Use of Achievement and Reduction Strategies in L2 Writing: Solutions for Productive Competence-deficit Lexical Problems

전유아 한국응용언어학회 2008 응용 언어학 Vol.24 No.1

Vocabulary plays a critical role in the production of successful writing such as when students are asked to write with a time limit, a situation that students often face in their academic lives. Therefore, students need to develop a set of strategies to solve lexical problems during the process of composing. Lexical problems and strategies have been widely researched in the area of communication strategies, but most of this research traditionally focuses on oral production. As such, investigation of writing communication strategies is a novelty within the area of L2 writing process studies. While obtaining data on the lexical aspects of the L2 writing process, this study aims at studying the lexical strategies that L2 writers use to compensate for insufficient lexical knowledge when 20 Korean university students were asked to think-aloud (TA) while writing in English. The TA protocols indicated that the writers used a repertoire of achievement and reduction strategies to compensate for their competence-deficit lexical problems which can be explained within the framework of communication strategies. The study provides pedagogical implications for strategy training that may help students develop strategic competence for solving writing lexical problems.

Academic Motivational Orientations and Vocabulary Size of L2 Adolescent Learners

전유아,장형심 한국영어어문교육학회 2013 영어어문교육 Vol.19 No.2

While motivation has been widely embraced by both researchers and practitioners as a critical determinant of success in language learning, there are scarcity of studies that pay attention to the separate role of motivation in L2 vocabulary learning. The present study revisits the self-determination framework of motivational orientations to highlight the utility of the intrinsic/extrinsic distinction for predicting L2 learning outcomes, in our instance, vocabulary knowledge. Relationships were sought between L2 vocabulary size and motivation by conducting receptive and productive vocabulary size tests on 261 adolescent high school learners, with information on the learners’ degrees of academic motivation via the Academic Self-Regulation Questionnaire. There were significant differences between all receptive vocabulary proficiency groups for the subtypes of extrinsic motivation. In examining significant predictors of receptive vocabulary knowledge, identified regulation, the most autonomous form of extrinsic motivation, was noted. Further subject variables, such as gender and year of study also indicated the female students and high school seniors scoring relatively higher on the receptive vocabulary test. The results imply how vocabulary learning needs to occur in contexts that can promote positive sensations for more self-determined subtypes of motivation.

Identification of Lexical Competence Problems in L2 Writing Process of Korean EFL University Students

전유아 한국영어교육학회 2007 ENGLISH TEACHING(영어교육) Vol.62 No.1

While the nature of productive lexical knowledge may be distinguished as competence-based or performance-based, classification of lexical problems in the translating phase is lacking in the writing strategies literature. With separate interest in competence-based word knowledge, this study investigates the lexical aspect of the writing process by exploring the types and tokens of lexical problems that L2 writers identify in the drafting (translating) stage of writing. To obtain data, 10 Korean university students were asked to think-aloud while writing twice in English on word processors with access to Internet dictionaries. A repeated measures design was used where students wrote for two audiences and two writing topics. Three main types of lexical competence problems were found where use of the Internet dictionary had an effect on the identification of problems. Signs of vocabulary problems indicated that writers had unknown word, partially known word, and more than one word problems where eight subcategories of partially known word problems were found. The findings may provide pedagogical implications for helping L2 writers solve different types of lexical problems such as in contexts where word processors and Internet dictionaries are used as the medium.

Writer’s Use of Lexical Retrieval Strategies in the L2 Writing Process of EFL Students

전유아 한국영어어문교육학회 2009 영어어문교육 Vol.15 No.1

Although productive skills such as writing is being continually emphasized in the area of English teaching, studies on the writing process of students learning English as a foreign language (EFL) have been overlooked in the Korean context. Also, there is scarcity of studies that systematically examine the process of writing with respect to performance-based lexical (PBL) problems, which require the use of strategies for writers to retrieve lexical knowledge to produce target words. As such, this study investigates the L2 writing process by categorizing the types of retrieval strategies, and the PBL problems which trigger the use of strategies when writers try to retrieve the best word for their target meaning. The strategies used to solve the different types of PBL problems indicated that it is a cluster of strategies rather than an independent strategy that leads to effective strategy use. To obtain data on the retrieval strategies for PBL problems, 12 Korean university students were asked to think-aloud while writing in English with word processors. The findings of the study contribute to model building of the L2 writing process regarding lexical aspects.

Collocations in L2 Writing and Rater's Perceived Writing Proficiency

전유아,신동광 한국응용언어학회 2009 응용 언어학 Vol.25 No.1

The retrieval and efficient use of vocabulary is known to be crucial in academic writing tasks since mastery of formulaic language, such as, collocations can help second language learners come across as native- like. However, the connection between the writers' use of collocations and the rater's perception of writing scores is largely unexplored. This study investigates the extent to how salient markings of collocations were in the rater's mind when assigning analytic scores to students' compositions. A corpus consisting of 30 student composition products was analyzed in order to investigate the relationship between the use of collocations in L2 written production and rater's scores. The results of the study indicated that raters assigned better scores to compositions that were written with a higher number of collocation types rather than to compositions that produced higher lexical sophistication levels. The findings of the study have implications for vocabulary assessment. As demonstrated by the results, this study proposes the inclusion of the notion of the ability to demonstrate ‘appropriate use of collocations’ for assessment as a measure of vocabulary proficiency in the ESL Composition Profile (Jacobs et al., 1981).

Adolescent EFL Learners’ Perceived Use of Listening Test-taking Strategies and L2 Proficiency

전유아,김성혜 한국영어어문교육학회 2016 영어어문교육 Vol.22 No.2

The ability to listen in a second language (L2) is important for Korean secondary school EFL learners who need to excel on the national high-stakes exam. However, the current practice of teaching L2 listening and testing are mainly product-oriented where primary interest is on the outcome of the test. After completing an L2 listening test, the test-taking process of 1,134 Korean EFL high school learners were explored via questionnaires with interest in general proficiency. Exploratory factor analysis yielded ‘online listening strategies’ (LS), ‘planning & evaluation’ (PE) and ‘test-taking strategies (TS).’The results indicated that the frequent use of PE and LS was associated with rising proficiency levels, but that the use of TS was detrimental to L2 proficiency. The results indicated the significance of employing LS to ascertain the main idea of listening and PE for directed attention. However, the use of mental translation was found to be a detrimental LS. The results present implications for teaching learners to strengthen rudimentary listening skills and to work consistently towards introducing listening tasks that will deter the use of test-wiseness skills.

Item Difficulty Predictors of a Multiple-choice Reading Test

전유아,신택수 한국영어교육학회 2010 ENGLISH TEACHING(영어교육) Vol.65 No.4

The researchers’ experiential knowledge demonstrates that the task of predicting and controlling the difficulty level of the multiple-choice items of the College Scholastic Ability Test (CSAT) for English is substantially left to the subjective judgment of experienced item writers. The present study accordingly recognizes a need to identify item difficulty predictors and build an item difficulty prediction model to handle this pertinent issue. While taking separate interest in constructing a model for the multiple-choice reading subset of the CSAT, the study was conducted by identifying item difficulty predictor variables from previous research, and by validating the candidate predictors via questionnaires by highly experienced teacher-raters when asked to analyze reading items from the English reading subset of the preliminary CSAT (i.e., yun-hap-hak-ryuk-pyung-ga) administered in March 2009. Using multiple regression technique and maximum likelihood estimation, an item difficulty prediction model was generated. In order to check validity and applicability of the prediction model, the hypothetical model was finally tested on a subsequent version of the test administered in September 2009. This type of model building is expected to guide test developers design an item pool in accordance with special needs, such as to construct multiple test forms, which have similar mean difficulties.

Lexical discovery and consolidation strategies of proficient and less proficient EFL vocational high school learners

전유아,김유희 한국영어어문교육학회 2011 영어어문교육 Vol.17 No.3

The analysis on the use of lexical discovery and consolidation strategies that have been researched within the area of vocabulary learning strategies (VLS) have not sufficiently drawn the interest of EFL practitioners with regard to vocational high school learners. The results, however, are expected to have implications for the design of vocabulary tasks and instructional materials for EFL learners. The present study investigates EFL vocational high school learners’ use of lexical discovery and consolidation strategies with questionnaires, where the use of the learners’ lexical discovery strategies were further validated with the think-aloud methodology by asking samples of proficient and less proficient learners to report on their reading process while reading L2 texts that had not been exposed to the learners. The results indicated that there were significant differences between the two groups of learners in the employment of 11 of the strategies which were in the categories of determination, social, memory, and metacognitive strategies, but not for cognitive strategies. The pattern of strategies indicated that different lexical discovery and consolidation strategies were employed relatively more by one proficiency group than another. The study suggests some implications for how strategy-based instruction can be implemented in EFL classrooms.

Lexical Strategies and Problems Encountered in the Use of Dictionaries

전유아 한국응용언어학회 2007 응용 언어학 Vol.23 No.1

The potential role of the dictionary as an aid for solving lexical problems is usually not questioned by teachers and learners. When L2 learners are writing, the dictionary may help writers access unknown L2 words, check on an aspect of a retrieved L2 word or provide alternative equivalents to their intended meaning. However, words presented in the dictionary entry pose new problems when L2 writers have to decide whether to use any of the words. To obtain data on L2 writers’ problem-oriented process of using dictionaries, 10 Korean university students were asked to think-aloud (TA) while writing twice in English on word processors with access to Internet dictionaries. The TA protocols indicated that dictionary-based problems arose due to writers’ lack of knowledge of the L2 word(s), or when known L2 dictionary word(s) were considered inappropriate or wrong to the writer in some way for conveying the intended meaning. As a solution to the dictionary-based problems, writers used a range of lexical strategies which can be explained within the framework of communication strategies that may be employed among L2 learners when they need to compensate for their lack of productive lexical knowledge.

Lexical Threshold of L2 Reading in the Korean CSAT

전유아 한국외국어대학교 영미연구소 2014 영미연구 Vol.31 No.-

For over two decades in Korea, no other English exam has been able toreplace the high-stakes Korean College Scholastic Ability Test (CSAT). From a lexical perspective, there has been transient analysis of the readingpassages, however, without sufficient attention it deserves as thenationally administered exam. Twenty-one years of the main CSAT ofEnglish reading texts for academic years 1994 through 2014 were utilizedto compile a specialized, small corpus. For analysis, lexical richness(STTR) was calculated, and distribution of the CSAT words across thefourteen word bands of the British National Corpus (BNC) was searchedwith RANGE to propose a lexical threshold level. By STTR, lexical varietyindicated to be steady over the twenty-one years of the CSAT. However,the recent 2014B CSAT exhibited a noticeable increase of words comparedto the CSAT in previous years, pressuring test-takers to improve readingfluency. The range and the percentage of CSAT words across the 14 wordbands of the BNC indicated test-takers to minimally need a threshold of6,000 word families for 95% coverage (including proper nouns) of theCSAT reading passages. The study ends with implications for L2vocabulary learning.