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 present study examined how writing tasks in high school English textbooks under the revised national curriculum reflected the key writing elements (process, genre, and context) of process-genre based approach. Concerning the latter, the focus was narrowed to audience since it was relatively neglected in writing instruction compared with other contextual factors. For this study, we analyzed 335 writing tasks in ten English textbooks for 1st- and 2nd-year high school students. Results showed that writing tasks largely incorporated the process-genre based approach. However, pre-writing activities mostly scaffolded the organization of ideas, rather than generated them. In the post-writing phase, editing was not targeted in some writing tasks. Both the diversity of genres/subgenres and genre awareness activities were also lacking. In addition, few writing tasks targeted the development of audience awareness through explicit activities. These findings provide pedagogical implications for writing task and curriculum development for material writers, curriculum designers, and practitioners.

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.

Previous research developed lists of the most frequently used phrasal verbs in native English corpora. This study aims to discover how these high frequency phrasal verbs were presented in high school English textbooks in Korea. A high school English textbook corpus comprising 189,203 words taken from the listening scripts and reading passages of eight different textbook series was developed for the study. A corpus-based analysis of phrasal verbs revealed that each textbook series covered only 30% of most commonly used phrasal verbs in native corpora. In addition, the phrasal verbs used in the different textbook series rarely overlapped, suggesting a lack of systematic selection process. Among the recursive phrasal verbs appearing in the textbook series, high frequency phrasal verbs were more likely to be recursive and evenly distributed. A comparative analysis conducted with a referential corpus revealed that the textbooks employed fewer phrasal verbs than their comparative counterparts. In terms of meaning, 91% of high frequency phrasal verbs in the textbooks delivered their most frequent meanings while the rest 9% did not. The results of this study support the necessity of pedagogical guidelines for phrasal verbs.

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.

This study analyzed the text readability of the College Scholastic Ability Test (CSAT) and High School English Ⅱ textbooks by focusing on reading and compared the difficulty levels between them. To analyze the readability, the Flesh 2.0 for Windows and the Web VP 1.5 (2003) were used. To find out about high school students’ attitudes and behavior towards English and their preferences of English books, a questionnaire consisting of ten questions was administered. The results revealed that the textbooks are more readable than the CSATs in terms of the Flesch-Kincaid Reading Grade Level (RGL) and Reading Ease Score (RES). The average length per sentence of the textbooks is shorter than that of the CSATs. Furthermore, the CSATs have a higher percent of academic words than the textbooks. The questionnaire results showed that the participants, 228 second-year high school boy and girl students, preferred CSAT prep books, followed by EBS books and textbooks. Based on the findings, the basic directions of the CSAT and the guidelines to write textbooks have been suggested.

Textbook is very important in English learning and teaching. The goals of this paper are (i) to analyze the distributions of modal auxiliaries in middle school and high school English textbooks and (ii) to compare the analysis results with those of the general- purpose English corpora. Our study is based on Corpus Linguistics, and we are using corpus-analysis methods and tools in our research. In our study, we consider English textbooks as corpus texts and we will analyze them with NLPTools, which is a corpus- analyzing program. After we survey the distributions of modal auxiliaries, we will focus on a modal auxiliary can. We will examine not only syntactical distributions of a modal can but also semantic/functional distributions of this modal in English textbooks. In order to analyze the semantical distributions of can, we will use semantic tags and divide its semantic/functional category into three groups: ability, permission, and possibility. We will also divide the syntactic distributions into the nine verb phrase structures. After we closely examine the syntactic and semantic/functional distributions of a modal can, we will compare the analysis results with those of the LLC Corpus, the LOB Corpus, and the British National Corpus. Through the study, we want to show that the actual distributions and usages of a modal can in middle and high school English textbooks are a little different from those in other general-purpose English corpora.

The purpose of this study is to analyze writing activities in Korean high school English textbooks and suggest more effective writing activities in comparison to Chinese textbooks. For the analysis, two Korean and two Chinese high school English textbooks are selected. Writing activities are investigated in terms of three research procedures. The study begins by typifying writing activities as controlled, guided, and free writing, guided by Raimes’ controlled -to-free approach (1983) and Rivers’ five writing instruction stages (1981). Next, it examines writing activities according to the writing criterion prescribed by the Korean and Chinese national curricula, respectively. Finally, it investigates writing activities in relation to other language skills, such as listening, speaking, and reading. The results are as follows. First, while Korean textbooks include more writing activities than Chinese textbooks, there remain substantial imbalances in both. Both textbooks contain the most controlled writing activities and lack free writing. Second, Korean textbooks provide more writing questions than do Chinese textbooks in order to satisfy the national-level writing criteria. However, in comparison to Chinese textbooks, they lack writing activities designed to satisfy paragraph- level writing standards which enhance logical organization competence. Third, Korean textbooks offer more writing activities integrated with other language skills. Both textbooks most frequently contain writing activities integrated with reading skills.

This study is to investigate the relationship between teaching and testing restricted on English listening comprehension processing. 726 listening activities in three textbooks of High School English and 80 questions in four nationwide English listening comprehension tests for high-school first grades were analyzed and classified into micro-skill categories of top-down, bottom-up and interactive processing. The results revealed that the tests put emphasis on the top-down processing in contrast to overemphasis of the textbooks on the bottom-up processing, whereas interactive processing took up a small portion both in the textbooks and tests. While the number of questions requiring bottom-up processing reduced in the tests, all the questions of bottom-up processing were focused only on one specific micro-skill, comprehending details. Further, despite diverse demonstrations of top-down micro-skills, each micro-skill question for top-down processing in the tests took some specific forms, which might lead students only to studying for preparation for the specific forms rather than for enhancing general comprehension abilities. Further pedagogical suggestions and implications for listening teaching were suggested.

본 연구는 다인종/다문화사회로 급변하면서 한국사회에서 드러난 다문화교육의 요구를 <영어 I> 교과서가 잘 반영하고 있는지를 다문화주의적 관점에서 분석해 보기 위한 것이다. 이를 위해 제7차 개정 교육과정 고등학교 2학년 <영어Ⅰ> 교과서 5종을 택하여, 어느 문화가 그 주된 배경이 되는지를, 문화별, 권역별, 국가별로 살펴보았고, 삽화 인물이 인종별, 성별로 어떻게 분포되어 있는지를 분석하였다. 분석 결과, 본문의 배경이 되는 문화는 그 빈도가 보편문화와 영어권문화, 대조문화 순서로 나타났다. 그리고 국가적으로는 미국, 한국, 영국 순으로 많이 나타났고 외부원의 국가는 출현 빈도가 현저히 낮은 것으로 나타났다. 삽화에서는 인종별 출현 빈도가 백인, 황인, 흑인 순이었다. 백인이 총 인물 삽화의 절반에 가까운 비율을 보여 백인이 중심이 되었다. 황인에서 대부분을 차지하는 한국인의 출현 횟수를 제외한다면 황인과 흑인은 백인보다 현저히 낮은 빈도로 삽화에 등장하였다. 성별에서는, 남성이 여성보다 약 1.5배 더 많이 본문에 등장하여, 남성중심적이었다. 인종적, 성별 균형을 배려한 교과서도 있었으나, 대부분은 개선이 여지가 많이 남아 있었다.