Ballena, Mae Karr Ruth & Shim, Young-Sook. 2018. “Representation of Social Struggles in Korean and Philippine ELT Textbooks”. The Sociolinguistic Journal of Korea 26(1). 201~228. The present study investigates the representations of social struggles depicted in middle school English textbooks published in Korea and the Philippines. The data consists of 200 reading selections from 18 volumes of Korean textbooks and 108 reading selections from 3 volumes of Philippine textbooks. A total of 39 instances of social struggles were identified from the data analysis, and the following categories emerged from careful reviews of those instances: (1) social struggles involving social groups, which are further divided into subcategories such as gender, generation, socioeconomic class, social rank, race, and the colonizer/colonized; and (2) social struggles involving resources, which are subdivided into education, basic necessity, and technology. Findings show that social struggles associated with gender, colonization, education, and technology are common among Philippine and Korean ELT textbooks. The data analysis also reveals that Philippine textbooks present a wider array and more in-depth contextualization of social struggles while representational issues on stereotyping, desensitization, and juxtaposition of elements are found in Korean textbooks. Related to the research findings, some educational implications are provided particularly from the perspective of critical pedagogy.

Shim, Young-Sook. 2016. “A Study on Semantic Relation of English Loanwords with Their Corresponding Korean Words”. The Sociolinguistic Journal of Korea 24(3). 281~316. The premise underlying the Korean language “purification” by way of replacing loanwords with Korean existing words is that loanwords and their corresponding Korean words occupy nearly identical semantic domains and thus are interchangeable. Few studies, however, have been conducted to verify this premise. This study aims to investigate the semantic relation of English loanwords with their corresponding Korean words recommended for purification of the Korean language. From the database consisting of news articles in the economy section of Korean newspapers, six loanwords were chosen for an in-depth analysis. With Trends 21 Corpus and Naver being primary tools, the loanwords and their corresponding Korean words are analyzed in terms of frequency, co-occurrence, collocation, and usage. The findings show that the loanwords semantically relate to their corresponding Korean words in various ways, with the words across the pairs presenting varying degrees of semantic likeness, difference, and inclusion. Suggestions for further research are provided based on the findings.