analyzed using Swales’ CARS model. The results reveal that very few MTs and DDs, which are the lower academic proficiency groups, follow the regular form of the CARS model, whereas most KRs and ERs maintain linear patterns. KRs follow the CARS model most accurately while ERs convey a rather liberal form of the Move structure.

This study investigates six Korean EFL writers’ proportional use of cognitive strategies with different genre application. Also, the association between the proportional use of each cognitive strategy and the holistic and analytic scores were examined accordingly. Data are being collected by means of 48 think-aloud protocols (TAPs) and evaluation of 48 writing drafts. Data analysis reveals that overall, IG (Idea Generation) in L1 was the most frequently adopted, followed by T (Translation) and IG in L2. The cognitive strategies of LS (Lexical Searching), IO (Idea Organization), TE (Task Examination) and MC (Metacommenting) were rarely used. Both argumentative and narrative genre largely followed the overall proportion. The total incidences of cognitive strategies used are correlated to the holistic writing scores. There was also a strong relation between the cognitive strategies used and the analytic scores. High frequency usage of a certain cognitive strategy resulted in a high analytic score.