This paper analyses the lexical verbs in the guided word list of the 2015 Revised English Curriculum and high school English textbooks on the basis of the high frequency 200 lexical verbs extracted from the core academic words in the Corpus of Contemporary American English [COCA]. Lexical verbs are key words in determining sentence structures and meanings. In particular, this research focuses on academic verbs the knowledge of which is important for EFL learners’ academic achievement. The following questions are dealt with in this paper: 1) What changes occur in the distribution of high frequency core academic verbs in the guided word list? 2) Which verbs are classified as career development and technical words? 3) What are the properties of the academic verbs used in the high school textbooks of <English>, <English I> and <English II> in terms of frequency? and 4) With regard to EFL learners’ vocabulary learning, why should we be concerned with academic verbs classified as elementary-level words? The findings reveal that 35% of the 200 core academic verbs are used in the series of high school English textbooks, which means that a thorough learning of the general lexical verbs is important from a pedagogical perspective in the EFL situation. Furthermore, a diverse use of more core academic verbs is required in high school English textbooks.

The purpose of this study is to analyze the readability of reading passages used in 5th and 6th grade elementary school English textbooks under the 2015 Revised National Curriculum. For this purpose, all the reading passages of each textbook were calculated with ATOS (Advantage-TASA Open Standard) formula as a readability index. The results of this study indicate that, firstly, the average readability score of 6th grade English textbooks is higher than that of 5th grade ones. Secondly, the readability of 6th grade English textbooks is about six months ahead of that of 5th grade ones. Thirdly, the readability scores are similar in all reading passages for 5th grade, while the readability scores of 6th grade differ from textbooks to textbooks. According to the textbook writers, the readability score of 6th grade textbooks is higher than that of 5th grade ones in four out of five textbooks. Lastly, In terms of the units in each textbook, the readability scores fluctuate and do not increase sequentially as expected.

This paper explores the historical development of English education in Korea regarding the second and third National Curriculum period. By using the historical research method which analyzes newspaper articles in four major newspapers in Korea, we compared the similarities and differences between these two periods. The research questions are: 1) what are the characteristics of the second National Curriculum? 2) what are the characteristics of the third National Curriculum?, and 3) what is the implication of these previous curricula on the current English education in Korea? It was found that the second National Curriculum Period showed steady development in English education in terms of its emphasis on oral skills instead of the traditional emphasis on reading and grammar skills. However, the lack of coherence among various English textbooks, the lack of English teachers fluent in English, and the exam-oriented social atmosphere were the significant challenges in fully implementing the second National Curriculum. The third National Curriculum Period overlaps with the Yushin Regime propagated by the late President Park Junghee. During this period, a systematic effort to introduce communicative language teaching continued, whereas the exam-orientation persisted which made the English class employ teacher-centered grammar-translation methods. This paper concludes with educational suggestions and future research directions.

The aim of this study is to apply flipped learning in teaching General English courses in university and examine its impact on English self-efficacy and students’ English achievement. The researcher implemented flipped learning by recording videos based on the students’ textbook and up-loading those videos on the SNS before each lesson to provide opportunities for active interactions in class. The students of the experimental group (n=56) were required to learn through SNS the videos to learn in the pre-class. They also practiced what they had learned under the teacher’s supervision by completing collaborative tasks in groups or pairs. Meanwhile, the control group students (n=66) received in-class only traditional English teaching. The statistical analysis of the results showed that adopting the flipped learning strategy appeared to play a role in enhancing the students’ English self-efficacy and English achievement. Also the students’ responses indicated that their satisfaction towards the flipped learning is positive.

On December 27, 2017, the Ministry of Education in Korea published a policy intended to ban English education in public kindergartens and day-care centers. The policy instantly sparked a strong backlash from the public, who voiced concerns and opposition to it in online news comments. This study analyzed 5,815 online news comments to identify public perception of the ban in particular and early childhood English education in general. The findings revealed that the number of opponents of the ban was much larger than that of supporters (85.1% vs. 14.9%). The opponents disapproved the ban for the following reasons. First, the ban would make parents turn to private education and eventually end up widening the gap between those who can afford it and those who cannot. Second, the ban clearly infringes on the basic right to get an education. Third, English is being taught through play-based curriculum, which causes little stress and emotional burdens for children despite the concerns of the government. On the other hand, the supporters underscored the role of parents and the importance of children's native tongue to back up their arguments for the ban. Overall, this study may provide insights about how to utilize online news comments to study public perception of English education.

본 연구는 진로프로그램과 영어교과수업을 융합한 영어진로 프로그램을 구안・적용하여 학생들의 글로벌 리더십을 향상시키고자 하였다. 영어교과 학습동기를 높여 학생들이 영어수업에 즐겁게 참여하고 영어교과 시간에 꿈과 끼의 탐색에 필요한 다양학습 활동을 할 수 있는 기회를 제공함으로써 영어 학습동기를 높이고 글로벌 리더십교육을 하고자 하였다. 중학교 1학년을 대상으로 꿈-ING 영어진로 프로그램을 적용하였으며 사전・사후 설문 조사를 통해 평가한 결과 학생들의 진로개발역량 향상에서 유의미한 차이를 보였다.

The present study investigates secondary school student athletes’ specific needs for English learning and analyzes correlation and a cause and effect relationship among the needs-related variables. Two hundred forty six student athletes enrolled in physical education. Junior and senior high schools participated in the study. Data were collected through a survey that inquired about the students’ perceived English ability and learning areas of interest, their needs for ESP education, and aspects to be considered for ESP course design. The results show that the students put more emphasis on verbal communication (i.e., on speaking and listening) than on written communication (i.e., on reading and writing) and that they wanted more practical ESP education reflecting their needs and interests. Additionally, there was significant correlation (p<.01) among the subjects’ learning areas of interest, needs for ESP education, and aspects to be considered for ESP course design; a cause and effect relationship among the above three variables was discovered by goodness of fit test for structure equation model. Based on these findings, it is concluded that secondary school student athletes’ perceived English ability and areas of interest for English learning influence both their needs for ESP education and aspects to be considered for ESP course design.

The purpose of the present study is to analyze needs of graduate students for English education for their academic study. Online survey was administered to all the graduate students in a university located in Seoul, Korea, and a total of 1,241 students participated in this study. The participants varied in majors including humanities and social sciences, natural sciences, engineering, medicine, and so forth. Crosstab analyses were performed in order to analyze the survey data, followed by subordinate analyses by the participants’ majors. Results indicated that most students perceived the great importance of English for their study, and ‘listening’ and ‘speaking’ were found to be the most difficult areas when students take English-medium graduate courses. In addition, although the frequency of scholarly activities varied by majors, most of the students expressed difficulties in writing research papers and making presentations. Based on the results, the present study suggests that English education programs be expanded and opened in order to meet the different needs by the students’ academic majors.

Effects of primary English education using children’s literature have been extensively examined by many researchers in Korea during the past about two decades. This study aims to delineate the research domain by employing a meta-analysis of 31 primary studies that have been published in Korean refereed journals by February 2017. From the primary studies, 41 effects sizes were calculated based on the contrast of the means of two groups and 152 pre-to-post effect sizes based on the contrast of pretest and posttest scores. The results indicate that primary English education using children’s literature had overall a medium-sized effect (g = .60), with its effect being greater in the affective domain (g = .93) than in the cognitive domain (g = .37). More specifically, it was found that introducing children’s literature in the elementary English classrooms would bring about positive learning effects in the areas of vocabulary and reading and would be effective to develop positive learner interest and attitudes toward English learning. The results and their implications are further discussed.

As a preliminary study for the effective development of a genre-focused English learner corpus, this article aims to investigate most frequent error types and their frequencies in English emails written by undergraduate freshmen in South Korea. Data for this study include English emails of 86 Korean students majoring in humanities or social science in a university located in Daegu. With the rise of Internet, ESL/EFL education has witnessed a growing interest in teaching email usage in composition courses, as it provides a variety of opportunities to evaluate language abilities including interpersonal and pragmatic abilities. The present article revealed that the most frequent error type was concerned with style, such as capitalization (28.7%) and punctuation (7.8%), which was followed by determiner deletion (6.3%), genre convention such as closing (3%), countability of nouns (3%), and verb choice (2.7%). Different error types and frequencies were identified according to different English proficiency levels (Korean SAT and TOEIC), which evidenced the need to include the English proficiency level annotation in the corpus design and to focus on different types of errors in class in accordance with learners’ proficiency levels.

The paper observes that grammatical competence has been interpreted as the ability to judge grammaticality ever since the employment of communicative competence as the core basis of curriculum design in the 6th national English curriculum of Korea. It contends that this interpretation is different from what has been widely accepted in the literature on grammatical competence, that is, the ability to understand and express propositional meaning of utterances. The study suggests that a new and fresh look at grammatical competence needs to be taken in developing and implementing the national English curriculum which is to provide English learners in Korea with more potential opportunities for success in acquiring communicative competence.

The purpose of this study is to analyze the characteristics of action research in the field of English education in Korea from 2001 to 2015 across 36 masters/doctoral theses and 21 articles from journals. The researcher specifically focuses on the following criteria: purpose, theme, methodology, differences between such characteristics across action research published in journals to that published in dissertations. According to the results, the number of action research dissertations has increased in recent years and the study suggests the number of action research continue its upward trend; action research in Korea has been more prevalent at the primary school level rather than at the secondary and university levels; and the proportion of mixed method in English education was much higher than that of the mixed research in education with a 43% mixed method proportion accompanied by 55% of qualitative research. The study concludes that action research in English education in Korea will become a more meaningful and feasible tool for practitioners’ inquiries, as it provides graduate students with applied experience in their current demanding school environment and writing assignments such as their thesis and research papers. The author suggests that the aforementioned factors enlarge the existential meaning of current graduate schools in Korea.

The purpose of this research is to review studies of English education for young learners in the journal of English Teaching in order to commemorate its 50 years of history. Atotal of 126 young learners ofEnglish-related studies between 1965 and 2015 were collected. The studies were analyzed by historical trend, research methods, topics, subjects, contexts, and authors. The results are as follows: the studies on young learners of English have increased since 1982 when English was allowed to teach as an extracurricular activity in elementary schools; 103(81.7%) studies were identified as empirical research, and 23(18.3%) studies were identified as theoretical research; the most preferred research topic was 'teaching/learning' and 'investigation, effect, and direction' of English education in Korea; the most studied subjects were elementary students; the most preferred research context was Korea; and 98.4% ofresearchers was Korean. Based on the findings, several suggestions are made for future research in the area ofyoung learners ofEnglish.

This study mainly explores the research themes and topics of corpus-based studies published in English Teaching in an attempt to provide future directions and pedagogical implications in this research domain. For the purposes of the study, a total of 42 corpus-based research articles published in English Teaching were reviewed and analyzed in terms of research topics, methodology, and characteristics of the corpora employed in the studies. The thematic and topical analysis of the corpus-based studies showed that much research, i.e., 64%, has focused on the analysis ofvocabulary items. Further, the analysis of the research methods revealed that corpus-based studies published in English Teaching mainly employed quantitative methods to describe frequency and distribution information of the target linguistic items. It also provided the description of the characteristics of the corpora adopted in the corpus-based research. Interestingly, many corpus-based studies published in English Teaching focused on the analysis of the learner corpus data. The paper discusses the future research directions and pedagogical implications for corpus-based studies on TEFL.

This study investigates 95 articles on English teacher education published in English Teaching for the past 50 years. Remarkable changes have been made in research methodology and research focus. In particular, six themes emerged from the selected articles and were discussed: (1) teacher qualifications and roles, (2) teacher training and professional development, (3) teacher cognition and perceptions, (4) teacher professional identities, (5) teacher talk, (6) teacher evaluation. Finally, pedagogical implications and directions for the future research are suggested.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the current state of research on learner factors in second language acquisition by reviewing relevant studies published in English Teaching over the past 50 years. A total of 182 articles on various learner factors were extracted from the journal. Further detailed analyses were conducted on 110 articles on strategy, motivation, and personality traits in terms ofpublication year, research topics, participants, methods, and researchers' concentration. The results reveal that research on learner factors has significantly expanded over time in terms of volume and diversity, reflecting increasing research interests in the field. As for research methodology, a quantitative approach was far more frequent but qualitative and mixedmethod approaches have gained visibility since 2000. Yet, most of the studies focused on tertiary level learners, while overall neglecting primary and secondary level learners. Furthermore, individual researchers' interests in the factors looked rather sporadic as revealed in the lack of research concentration. Based on the findings, suggestions for future research on learner factors are made.

This paper overviews English language assessment-related articles published in English Teaching from 1965 to 2015. One hundred thirty-eight articles are chosen for analysis, and the discernible trends epitomizing a specific era are traced. The results show articles concerning item analysis and improvement oftesting methods constituted a major portion of the periodical in the early days. The number of the assessmentrelated articles began to soar from the late 1980s, and recently a major focus seems to have shifted to test validity. In terms of research topics, a significant body of research has been conducted on item analysis, improvement of testing practices, performance assessment, evaluation methods, and test validity. Even though the overall level of the articles has advanced dramatically over the past 50 years, little research has been intended in the areas of classroom assessment, English language testing policies, washback effects, new assessment tools, and the validity of national tests. This paper concludes with a suggestion that more efforts should be made to fill the gap between research and testing practices in the field.

This paper reviews research articles on English grammar instruction in Korea published in the journal ofEnglish Teaching since 1965. It analyzes current trends of research studies and provides prospects for future research studies in the field of English grammar instruction. A total of 45 research papers were reviewed and analyzed quantitatively and qualitatively. The quantitative analyses revealed that over 90 percent of the articles have been published since 1990 and most of them have explored the efficacy of grammar teaching under the approach of focus on form. The qualitative analyses present thorough reviews of the published research papers with the emphasis on themes, research methods, and their pedagogical implications. The limitations ofthe published articles and some suggestions for the development of English grammar instruction are provided.

The purpose of the current study is to examine 123 English reading-related articles published in English Teaching from 1965 to 2014 in order to consider what has been studied in English reading and how, and to gain insight into what has to be studied and how from now on. To fulfill this purpose, the articles were analyzed in terms of basic data, research methods, and research themes across four time periods. In accordance with the findings, it has to be admitted that English reading-related research has made notable, impressive advances in quantity and quality. In particular, it is notable that research methods and themes have been diversified and expanded across the periods. For further development, it is required for researchers' ceaseless endeavor to explore ongoing issues and troublesome gaps in English reading research and to establish a theoretical and practical framework for reading research in Korean EFL context.