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The present study investigated the learners" perceived impact of peer feedback on their learning after one semester"s practicing it in a content course classroom, with additional interests in the influence of personal characteristics in the shaping of their perception and factors underlying their approaches to peer-feedback activities. Participants were 52 Korean college students majoring in TEFL.A survey was administered at the beginning and the end of the semester in search of any possible change in their perception attributable to the actual practicing of peer feedback activities. An interview was also conducted to see how their perception was shaped. Results indicated that, at the end of the semester, the participants significantly more positively perceived the beneficial impact of peer feedback on various aspects of learning. Students with more exposure to peer feedback activities tended to more favorably appreciate its beneficial impact, especially on learning achievement. The significant difference between the extroverted and the introverted about the impact of peer feedback on learning motivation disappeared at the end of the semester, suggesting peer feedback could benefit learners of any personality type. The desire to keep face emerged as the most salient feature underlying the process where peer feedback benefitted the learners.

In pursuit of the precise mechanism by which working memory (WM) functions in second language (L2) reading comprehension (RC), the current study examined whether strategy use or task difficulty influences the role of WM in L2 RC. Eighty Korean adult EFL learners participated, and their WM capacity, RC performance, and strategy use were measured. The variable of task difficulty was operationalized by the relative difficulty of texts on which RC items were based. The results showed that difference in strategy use brought about significant difference in RC performance when the readers with insufficient WM capacity had to comprehend difficult texts, whereas no such difference was found with easier texts or among L2 readers with more WM capacity. These findings not only illustrate intricate interrelationships among WM and other variables in L2 RC, but also provide a noteworthy implication for L2 reading instruction that L2 learners with deficient WM capacity could benefit from active strategy use when faced with a difficult L2 reading task. The compensatory role of strategy and the necessity of remedial strategy training for the learners with limited WM is further implicated for L2 reading classrooms.

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This study examined how language learners' preconceptions about a task influence their approaches to second language reading and the sociocultural basis for such preconceptions. Participants were 30 students learning English at a Korean university. The researchers told half of the participants that they would do a recall task after reading an English text; the rest were not told what the postreading task would involve. Several reader variables were measured to control for preexisting differences between groups. The researchers used free recall and interviews to determine whether conceptions of the task were associated with strategy choice while reading and recalling. Results indicate that the two groups did not differ in recall performance but did in strategy use. The sociocultural context to which the participants had been exposed seemed associated with both their conception of task and strategy use, with a suggestion that strategy use was predicated on conception of task. doi: 10.1002/tesq.147 D efined as "mental operations involved when readers approach a text effectively and make sense of what they read" (Barnett, 1988, p. 150), reading strategies represent one of the most frequently studied topics in the field of second language (L2) research. Although studies conducted in first language (L1) contexts (mostly in North America) have tended to focus on the effect of strategy training on achievement, L2 reading researchers seem more interested in elucidating the relationship between strategy use and comprehension,

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