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Experience abroad has been recognized as one of the best investments for second or foreign language learning. A lot of research has examined its impact on language learning from linguistic as well as non-linguistic perspectives. Nonetheless, literature on the relationships between and among experience abroad, language proficiency, and self-efficacy beliefs in language learning seems to still be cursory and thus the present study chose to focus on these aspects in more detail. To do so, 259 Korean English as a foreign language students answered the Questionnaire of English Self-Efficacy as well as completed a background questionnaire. Statistical analyses identified two underlying factors of self-efficacy beliefs-production and comprehension-that helped analyze the data from a new perspective. Using this two-factor structure of self-efficacy, it was found that the combination of experience abroad and English proficiency were indeed related to these self-efficacy factors. In addition, the results indicate that students may have benefitted most in self-efficacy formation in production and comprehension aspects when they have four to six months of experience abroad.

The primary goal of this study was to explore the changes that four Korean university students made in their regulation of cognition during reading processes. The students were trained using explicit reading strategy instruction based on the CALLA model. To this end, first, metacognition was framed and categorized by the definition from Baker and Brown (1984) and, second, a scoring scale for measuring the readers' regulation of cognition was developed based on the study by Block (1992) to examine and trace any changes in their regulation processes. For data analyses, the participants' think-aloud protocols were used. The results indicate that there were marked changes in the frequencies of their regulation processes over time. Specifically, the students' overt strategic and regulatory behaviors in a regulation process showed more flexibility and organization toward the end of the strategy training. This study suggests that students would benefit from being provided with sufficient time for practice in order to build effective regulation of cognition in reading processes and that the teacher should understand the complex nature of the regulation processes that students go through. In addition, think-aloud procedures as an instructional tool for effective strategy training was shown to be a worthwhile technique in the classroom.

Interest and self-efficacy beliefs are important components of motivational constructs that share some common characteristics and influence learning. Studies examining how these two relate to each other, however, appear to be few, especially in the area of language learning. To fill this gap, this study aims to investigate how interest in learning English and proficiency influence self-efficacy in listening, using a pre/post-design. This study focused on exploring the role of interest on the development of self-efficacy in 107 EFL Korean university students, with a low-intermediate English proficiency. Despite the participants' proficiency, they were found to possess and maintain relatively high interest over the English course they were enrolled in. Regression analyses revealed that, unlike at the beginning of the course, individual interest was found to be a significant factor in the development of advanced skill self-efficacy around the end of the semester, even predicting it more than proficiency did.

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