The 7th national curriculum takes a strong stance for a student-centered curriculum as well as operating and management flexibility at the school level. This study explored the procedures of and the status on implementation of the 7th national English curriculum at the primary level. It examined the processes taken by the local boards of education in due course of facilitating the schools with the school level curriculum implementation, and the schools and teachers for the actual curriculum implementation. To achieve the goal of the study, it was conducted by questionnaires for teacher and supervisors, classroom observation, and teacher interviews. Results were interpreted by the core aspects of the 7th national curriculum: curriculum reconstruction, student-centeredness, and specialization of the curriculum. Three major elements were found in the process of curriculum modification: firstly, the local boards of education was not enough to support so that the schools developed and implemented the school-based curricula secondly, teachers did not exert autonomy in interpreting and applying curriculum to their classrooms, and finally, there was a high demand for teachers and experts with potential in the schools as well as in the board of education. For the successful settlement of curriculum, continuous efforts are needed to involve teachers in the process of curriculum implementation.

This study analyzed English words that are used in the middle school English text books of the 6th and the 7th National Curriculum in Korea. For this analysis, an English corpus of a total of 1,230,023 nodes was built out of 63 English textbooks of the 6th and the 7th National Curriculum. The study specifically investigated the following items for analysis: 1) tokens and types of words used in the middle school textbooks, 2) frequency of the words, and the numbers of new words introduced in each school-year, 3) high-frequency words in the textbooks with reference to those in large-scale general English corpora, 4) parts of speech of the words and their frequencies, and 5) the comparison of the words used in reading parts and listening parts. Analysis of the corpus revealed the following results. Regarding the average number of tokens and types, the textbooks based on the 7th Curriculum contain more than those based on the 6th Curriculum. As for the frequency of the repetition of words, the 6th curriculum textbooks are more than the 7th curriculum textbooks. Comparison of vocabularies used in the text corpus and in general large-scale English corpus shows that there are more similarities than differences.

The purpose of this study is to evaluate from English teachers' perspectives the secondary school English curriculum of the 7th National Curriculum, which became effective in 2001 for middle schools. With such a goal, the present study analyzes the results of questionnaires collected from middle school teachers of 7th-grade English. The study discusses the realities and problems of the 7th National Curriculum that teachers experience when they teach 7th-grade English classes. The study also discusses-solutions and alternatives proposed by teachers in order to contribute to the improvement of the English curriculum.