The purpose of this study is to investigate Korean L1 students' awareness of L2 English derivational affixes and the relationship between one's morphological knowledge and overall language proficiency. A total of 150 high school students participated in the study. A diagnostic test was developed to assess their morphological knowledge with a set of high-frequency prefixes and suffixes. The results indicate that the degree of ease and difficulty in acquisition of an affixal morpheme is related to its frequency and compositionality but not with its productivity or uniformity; the acquisition of prefixes appear to differ in function of frequency while that of suffixes is more closely associated with grammatical categories. Korean students show some characteristic error patterns. Most notably, they tend to overgeneralize the prefix in- to a wide range of stems, often producing morphologically ill-formed words. A student's ability to use suffixes predicts the student's overall English proficiency to a significant degree, but no such relationship is found between one's knowledge of prefixes and proficiency. Since Korean students can hardly notice and acquire L2 English derivational morphology only on the basis of natural input, explicit instructional interventions and consciousness raising seem to be necessary.

The purpose of this study is to analyze the Voice Onset Time (VOT) of English stops in textbook paragraph reading. It is differentiated from previous research in that it analyzed the stop pronunciation after two months-not just after pronunciation training. For this purpose, eight of the prospective English teachers who received the high level in the evaluation of textbook reading proficiency test were tested. Major results show that VOT value of voiceless stop produced by the subjects was slightly shorter than that of the native English speakers except for /t/, while VOT value of the voiced stop was slightly longer than that of the native speaker except for /g/. Also, it is noticeable that subjects had less distinct voiced stops and voiceless stops than those of native speakers. The results may be interpreted that even though the VOT values of Korean speakers' English stops are not comparable to that of native speakers, it does not interfere communication.

The aim of this study is to explore the influence of a customized mobile application developed for a certain liberal arts class and to consider learners' attitudes and perceptions about using customized mobile apps in the classroom. An experimental group and a control group were classified into an upper and lower group, respectively. I and II tests were conducted to determine the impact of the use of classroom-specific mobile apps. Individual interviews and an open questionnaire were carried out to identify learners' attitudes and perceptions. The results of the study indicate that more adept learners were not significantly affected by the learning method (i.e., the mobile app or the handout), whereas less adept learners were more likely to benefit from learning through the mobile app than through the general handout form. The results from the interviews and open surveys suggest that mobile apps can: (1) create interest and motivation for learning; (2) be conveniently used beyond time and space constraints; (3) are great learning tools; and (4) ease the burden of studying. In order to support mobile usage in the classroom, more experimental research regarding the efficiency and learning effects of mobile apps should be carried out in the future.

From a pragmatic-analytic perspective, this study examines how definitely as a discourse marker (DM) functions in spoken conversation. Three corpora, namely the British National Corpus (BNC), the Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English (MICASE), and the Santa Barbara Corpus of Spoken American English (SBC) are used to investigate the multifarious pragmatic functions of definitely between interlocutors. It is practicable to use definitely as a DM in pre-front field and it frequently occurs in everyday language use. In light of the three corpora with respect to the DM definitely introduced in this study, there may be divergent types of definitely that occur in spoken conversation. Based on my dataset, definitely exhibits four types of pre-front use. For instance, definitely appears by itself and it also occurs with specific discourse particles such as oh, yeah, and yes and with negators such as no and not. Lastly, its repetitive pre-front use is also found. The analysis from a pragmatic perspective in regard to definitely as a DM proposes that definitely can play a great variety of pragmatic functions such as those of acting as a pre-closing device, or devices to express and solicit approval, consensus, eagerness, stimulation, gratification, floor-holding, topic-shift, intimacy, and bridging between interlocutors in spoken conversation. From perspectives of semantic and pragmatic analysis, definitely has an affirmative semantic connotation and it could strongly serve as an affirmative conversational response device.

In this study, we investigate how L2 acquisition theories can successfully account for the relative difficulties in the perception of English fricatives by Korean young learners. Regarding the acquisition of L2 phonemes, the previous studies can be divided into two main approaches: (1) phoneme-based analysis which is mainly concerned with Loanword Phonology and Perceptual Assimilation Model vs. (2) feature-based analysis. Noticing that these analyses make different predictions on the acquisition of L2 sounds, we conducted AX discrimination task and 4I-oddity task to find which types of English fricatives (voicing, place, and manner of articulation) Korean young learners have difficulties in perceiving. 30 Korean elementary school students participated in the tasks and 27 minimal pairs including word-initial English fricatives were employed. Crucial to the analysis of the experimental results is that with one particular L2 acquisition theory it is impossible to explain why Korean learners can or cannot perceive English fricatives distinctively. That is, Korean young learners' perceptibility of English fricatives is attributed to both phonemic differences and feature differences between L1 and L2. Furthermore, in some cases, the fact that Korean young learners fail to discriminate certain pairs of English fricatives should be better accounted for by considering phonetic characteristics of L1 and L2 fricatives.

Based on cognitive semantics, Izutsu and Izutsu (2011) provide an explanation of how English connectives such as while and whereas extend their meanings to CONTRAST and CONCESSIVE from their original meaning TEMPORAL/SPATIAL OVERLAP. In case of while, the two propositions connected by while are arranged side by side within the viewer's viewing frame. The arrangement creates spatial proximity between the two propositions, making it easy to compare and contrast them, leading to the meaning CONTRAST for while. The meaning CONCESSIVE is developed when the co-occurrence of the events denoted by the two propositions is not compatible with one of the viewer's assumptions. These explanations raise the question as to whether this type of meaning development is restricted to connectives or if it can be extended to other categories. In answering the question, the paper examines Korean verb tayta, which literally means SPATIAL CONTACT, and reveals that the meaning development is similarly observed. The cross-categorical finding of the paper strengthens the linguistic motivation towards meaning development from spatial proximity to comparison, contrast, and concessive.

I argue that putative adjectives in Korean do not form a separate syntactic category but fall into the category of verbs. I critically review the arguments for the adjectives in Korean as a separate syntactic category, and present various arguments against them. I further go on to argue that putative adjectives in prenominal position are not attributive adjectives, but actually verbs, forming a relative clause and thus behaving as predicatives. It will be shown that the various interpretations of putative adjectives in Korean in the prenominal position follow from the present proposal.