중학교 1학년 영어 교과서 문화 내용 분석

Abstract

The 21th century can be noted not only as the global but also as the information age, in which communication with foreigners and the necessity to do so increase rapidly. In the center of this entire situation English has established itself as a universal language. Because language reflects its socio-cultural environment, students can not fully understand or properly use a foreign language without understanding its culture. The goal of foreign language education is to improve communicative competence and, therefore, it should be accompanied with culture education. In the EFL context, however, Korean students do not have enough opportunities to directly experience English culture, prompting the need to offer some well-organized culture education in classes. The goal of this study is to analyze how many cultural contents are reflected in English textbooks and to examine their appropriateness. In order to achieve this goal, I review the literature dealing with the objectives of culture education and cultural contents, as well as official documents specifying the 7th revised version of English curriculum. Then I survey three English textbooks for the first graders in the middle schools that are currently used. I carefully examine the whole chapters of these textbooks, focusing on the cultural contents. I analyze the results of the survey by dividing them into two categories such as cultural patterns and related language skills. I present the results of the study in the following way. First, as for the cultural patterns, I find that the contents dealing with behavioral culture are more than those dealing with material and spiritual culture. Second, as for the language skills, I find that the cultural contents in the textbooks are organized in the order of speaking, listening, reading, and writing. I find that this order, which reflects the view that puts more emphasis on spoken language than the written one, is especially useful for the first graders in the middle schools who have been accustomed to spoken language-oriented education. Since it is impossible to separate language skills from culture, I suggest that the aspects of target culture should be incorporated in various forms into the learning situations. Some of the proposals that I come up with the research can be summarized as follows. First, given that the wide variety of culture makes it difficult to have them all reflected in the textbooks, I suggest that the educational authorities should establish some clear guidelines for putting cultural contents in the curriculum. I also suggest that compiling some essential contents into a culture-oriented textbook would be an efficient way to present target cultures. Second, I suggest that teachers should not only have positive attitudes toward culture education, but also be equipped with the useful teaching methods. This helps teachers enable to provide the students with various levels of cultural contents that are selected and developed for the various needs of the students.