초등학교 교사의 영어 어휘 빈도 직관에 관한 연구

Abstract

A Study on Elementary School Teachers' Intuitions about the Frequency of English Words

Hyang Mi Park

Graduate School of Education Pukyong National University

Abstract

Nowadays vocabulary knowledge is an important part of learning the English language. Knowing a word includes knowing the degree of probability of encountering that word in every type of text and speech, which is called intuitions about frequency of English words. Especially in the English as a foreign language (EFL) education environment like Korea, vocabulary is strictly controlled in the national curriculum, and frequency is an important criterion because it will be the most efficient way to learn the vocabulary. At this point, if the teachers don't have the intuitions about English vocabulary frequency, they cannot provide a comprehensible and natural English input. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to analyze teachers' intuitions about English word frequency and the relationships between teachers' English competency and intuitions of frequency through a paper-and-pencil test battery. An attempt was made to investigate the intuitions of English vocabulary frequency using two concepts. First, the teachers' ability to recognize the elementary vocabulary was assessed by asking teachers to distinguish the elementary-level from the secondary-level words based on the national English curriculum. Also, the teachers' ability to judge the frequency of words was tapped by having teachers order the target words according to their frequency intuitions. The results are as follows: First, in the first questionnaire, teachers' ability to distinguish the elementary vocabulary was high (mean= 74%). This shows that most of the teachers had moderately high recognition ability, and that they intuitively know what kinds of words they should teach in the classroom. In the second questionnaire, the correlation between the judgement of word frequency and British National Corpus (BNC) word frequency turned out to be moderately high (r=.624), whereas the judgement of secondary-level word frequency was not high. These findings suggest that the teachers have better intuitions of word frequency at the elementary school level. Interestingly, there was no significant relationship between teachers' English competency and intuitions about English word frequency. This calls for further research on why this may have been so.