日本と韓国の英語教育課程の通時的研究 : 学習目標と言語材料を中心に

The main purpose of this paper is intended as a comparison of English education in Japan with that in South Korea. The author analyzed the curricula of both countries, because few studies have focused exclusively on curricula in Europe or the U.S.A., as represented in the annual report by the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology, sufficient studies regarding Asian countries'curricula are not available. Nevertheless, a comparative study of English education in Japan and that in South Korea will yield many insights: they have similar EFL learning environments; moreover, linguistic characteristics of the Korean language are similar to those of the Japanese language. Regarding analyses of the respective curricula, the author classified the stages into three: "the dawning", "the age of sentence-pattern", and "the age of communication." Thereafter, their changes of objectives and language materials are addressed herein. Although educational practices emphasizing grammatical competence have been performed for a long time in South Korea as well as Japan, now that "communication" has been set as the objective of the second latest curriculum, both countries have given priority to communication activities that raise consciousness of language-use and function