This paper reports the current situation of English and English education in North Korea. Two approaches are taken to achieve the goal: One is to examine social attitudes and government approaches to English education. Interviews with defectors from North Korea, newspaper reports and other related literature are used. The other is to analyze middle school English textbooks and research articles to reveal the current practice of English language teaching at schools. The results show that North Korean government and people are interested in learning and teaching English and they take various measures to improve English learning to meet national or individual goals. English seems to be considered as a way of improving their economic situations and finding a better opportunity for many North Korean people. However, English education in North Korea is still limited in terms of resources including learning materials and native teachers of English. Also academic research and practices in English education are still heavily influenced by Kim Ilsung and Kim Jungil’s words so that scientific investigations are limited. It is an impending issue to narrow a gap in English education between South and North Koreas to overcome difficulties encountered in the future.

We cannot imagine textbooks without visual images in foreign language education. What are their roles and fuctions in language teaching? Are they simple decorations for just visual effects? Or are they presented to facilitate listening and reading comprehesion? To answer to these questions, this study is designed to analyse the relations between visual images and texts in language teaching materials based on communicative approach, and to argue that visual images are means of conveying their own autonomous meanings.

Since the 7th Curriculum allows students to freely select their second foreign languages, teachers who can teach some other languages as well as German are expected to be in increasing demand in Korea. For this change, the German language education curriculum introduces a new dual structure that includes both a teacher education program for German language and an interdisciplinary program. Due to the separate structure of disciplines, in which any situational connectivity is not considered, we fail to effectively deal with a new discipline areas. This is also the case in teacher education. Specifically, the Department of German Language Education should make more tangible interdisciplinary connections with other discipline areas such as Teaching Korean as a Foreign Language, instead of keeping the curriculum based on the humanistic point of view only.