Sungwoo Kim

DOI: Vol.22(No.2) 9-28, 2019

With recent developments in artificial intelligence, students are starting to actively embrace machine translation for a variety of purposes. However, English teachers feel ambivalent about introducing this new technology into classroom settings, raising concern about its educational value and effectiveness. The situation requires an empirical investigation into the affordances and constraints of machine translation within specific educational contexts. Given these intersecting developments, the present study reports on a pedagogical experiment which traced students’ exploration of using machine translation services, and analyzes their evaluations of this emerging technology. Results suggest that teachers and students can benefit from the use of this emerging technology if they collaboratively explore machine translation as a context-sensitive tool, while paying close attention to crosslinguistic features, culture-specific phrases, lexical and grammatical characteristics, genre types, and the criticality of a given task. Based on these results some possible classroom tasks incorporating machine translation are proposed. It is also suggested that educators initiate a productive discussion on the use of machine translation and other artificial intelligence-driven technologies in the classroom and design effective pedagogical practices within a broader conceptual framework of literacy, rather than giving into unexamined hope or fear of the technology.

machine translation, mediation, google translate, computer-assisted language learning

김규미 Kim Gyoomi

DOI: Vol.22(No.2) 29-49, 2019

The purpose of this study was to investigate the factors that influenced the mobile-assisted language learning (MALL) environment. To do so, seven constructs which included personal factors (attitude, metacognition), social factors (subjective norm, interactivity), and cognitive factors (perceived usefulness, perceived ease, content reliability) were selected. A questionnaire was developed to measure the constructs of MALL. A total of 194 university students were surveyed in the spring semester of 2018, and data were analyzed using exploratory factor analysis. The results of data analysis were classified into five influencing factors, which were different from the ones originated by previous studies, and the question items of each factor also showed a different aspect from the original question composition of previous studies. As a result of analyzing the correlation among the new factors, all factors except subjective norms showed more than medium levels of positive correlations, and the correlation of each pair was statistically significant. This study suggests the instructional ways to utilize influencing factors of MALL and develop measurement tools as well as offers pedagogical implication for language teachers, students, and system designers.

mobile-assisted language learning (MALL), influencing factor, factor analysis

이선영 Lee Sun-young , 최정혜 Choi Jung-hye , 박주현 Park Joo-hyun , 성미정 Sung Mi-jung

DOI: Vol.22(No.2) 50-68, 2019

This study investigated the effect of using a digital serious game on the phonemic development of young EFL learners in Korea by examining their brain responses using ERP (event-related potentials). A tablet PC-based phoneme discrimination game named “Alien Family” was created focusing on three pairs of English phonemes: /m/ vs. /n/, /l/ vs. /r/, and /æ/ vs. /e/ to enhance the learners’ phonemic discrimination of the pairs. A total of 29 6th grade elementary school students including 14 in the game group and 15 in the English dictionary app group participated in this study. The game group played the game for 10 minutes two times per week for five weeks whereas the English dictionary app group used a digital dictionary for listening practice. The results revealed a positive effect of digital-based learning shown in the ERP experiments, especially, in the condition of /l/ and /r/ even though such an effect was not shown in their behavioral responses. The data indicate that a systematically designed digital serious game can be effective on changing learner’s neural sensitivity to the phonemic discrimination in English even if it is not immediately shown in their behavioral responses. This finding provides positive empirical evidence for the effectiveness of games in class.

gamification, digital game-based learning, serious game, ERP, phoneme discrimination