earticle

영어

A good foreign language curriculum consolidates the three important principles: sequence, continuity and integration. Since English textbooks are the incarnation of the curriculum used in foreign language classrooms, a comparative investigation of the principles in English textbook corpus enlightens differences in English education of South Korea (SK) and North Korea (NK). To this end, the current study analyzes how graded sets of vocabulary are distributed to discover the sequence in the textbooks, and what the repetition rate is by looking into Standardized Type Token Ratio (STTR) to find out the continuity in the textbooks, and what keyword list is in both positive and negative keyword list of the NK corpus against the SK corpus to elicit integration property of the curriculum. The findings are: (1) NK textbooks are structural in sequence, and no such structural sequence is found in SK textbooks. (2) SK textbooks recycle vocabulary more frequently than NK textbooks, and this leads to more rote memorization activities in NK textbooks. (3) NK textbooks are more integrated with other academic subjects such as science, geography and ideology.