earticle

영어

In EFL education, self-evaluation-that is, learners’ judgments regarding their own learning-is considered an important evaluation tool, but previous studies have focused on the degree of discrepancy between teachers’ evaluations of students and the students’ self-evaluations. In contrast, this study investigates how EFL learners’ self-evaluations are related to their proficiency levels. Questionnaires inquiring into five areas (speaking, reading, listening, writing, and grammar) were administered to 155 Korean college students divided into three proficiency groups (high, mid, and low). The results provide three main findings: (1) of the three groups, the high-proficiency group’s self-evaluation scores were the highest in all areas except for writing; (2) all the groups evaluated their speaking and writing abilities lower than their listening and reading abilities; (3) the high-proficiency group tended to underestimate their own English capability more than the mid-proficiency group did. Overall, the findings suggest that high-proficiency Korean EFL learners tend to evaluate themselves more negatively than do mid-and low-proficiency Korean EFL learners.