The purpose of this study is to propose the development phases and the directions of the electronic textbook for English education. In order to achieve this purpose, above all, the conception of electronic textbook based on electronic book is defined. Second, the electronic and traditional printed textbook is compared. Third, the types of electronic textbook are classified, and the practical process of developing CD-ROM titles in the primary English education is presented. In this study, it is suggested that there are six phases in the development phases of the electronic textbook: analysis - design - development - experiment - evaluation - revise - application. Furthermore, the directions of the electronic textbook are proposed in terms of the design of learning contents, functional components, and technical components systematically. Particularly, learning contents based on the national curriculum should be designed in detail. Accordingly, the characteristics of English education and the possibility of application should be considered in designing the electronic textbook.

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.