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 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.

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.

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.

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.