A Study on the Awareness of Korean Learners for Academic Purposes about the Difficulty of Academic Tasks

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to derive the factors affecting the difficulty of academic tasks presented to Korean learners for academic purposes and to identify the difficulty levels that Korean learners actually experience. In this paper, we examine whether learners’ awareness of the degree of difficulty changes according to the task performance process and the task process, especially as based on their self-awareness. For this purpose, this study categorized academic tasks according to four factors of inputs, conditions, procedures, and outcomes, and examined the learner's awareness of each item. According to the result of analysis of the 93 learners’ responses, Korean learners showed significant differences for academic purposes between the groups in the familiarity of task subjects, opinion exchange type tasks, and classification tasks depending on Korean proficiency. In addition, it was found that the number of tasks that should be handled at the same time depending on the grade may affect awareness of the difficulty. These results are expected to be helpful in selecting, arranging and organizing tasks for Korean language learners in the academic context in the future.