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.

The present study aims to examine vocabulary analysis programs suitable for English textbook authorization in the amended version of the national curriculum. The analysis of WordLister 2002, a conventional vocabulary analysis software, reveals that it fails to meet the needs necessary to authorize textbooks in terms of user-friendliness and limited uses of the vocabulary analysis output. The design of WordLister 2002 is too complicated to be used without special training. While it provides useful information on new vocabulary, it fails to provide information in comparison with the existing research on vocabulary. NLPtools, on the other hand, applies corpus analysis techniques to the analysis of textbook vocabulary. In this program, texts in the textbook are seen as a corpus. Another characteristic is that NLPtools employs analysis methods based on dictionaries. It is found that NLPtools processes special characters in the text, so that the user does not need to process them by using specified input codes as in WordLister 2002. Wordlister 2002 requires its user to register a number of words in the process of vocabulary analysis, whereas the user with NLPtools does not need to register words as its built-in dictionary has a wide range of information on words. NLPtools also provides its users with functions, by which they can get and analyze the information they need. With these advantages over the conventional software, it is suggested that NLPtools can be used as a vocabulary analysis program for textbook authorization in the amended curriculum.