As technology advances, and more students have constant access to cell phones, laptops and tablets inside the classroom, the use of machine translation (MT) by language learners will continue to rise. Therefore, in order for instructors to better design courses they should strive to understand how students are using machine translation, as well as student attitudes towards this technology. This present study examined the perspectives of South Korean graduate students at a science and technology university towards the usage of MT in relation to academic settings. This study featured a survey of 100 participants, and found positive correlations between the use of translators on written assignments, important academic work such as theses, as well as a proclivity to use machine translation to support completion of daily academic tasks. Students also showed a strong belief that MT has overall benefits as a language learning tool. As a result of this study, language teachers may consider incorporating MT education within their second language curriculum.

To date, there is limited research into the measurable benefits of unguided and unstructured conversation practice (typically a popular, in-demand service) for adult English language learners. This project looks to determine the differences in measured oral fluency as well as self-reported speaking confidence of South Korean university students before and after several months of conversational English practice with native English instructors. Participants were given weekly one-on-one “free talk” sessions with no grammatical instruction and very limited corrective feedback for a total of one hour. Sessions were recorded at early and late program intervals in order to calculate the average length of runs and speech rate. Moreover, students completed pre- and post-program surveys to estimate their overall confidence levels in L2 speaking. This project found limited change in fluency without direct corrective feedback. Furthermore, our measurements of students’ self-reported speaking confidence revealed inconsistent trends from the first to last sessions. This research seems to indicate that loosely structured, “coffee shop” style lessons should adopt a more structured curriculum in order to see more pronounced and measurable growth over time.