This research investigated consistency of achievement levels stated in the 2015 revised national curriculum of English, high school English textbooks, and the Korean College Scholastic Ability Test (CSAT) according to CEFR Levels. Based on CEFR levels, this study compared levels of targeted achievement standards in the national curriculum, focusing on reading passages in High School EnglishⅡ and CSAT implemented for three consecutive years (2021-2023). Results indicated that the reading section of textbooks and CSAT included a considerable portion of passages whose text difficulty levels were higher than CEFR B2, exceeding the achievement standards required for high school graduates. These results suggest that difficulty levels in the national curriculum, textbooks, and CSAT should be adjusted according to target levels of language proficiency based on CEFR levels so that learning burden of students can be lessened and competency-based English teaching and learning finally can be performed.

This study attempts to examine the distributions and characteristics of language forms and learning activities necessary for communication used in the middle school textbooks based on the 2015 revised national curriculum. To this end, 12 textbooks were analyzed and compared by grades and 4 textbooks by different publishers. The results are as follows: 1) Of the 38 language forms required for communication in middle school textbooks, 23 forms were commonly addressed in all the textbooks, while 12 forms were optional or missing, which may cause problems in articulated learning. 2) Even in the same language form, the level of difficulty increases as the grade goes up, which follows spiral curriculum. 3) Some language forms were omitted in the list presented in the 2015 revised curriculum, where only examples were presented without explanation. Explicit explanations need adding with elaborately classified examples. 4) Although the activities in the textbooks focus more on language acquisition than language use, they are well-organized to practice core language forms focusing on meaning in a controlled manner and gradually apply them to real life situations.

This study aims to analyze the types of cognitive process required to perform vocabulary learning activities in Middle School English textbooks. For this purpose, 26 middle school English textbooks were examined, including 13 for the first year and another 13 for the second year of middle school. The results indicated that vocabulary learning activities emerged in the phase of reading, and then were categorized into pre-reading vocabulary activities and post-reading ones. Eight types of cognitive process emerged in the pre-reading phase and three types in the post-reading phase. That is, the number of vocabulary activities in pre-reading phase was larger than that in the post-reading phase. In addition, the diversity of vocabulary activities in the pre-reading phase was higher than that in the post-reading phase. Based on these results, this study suggests a new model of vocabulary learning activity in middle school English textbooks. A few implications on how to teach new words in English classrooms are discussed.

This study aims to investigate how multicultural aspects are dealt with in current elementary English textbooks. The cover pages, dialogues, main readings, and culture sections of a total of 10 elementary English textbooks for 5th and 6th graders were closely examined in terms of (1) the races and genders of the characters, (2) the cultural backgrounds of the contents, and (3) Bennett’s (2010) core values of multicultural education. The results revealed that each gender was equally represented and the textbooks present diverse cultural backgrounds in a balanced way. It was found, however, that there was an imbalance in terms of racial backgrounds. With respect to the core values of multicultural education, acceptance and appreciation of cultural diversity, and respect for human dignity and universal human rights were the top two values that appeared most frequently throughout the textbooks. Responsibility to a world community was the value that was comparatively hard to find in them. Detailed findings are discussed in greater depth, along with implications for elementary English education in Korea.

This study probes how cultural contents are represented in middle school English textbooks based on the 2015 revised national curriculum. To this end, culture-related sections of 15 textbooks were analyzed in terms of five aspects: cultural subject matters, cultural types, backgrounds, activities for cultural learning, and language integration. The results reveal that the middle school textbooks deal with everyday life of various cultures, including tasks for introducing Korean culture. The three culture types are provided at a relatively balanced ratio, but as the grade goes up, the portion of spiritual culture increases whereas that of material culture decreases. As for cultural background, non-English cultures in the outer and expanding circle are the most frequently presented. In the analysis of cultural learning activities, searching and communication activities connected to speaking and writing have a large portion, but experiential activities are rare. 45.5% of cultural activities are presented in a single communication skill and 54.5% of them are integrated into two or more skills. Finally, based on the study results, some suggestions for effective culture education to attract students' spontaneous participation in middle school English classes are presented.

The purpose of this study is to explore inter-grade dividing criteria of the 2015 grade group elementary English textbooks. Elementary English textbooks consist of two grade groups: the 3rd and 4th grade group and the 5th and 6th grade group. L2 Syntactic Complexity Analyzer(L2SCA) is utilized to investigate the dividing criteria of the communicative functions implemented in these textbooks. Subjects of the analysis were the listening dialogues for their structural sequencing of 3rd to 4th graders and 5th to 6th graders separately within their own grade groups. Data were processed and analyzed using SPSS 25.0 and independent sample t tests for inter-grade textbooks for 14 L2SCA statistical indices. The findings are: 6 indices out of the 14 L2SCA statistical indices turn out to be critical for dividing the 2015 grade group elementary English textbooks. The 6 indices are mean clause length, mean sentence length, mean t-unit length, mean complex noun phrasal number per phrase and per t-unit and mean number of verb phrases per t-unit. Based on the findings, it is suggested that a standardized criteria derived from these 6 indices can be provided as an inter-grade dividing criteria of the 2015 grade group elementary English textbooks.

This study analyses the communicative functions of listening scripts extracted from the 2015 elementary school English 6 and middle school English 1 textbooks in terms of continuity. Auditory data corpora were drawn from all five elementary school English textbooks and five most widely used middle school English textbooks. Each sentence of listening scripts was manually tagged based on the classification of communication functions presented in the 2015 Revised National Curriculum. The corpora were analyzed using 14 syntactic complexity measures with the L2 Syntactic Complexity Analyzer (Lu, 2010). The findings of this study show that the continuity between the elementary school English 6 and the middle school English 1 textbooks is relatively well-organized. However, concerning the sequence, the elementary school English 6 was found to be more complex than the middle school English 1 in terms of syntactic complexity. It is suggested that future textbook development should correct the reversed complexity in listening scripts found in this study.

This study examined how teaching and learning activities in primary English textbooks include the components of creativity and character building. Three third and fourth grade level textbooks based on the 2015 revised curriculum were analyzed in order to find the proportions of the components of creativity and character building, and the types of learning activities that embody those components were analyzed by examining the teachers’ guides. The analysis revealed that all of the textbooks examined included diverse components that were intented to increase creativity, among which components stimulating divergent thinking and originality were a high proportion, while convergent thinking and dispositional aspects appeared less frequently. Among character building components, care-forgiveness and responsibility were two of the more popular components, while honesty and moral judgment were few and far between. From these findings, this study suggests that the components of creativity and character building should be more evenly distributed across textbook activities since they should be of equal importance in education.

This paper analyses the lexical verbs in the guided word list of the 2015 Revised English Curriculum and high school English textbooks on the basis of the high frequency 200 lexical verbs extracted from the core academic words in the Corpus of Contemporary American English [COCA]. Lexical verbs are key words in determining sentence structures and meanings. In particular, this research focuses on academic verbs the knowledge of which is important for EFL learners’ academic achievement. The following questions are dealt with in this paper: 1) What changes occur in the distribution of high frequency core academic verbs in the guided word list? 2) Which verbs are classified as career development and technical words? 3) What are the properties of the academic verbs used in the high school textbooks of <English>, <English I> and <English II> in terms of frequency? and 4) With regard to EFL learners’ vocabulary learning, why should we be concerned with academic verbs classified as elementary-level words? The findings reveal that 35% of the 200 core academic verbs are used in the series of high school English textbooks, which means that a thorough learning of the general lexical verbs is important from a pedagogical perspective in the EFL situation. Furthermore, a diverse use of more core academic verbs is required in high school English textbooks.

The purpose of this study is to analyze the readability of reading passages used in 5th and 6th grade elementary school English textbooks under the 2015 Revised National Curriculum. For this purpose, all the reading passages of each textbook were calculated with ATOS (Advantage-TASA Open Standard) formula as a readability index. The results of this study indicate that, firstly, the average readability score of 6th grade English textbooks is higher than that of 5th grade ones. Secondly, the readability of 6th grade English textbooks is about six months ahead of that of 5th grade ones. Thirdly, the readability scores are similar in all reading passages for 5th grade, while the readability scores of 6th grade differ from textbooks to textbooks. According to the textbook writers, the readability score of 6th grade textbooks is higher than that of 5th grade ones in four out of five textbooks. Lastly, In terms of the units in each textbook, the readability scores fluctuate and do not increase sequentially as expected.

This study investigated the use of the amplifier very in high school English textbooks and native corpora by comparing its frequency distributions and collocation patterns. The native corpora, used as the reference of the study, were COCA and BNC, with their built-in sub-corpora further grouped into spoken and written corpora. The High School English Textbook Corpus (HSETC) was compiled from a total of 53 high school textbooks, with the spoken corpus (HSETC-S) from the texts in listening and conversation and the written corpus (HSETC-W) from the reading passages. Analyses using AntConc3.4.4 revealed no prominent differences between HSETC and reference corpora in the frequency of the amplifier very, while the written corpus (HSETC-W) had more occurrences contrary to the native corpora. The combination patterns and their occurrences of HSETC were slightly different from those of COCA and BNC with the gap increased with the spoken corpus (HSETC-S). Pedagogical implications and suggestions are made on ELT materials development and teaching practices.

The present study examines the features of communicative functions in middle school English textbooks, identifying whether or not they are presented based on the spiral structure. It also compares the communicative functions of 15 different middle school English textbooks and investigates whether the National English Listening Tests (NELTs) reflect the communicative functions presented in the textbooks. Two corpora were compiled using the 15 middle school English textbooks and the NELTs, and they were analyzed using WordSmith Tools. The results show that all the textbooks included communicative functions that the National Curriculum recommends; however, the textbooks presented a limited number of functions. Nonetheless, the communicative functions were presented relatively in a spiral way. The majority number of communicative functions in the textbooks and the NELTs were similar to each other, but there were some functions in the tests that were not covered in the textbooks. These results imply that more diverse communicative functions should be included in textbooks in order to help improve students’ communicative competence. The communicative functions not presented in the textbooks should not be included in the NELTs.

This study examined the reading passages of the National Assessment of Educational Achievement (NAEA) and middle school English textbooks in terms of their readability and lexical difficulty. The readability was measured by using Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level Index, while their lexical difficulty was measured in terms of STTR (standardized type-token ratio), frequency of tokens per type, and vocabulary frequency levels by using VocabProfile and Oxford WordSmith Tools 7.0. The results showed that there was a gap between the readability of the English textbooks and that of the NAEA conducted from 2012 to 2014, while the readability between the English textbooks and that of the 2015 NAEA reached a comparable level. However, the textbooks from one publisher showed substantively lower readability than those from the other publishers and the NAEA. Secondly, regarding vocabulary frequency levels, the words in 1K and 2K accounted for more than 90% of the textbooks and the NAEA, while the NAEA had a higher STTR and lower frequency of tokens per type than the textbooks. It suggests that the NAEA employed more various words with less repetition than the textbooks. Pedagogical implications are discussed.

This study examines the difficulty of reading text in elementary school English textbooks. Four elementary school English textbook series published by three publishers were evaluated by Word Critical Factor (WCF). WCF considers cognitive demands for word recognition; it assesses the match of linguistic content in the text with the phonetically regular and high-frequency words that are associated with particular stages of reading development. For the analysis, all of the words that appeared in the reading and writing sections from four elementary school English textbooks were analyzed by two criteria, that is, the ratio of high frequency words and phonetically regular words among 100 running words, and the number of unique words in each textbook. The results showed that all four textbooks’ difficulty levels were very high considering the learner’s reading ability. This was due to the textbooks having a low repetition of words and also the complicated vowel patterns that were above the reading abilities of students. All of these factors combined are what have caused the difficulties presented in English textbooks. In conclusion, although the reading text introduces a variety of genres and activities for the development of reading skills, most reading text could not assist the reader’s cognitive processing.

Shim, Young-sook. 2015. “An analysis of ELF-oriented features in Korean middle school English textbooks”. The Sociolinguistic Journal of Korea 23(3). 147~176. This study examined how ELF-oriented features were incorporated into English textbooks used in Korean middle schools. A total of 213 dialogues and 214 reading texts presented in 21 textbooks were analyzed from the perspective of English as a global language. The analysis of the data revealed the following findings. First, most of the textbook dialogues took place between either English native speakers or an English native speaker and a Korean speaker, with the number of dialogues involving non-Korean ESL or EFL speakers remaining very low. Second, nearly all the audio-recordings of the dialogues and the reading texts presented American English accent regardless of the nationalities and cultural backgrounds of the speakers or narrators in the materials. Lastly, a considerable portion of the reading texts contained topics or situations that can potentially enhance learners' interculturality, though ELF-related issues were rarely addressed in the texts. Based on the findings, this paper suggested some implications for ELF-based English education in Korean context.

The present study sought to examine the continuity of the English textbooks of the elementary school 6th grade and the middle school 1st grade by analyzing the readability and vocabulary difficulty of their reading passages. It investigated the continuity between textbooks of the two grades and among chapters of each textbook. For the analysis, Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level Index was used to measure the readability of reading passages, whereas vocabulary difficulty was measured in terms of TTR (type-token ratio) and frequency by using VocabProfile. The results showed that the readability of middle school textbooks was one point higher than that of elementary school textbooks. Given that the readability index is based on the American school system, the increase in readability index between grades can be seen as large gap. In terms of vocabulary difficulty, the total amount of vocabulary in the middle school textbooks was three times as much as that of the elementary school textbooks. Second, readability index fluctuated across the chapters of each textbook, while the TTR was found to be higher in the former chapters than in the latter chapters in elementary school textbooks. All these could lead to learning difficulties for students. Pedagogical implications are discussed.

This study aims to compare the English vocabulary used in Korean high school English textbooks with the one in the College Scholastic Ability Tests (afterwards CSAT) administered in the years of 2009-2013 by using a concordance program, NLPTools, and to make a list of vocabulary used only in CSAT. The findings are as follows: First, when compared with Coxhead's (2000) Academic Word List, the 'Basic Words List' shows a conformity rate of 98.78%. Second, in terms of TTR (Type Token Ratio), there is no noticeable difference among the English textbooks. Third, in the respect of TTR, CSATs show higher figures, which means that CSATs' vocabulary is more difficult than that in the English textbooks and that for CSATs, annually each test has shown a gradual increase in the number of valid types. (This shows that more valid types to be learned are needed for the preparation of CSAT. Also the degree of difficulty in CSAT is getting higher.) Lastly, the higher level of the 208 words which occur only in CSATs illustrates that the gap between the vocabulary level of textbooks and that of CSAT needs to be reduced for normalization of public education.

The primary purpose of this study was to examine prominent features of frequency in the new vocabulary of the middle school English textbooks based on the 2007 revised national curriculum and thereby to provide meaningful data to be compared with those on the 2009 revised national curriculum. This study used an online software (Vocabprofile) to divide words into four categories by frequency: K1 (1-1,000), K2 (1,001-2,000), AWL (Academic Words List), and Off-List Words (the remainder). Salient features discovered from the frequency-based categorization of words in textbooks by grades or publishers were further examined for pedagogical implications regarding textbook writing and curriculum revisions in the future. The analysis has revealed the following results. K1 words accounted for the most among the words presented in English textbooks, reflecting the significance of the high-frequency words in L2 learning. The number of other words showed a steady increase as the grade gets higher. Finally, most textbooks presented multi-words as new vocabulary, which indicates the importance of idioms or collocations. The vocabulary analysis by frequency could be of use to textbook evaluation, considering the growing importance of frequency-based vocabulary teaching.

The purpose of this study was to analyze writing activities of 1st grade middle school English textbooks based on the achievement standards of the 2009 revised National Curriculum and provide suggestions for improvements of textbooks. In this study, seven textbooks out of twelve were selected and their writing activities were analyzed as to whether they stick to the guidelines of the 2009 revised National Curriculum. For this purpose, specific focuses of the current study were 1) to look into writing activities based on achievement standards stipulated in the 2009 revised National Curriculum, and 2) to investigate the ratio of integrated writing activities to separate writing activities ones. The results of the analysis revealed that most of the writing activities seemed suitable based on learners’ real-life situations for achievements standards; however, the types of writing activities were rather simple, mainly focusing on given words. Next, there were not only separate writing activities but also a variety of integrated activities such as listening-writing, speaking-writing, and reading-writing activities. At the end of the paper, a few suggestions were provided to improve the qualities of writing activities in the textbooks.