The purpose of this study was to examine the development and characteristics of invented notation for musical representation. A total of 168 young children aged 3, 4 and 5 years participated in this study. The children listened to rhythm and melody, which represented music, to reveal their use of invented notation. The Korean children used various…

Teachers and parents intuitively judge the 'level' of the child and the 'level' of the text and try to match them; they know that overestimation or underestimation of either will be met with restlessness or boredom. In this way, they have an empirical understanding of Vygotsky's ZPD--the zone of proximal development he envisioned as measuring the…

aaaPlural marking differs across languages. Some must mark plurality using an overt morpheme (e.g. English, Russian), while others mark it optionally (e.g. Korean) or lack an explicit plural morpheme (e.g. Chinese). This crosslinguistic difference in plural marking has received much attention in research exploring language transfer in the context…

This paper examined whether a younger starting age of formal instruction on a foreign language is beneficial in expanding circle countries. An experimental study was designed to examine to what extent the five varieties of English language teachers are intelligible to Japanese- (JSLs) and Korean-speaking language learners (KSLs), who have…

In the English "tough" construction (TC), knowledge of "tough" movement is necessary for target performance (the object-interpretation only; e.g. "John is easy to see" e). The acquisition of the English TC raises a learnability problem for first-language (L1) Korean learners of English as a second language (L2): (1)…

Being able to read and write in English as a second language (L2) in the globalized world has been increasingly considered important to gain greater personal, academic, and business achievement. This study investigates English (L2) reading and writing abilities in relation to first language (L1) reading and writing abilities, L2 vocabulary…

Cyberbullying has become a serious global issue. Previous studies focusing on the prevalence and the consequences of cyberbullying have paid little attention to its linguistic features, especially in celebrity cases. This current study fills this gap by investigating the language that constitutes cyberbully toward celebrities from different…

Today, L.S. Vygotsky's concept of a 'zone of proximal development' (ZPD) is often used to just mean best practices in early years teaching, like scaffolding. But in his original theory, the zones linked age periods distinguished by age-specific neoformations -- one of which was the formation of concepts at adolescence. So Vygotsky rejected Stern's…

Science textbooks, as one of the main tools for school science education, contain knowledge and practices valued by Western epistemological culture. As those who (will) live in a world expanding from the westernized to the multicultural, students, regardless of their cultural/ethnic backgrounds, should be supported to critically understand and use…

The academic achievement gap between racial and ethnic majority and minority students in South Korea has received attention over the past decade, with one government-funded report and 10 peer-reviewed articles examining the performance of diverse student groups in the 2011 National Assessment of Educational Achievement. We conducted a qualitative…

To expand our understanding of script-general and script-specific principles in the learning of letter names, we examined how three characteristics of alphabet letters -- their frequency in printed materials, order in the alphabet, and visual similarity to other letters -- relate to children's letter-name knowledge in four languages with three…

The late Ruqaiya Hasan was an enthusiastic but exacting reader of Vygotsky: she reproached him for lacking a theory of language use, for using an asocial model of education without class variation in semantic code, and above all for using an atomistic unit of analysis, namely lexical word meaning. In this paper, I take up these criticisms and…

Resultative constructions show a wide range of cross-linguistic variation, which may pose nontrivial challenges to L2 learners. This study investigates how syntactic and semantic differences between L1 and L2 affect L2 acquisition of resultatives. In particular, we investigate how L1-Korean learners project the syntax and semantics of L2-English…

Offering an analysis of our multifaceted experiences as three Korean immigrant early childhood teacher educators in the United States, this critical collaborative self-study examines how positions as immigrant mothers and teacher educators interplay with each other. This study also explores ways in which the intersectional experiences influence…

Teachers across the globe engage in day-to-day struggles for justice, often with support from unions and community-led groups. Teacher narratives reveal opportunities for building an inclusive theory and practice of education for social justice. I profile one teacher, a third generation "zainichi" Korean permanent resident in Japan,…