중학교 2학년 영어 교과서 읽기활동 분석과 과업 유형 선호도 조사

Abstract

English education in Korea focuses on developing communication skills according to the Seventh national curriculum revision and the subsequent national curriculum revision. Most teaching activities are dependent on textbooks. This means the textbooks have a greater influence on the development of students' communicative competence in English classes. In this view, there is a need for analysis of the reading section, which accounts for a great part of English textbooks. This study aims to analyze reading tasks in middle school second grade English textbooks to examine whether they are organized in a way to help students enhance their English skills. Ultimately, this study is to provide some suggestions for improving English textbooks in developing reading tasks. For the analysis, five frequently used Middle School English textbooks were selected and the following three criteria were used. First, the four levels of reading comprehension stated in the revised 7th national curriculum were used. Second, the list of activity types based on reading stages, that is pre-reading, while-reading, and post-reading, was modified to be suitable for the purpose of this thesis. Third, the reading activities were integrated with other language skills, i.e., listening, writing, and speaking. On the basis of the textbook analysis, structured-interviews with two teachers and questionnaire survey of 114 students were conducted to compare their perception on reading sections in addition to students' preferences on reading activities. The major findings of this study are as follows: First, textbooks were shown to include a large number of activities of literal and creative comprehension levels. In particular, the greatest increase seemed to come from creative comprehension level, whereas literal comprehension tasks seemed to be decreased in proportion, compared to the English textbooks for the Sixth and the Seventh national curriculum revisions. Second, in the pre-reading stage, 'Activating background knowledge by telling readers' opinions and experiences' appeared as the most frequently seen task among the textbooks. Many textbooks seemed to offer simple types of while-reading activities, questioning about the reading materials, whereas a variety of post-reading activities were shown to be offered in the examined textbooks. Among them, is 'Integrative function', which seemed to take up the greatest portion of the activities. Lastly, 42% of total reading activities among the five textbooks proved to consist of the integrative tasks. Specifically, the textbooks were shown to offer four integrative tasks as follows: reading-listening, reading-writing, reading-speaking, and reading-multi language skills. Among them, reading-speaking tasks appeared to make up the biggest part of the total integrative tasks and reading-writing tasks came afterwards. In real situations, it is quite natural that two or more language skills are used at the same time. The results of this study seem to demonstrate that creative comprehension, 'integrative function', and integrated tasks based on reading, which are on a tendency to be increased in the analyzed textbooks, require integrative learning of 4 language skills. Integration of reading with other language skills would give students opportunities to express their understanding and emphasize their using integrated language skills. That is, practice of such reading activities would naturally boost students' communication competence, which results in the finding that English textbooks by the subsequent national curriculum revision are designed to help with learners' improvement in real communication abilities. On the other hand, in structured-interviews and survey results, it appeared that teachers mostly understand students' preferred reading activities and try to use them in class for learner-centered lessons. Unfortunately, the reality is that the integrated tasks mentioned above are actually under-utilized. Moreover, students do not seem to prefer those kinds of activities. The suggestions from the above findings are as follows: First, reading tasks in each textbook differ in number and distribution, according to the above three criteria. They are concentrated on some specific tasks or details. English textbooks should offer more varied and evenly distributed reading tasks to induce students to comprehend reading materials in the multilateral aspects and to use them through diverse activities. Second, teachers might reduce overemphasized activities, and add other helpful tasks to the textbooks in order for learners to grasp and internalize learning contents through reading materials in various ways. Lastly, future studies on the way to readily use integrative activities based on reading in English classes should be followed up. They will be helpful to construct more effective textbooks in the future, which will lead students to use language naturally and creatively for real communication.