Taehyeong Terry Kim

Hi, my name is Taehyeong Terry Kim. I was born and raised in South Korea until grade 5, after which my family and I immigrated to New Brunswick, Canada. After my time in Atlantic Canada, I made yet another journey during my high school years. My family once again moved to Ontario, where I graduated my high school from. After graduating from high school, I returned to Korea and entered Yonsei University as an undergraduate student. By virtue of my multicultural and bilingual background as a Korean Canadian, I developed a passion for the field of language acquisition and language transfer. Having been and still being a learner of languages, I was eager to understand how we learn, develop and process a language, contemplating about the inner workings of the growing repertoire of diverse languages acquired by an individual. Naturally, I majored in English language and literature during my undergraduate studies. Upon graduation in 2018, I was still committed to pursuing my study in applied linguistics. Thus, I became a MA student in the department of English Language Education at Seoul National University. I earned my MA degree in English Language Education in 2022.

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My scholarly interest during the master’s program has revolved around the cognitive processes underlying the reading comprehension of English as a foreign language (EFL) students. My particular focus on reading is shaped by the quintessential importance of reading skills as a prerequisite for one to function properly in society and to achieve academic and professional success. Despite the importance of reading skills, it is by no means an easy undertaking to read fluently and successfully in a foreign language. Reading fluently in a foreign language is a truly remarkable achievement, given the very complex and multicomponent cognitive processes intertwined during reading comprehension. 

 

I was intrigued by how EFL readers engage with texts to create a coherent mental representation of the text's content during such reading processes. In light of this, my master's thesis examined how text length (i.e., amount of contextual information) affected how well English language learners understood the materials used in the Korean College Scholastic Ability Test (KCSAT). The empirical research that examines the ways in which students actually construct meaning from texts in the KCSAT was deemed necessary to ensure whether the student's English reading ability is accurately measured in such a high-stakes nationwide exam. This undertaking was called for, given the huge impact of the KCSAT on testing and learning in South Korea with so much social and socioeconomic leverage.  Ultimately, I found that longer texts helped L2 readers retain more textual content and organize them better in the micro- and macro-structure of the passages. Contrarily, even very proficient L2 readers were more likely to be unable to arrange propositions in a hierarchical and coherent sequence when given the original short CSAT passages. Although they made more inferences in the case of the short passages, the participants frequently made incorrect inferences in comparison to longer text conditions. These findings raise questions about the high-stakes standardized reading comprehension test's use of brief expository passages.