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.

This paper is on the design of foundations for English curriculum on the basis of discipline centered curriculum to give academic and pedagogic platforms for curriculum development. For these purposes, this study finds theoretical and pedagogic elements, and inquiries into their natures and relationships. Theoretical foundations should reflect both general education theories and the features of the subject such as English. These foundations can include linguistics, psycholinguistics and sociolinguistics, which interact in both academic and pedagogic contexts. Specifically, linguistics (the nature of language) has some features such as expressiveness, productiveness, semantics, commonness and regularity. The theories of psycholinguistics can be grouped into behaviorism, cognitivism and humanism. Sociolinguistics focuses on key elements such as the language user as a social being, variations of language, social context and social use of language. The pedagogic elements such as content system, learning elements and social context which directly come from the theoretical elements also interact each other indirectly.

This paper aims to make some suggestions for the direction and objectives of teaching English as a global language (EGL). To this end, the examination reveals that the number of people who use English as a second or foreign language is much more than that of people who use English as the primary language. Moreover, in many parts of the world the status of English is shifting, being used within the country as well as for international communication. Thus, it will be more likely for the learners to communicate in English with other people than English natives. Communication across cultures demands mutual intelligibility and speaker’s identities. The objective of EGL is to provide intercultural learners with intercultural communicative competence, which is a knowledge of one or more cultures and social identities, and which is also a capacity to discover and relate to new people from other contexts for which they have not been prepared directly. Teaching English as a global language will be effective and prosperous under due consideration of local situations around learners. Several ideas are suggested for the new direction for EGL education.

This paper investigates the status and change of qualitative research in TEFL and applied linguistics in an effort to project the direction of TEFL research in Korea. This paper first reviews a first and a second coming of age of the research in TESOL and applied linguistics, focusing on qualitative research methodology. For the study, the issues on a definition of qualitative research are raised, and three exemplars such as case study, conversation analysis, and ethnography are discussed in terms of assumptions, methods, data analysis and interpretation, and evaluative criteria. The importance and directions of qualitative research studies in TEFL in Korea are also suggested.

This short essay is a slightly modified version of a presentation read at the annual Institute seminar held at SNU on the 5th of December to exchange views on the function of reading in foreign language education in Korea. It begins with the discussion of a need on the paπ of policy makers of English teaching to reassess and revise the dominantly pragmatic and instrumentalist philosophy particularly working in the pedagogy of reading in English. According to the revisionist review of the present writer, the guiding spirit of the 4-skill orientation has so far tended to overvalue the linguistic and communicative functions (or ’grammar’ as is termed here to contrast with the 'text’ that follows) at the cost of the human or readerly values carried by signifying textuality of the reading material. Language should and is fated to reflect and realize the lived experience of concrete and individualized people and society. English is a natural and cultural language that embraces a11 these cultural resourcefulness and expressiveness before it is a foreign language. Strategies of reading pedagogy ought to reflect this fundamental as well as human or value-oriented aspect of language despite the limited level of the language on the part of its leamers.

The main goal of this study is to review the role of the age factor in foreign language education and to discuss its implications in Korean English education. ‘The younger, the better', under the critical period hypothesis, has recently played a critical role in the introduction of English language education to young children in Korea and the public and the govemment seem to be highly dependent upon the hypothesis when they decide children’s English education. For example, the English education program in Korean elementary schools is an offspring of this theory. This study, however, casts a doubt on the effect of age on English education by reviewing theoretical and experimental studies focusing on whether age or the critical period hypothesis is a meaningful factor to validate the early exposure of foreign language education and its following success. Findings from foreign language education in US, French immersion programs in Canada and other foreign countries and adult second language leaming and studies dealing with the critical period hypothesis were critically reviewed to provide evidences to such argument that age is not a primary factor to determine early English education in Korea. On the contrary, time or the amount of exposure to the English language should be a more critical factor in a context where a very limited exposure to the target language is only possible. A list of generalizations and implications are also provided.

English language teaching in elementarγ school was proposed and is now in practice on the basis of the Critical Period Hypothesis which is also theoretically supported by innatists who argue that UG begins attrition around puberty and that language acquisition becomes increasingly difficult beyond this period. This was proved true of first language acquisition and naturalistic SLA, but no evidence has been known about instructed second language leaming in formal education. Elementary school ELT is supported by some parents who wish their children to leam this world language effectively, but the educational environment is far from utilizing the leamers' UG: few teachers are capable of providing authentic input, so the leamers depend on their general intelligence and leaming strategy rather than UG. It is suggested that high school age is optimum for utilizing leamers' motivation, intelligence, and leaming strategy.