중학교 영어교과서의 읽기 전략 간의 학년별 연계성 분석: 7차 개정 교육과정의 성취기준을 중심으로

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to examine whether the Korean middle school English textbooks for the newly revised 7th National Curriculum are designed adequately to help students enhance reading strategies with continuity from 7th grade till 9th grade and according to reading stages. For the research method, Sung's (2010) analysis techniques of 13 different types of reading strategies were adopted to maintain consistency of the study results. The textbooks analyzed are four different series of middle school English textbooks of 7th-9th grades. In total, twelve types of textbooks were examined. The results of the analysis are as follows: First, the 'Scanning' strategy was shown to be the most frequent strategy in all of the four types of the English textbooks. Next, the 'Inferring context', and 'Analyzing Vocabulary' strategies appeared much more than any other strategy. It might mean that other strategies are not sufficiently presented in the textbooks, which might cause students not to acquire various useful strategies effectively for three years in middle school. Second, although the continuity of the use of reading strategies by year is different from textbook to textbook, the frequency rate of the 'Scanning', 'Analyzing Vocabulary', and 'Inferring context' strategies increased or were maintained at least as years progressed. On the other hand, the 'Particular Meaning', 'Compensation', and 'Fluency' strategies were either reduced or never mentioned. Third, the distribution of the strategy use in each textbook is different from textbook to textbook as well. Overall, the while-reading (43%) strategies and the post-reading strategies (41%) represent most of the reading strategies in all the twelve types of textbooks examined, and the pre-reading strategies (16%) were the least used ones. As is the case with typical reading situations, the least strategies were used during the pre-reading stage. In conclusion, the analysis of all three years’ textbooks show that the textbook writers seem to utilize a variety of reading strategies by year and according to the reading stages to help students read efficiently although none of the textbooks seem to contain all the strategies in balance. Thus, teachers might need to carefully check the use of the reading strategies in the textbooks before teaching so that they can teach as many useful reading strategies as possible. It should be reminded that both roles of the textbook writers and teachers are needed for students to be more familiar with various useful reading strategies in the classroom.