A Study of English Production in the Context of Community Support

Abstract

Hwang, Sunhae. 2003. A Study of English Production in the Context of Community Support. The Sociolinguistic Journal of Korea, 11(2). The purpose of the study is to explore how community involvement supports English use in the context of interactional situations. In the EFL situation, target language use, especially in the early stage of learning, tends to be limited within the classroom setting and between the students and the teachers. In this experimental study, learners' activities were designed to get the college community involved in such a way that the faculty members participated in the students' English speaking activities in a natural communicative manner. In addition, this study illustrated linguistic features of the experimental and control group for the purpose of examining the effects of interactional activities outside the classroom, i.e., the college community. The results show that the experimental group outperformed the control group in terms of communicative and pedagogical aspects of language learning. It has been proposed that the early English production can be beneficial if community support is initiated for the target language use.