The main purpose of this study is to investigate effects of writing instruction using comic strips on Korean students' English writing skills and learning attitudes. Using both narrative and descriptive writing tasks, the experiment was conducted for eight weeks with 120 secondyear middle school students. The experimental group had writing activities with comic strips, whereas the control group studied writing using the textbook or free writing. The results showed that the experimental group improved English writing skills more, and had more positive attitudes toward learning English, than the control group. Lower-level students in the experimental group showed a marked improvement in narrative writing, while upper-level students demonstrated a positive change in their attitudes. Through surveys, interviews, observation, and analysis of students' writing, it was revealed that the experimental group reacted differently depending on the contents and type of comic strips, and activity types. Comic strips that dealt with everyday life and were drawn humorously induced more interest, while those demanding cultural understanding diminished the students' motivation. Student participation increased when drawing their own strips and sorting cuts of comic strips into order.

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.