The purpose of this study was to investigate the continuity of reading passages of Korean high school English textbooks with the 2015 Revised National Curriculum using Coh-Metrix, a software that analyzes English texts in a range of linguistic features. Twenty-one English textbooks were analyzed: 11 High School English, five High School English I, and five High School English II. Only reading passages in textbooks were analyzed. Coh-Metrix indices related to basic counts, lexical features, syntactic features, cohesion, and readability were analyzed. Results revealed significant differences between High School English and High School English I and II, but no such differences exist between High School English I and II. This study implies that continuity of reading difficulty in terms of lexical, syntactic, and readability characteristics among High School English, English I, and English II textbooks should be considered.

The purpose of this study was to develop a standardized job description for dietitians using the DACUM technique. To examine the validity of job description through DACUM, dietitians were surveyed relative to importance, performance, and difficulty. The survey was conducted April 1-30, 2014. A total of 217 questionnaires were used in the analysis. The final developed job description for dietitians included six duties, 38 tasks, and 210 task elements. DACUM’s findings include six duties: nutrition management, food service operation management, hygiene safety management, community food and nutrition program management, organization management, and professionalism strengthening. There were 5.1 points regarding importance, 4.1 points regarding performance, 4.9 points regarding difficulty, and statistically significant differences (p<0.001). Dietitians responded that ‘nutrition management’ and ‘hygiene safety management’ were the most important. ‘Hygiene and safety management’ showed the highest performance, and ‘community food and nutrition program management’ and ‘professionalism strengthening'' showed the highest difficulty. Thus, it is considered that the job analysis results can be used to evaluate and improve the subjects’ training program. Dietitians’ jobs are subject to various environmental changes, such as demographic changes, health care system changes, and the development of the food industry, and thus, should be reviewed and analyzed periodically.

The DQMS (Defence Quality Management System) is a certification system that manages participating companies to improve the quality of munitions. Since Korean Defense Specification (KDS) for DQMS certification that was established by adding military requirements based on the ISO quality standard, many companies complain that they should pay too much effort into the preparation process. However, it is hard to find helpful information on the preparation process because we have been only interested in the effect of DQMS acquisition. The purpose of this paper is to provide helpful information to companies preparing for DQMS certification. We surveyed the degree of difficulty and importance of the DQMS requirements from the companies with certification experience, and performed IDA (Importance-Difficulty analysis) by dividing the companies into the main contractor and the subcontractor. The result of IDA shows that there is a different recognition to the DQMS certification between main-contracting and sub-contracting companies. Subcontractor has more difficulties than main contractor in preparing the DQMS certification. In addition, we are able to identify the difficult and important requirements in the preparation process to the DQMS certification. Both main contractor and subcontractor have difficulty to the requirements related to configuration or validation such as ‘customer controls configuration’, ‘configuration review shall be implemented’ and ‘design and development validation documentation.’ The requirements related to customers are important to main contractor but the subcontractor regards difficult requirements as important ones. The result of this paper would be helpful to both the company preparing for DQMS and the munitions quality assurance agency.

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 paper aims to examine the differential degree of the task difficulty presented in high school English activity books. To achive the aim, the researchers analyzed tasks for three levels(high, intermediate, and low) in five English activity books currently published based on the revised 7th National Curriculum for high school freshmen. The criteria utilized for grading task difficulty are modified from Ellis(2003a, 2003b) which were developed to account for task complexity in terms of input, conditions, processes and outcomes. The results revealed that in general, the tasks of the activity books were organized in the sequential order of difficulty from low, imtermediate to high proficiency, but the difference of task difficulty across the three proficiency levels was not significant. It was also discovered that among three main factors determining task difficulty, task condition, task process, and task outcomes, task process and required task outcomes were more frequently adopted to di fferentiate the task difficulty level. In addition, there was lack of communicative tasks integrating four language skills (listening, speaking, reading, and writing) in all the five activity books. Further study suggesiotns and limitations are followed.