초등학교 6학년과 중학교 1학년 영어 교과서의 읽기 자료 연계성에 관한 분석

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to examine the connectivity in reading materials between Elementary School English 6 and Middle School English 1 and to provide suggestions for establishing better curriculum of Elementary School English 6. For the current study, both the reading parts and the listening parts from the textbooks of Grade 6 & Middle School 1 were analyzed. As for the middle school English textbooks, the five most widely used textbooks out of the 13 different textbooks available in the nation were chosen as the sample for the analysis. For the analysis of the readability of the given texts, the criteria such as number of words, word length, number of unfamiliar words, number of sentences, and sentence length were considered, and the two readability formulas, the Flesch Reading Ease and the Dale-Chall Formula were utilized for comparison. The results of this study are as follows: First, although the gap in the listening components between Grade 6 and Middle School 1 varies from textbook to textbook, the average number of words for Middle School English 1 is just one and a quarter times more than those of Grade 6 English textbook. Second, the average number of words in the reading components of Middle School 1 is over three times more than those of Grade 6, and the average number of sentences is about twice as much. In conclusion, the gap between reading materials of each grade is much larger than the gap between listening mat- v -erials than it has originally been expected. These findings suggest that the amount of reading materials of Grade 6 need to be increased to the same or higher level of listening materials because learners would have much more reading materials all over the English textbooks of Middle School 1 as well as the specified reading part, and it is likely for them to have much more difficulties in reading. Next, the guideline to obtain the validity of the connectivity between Grade 6 and Middle School 1 would be necessary because each textbook out of the five different Middle School English 1 textbooks shows a big difference in terms of its readability. Lastly, it has been found to be the case that the curriculum of Elementary School English 6 seems to supports all four language skills - listening, speaking, reading, and writing. More research in the area of the connectivity between the elementary school English and the middle school English should be done to accommodate the learners' smooth progress in learning English with ease.