2008 개정 교육과정에 의한 초등영어 교과서의 해독가능도 분석

Decodability of primary school English textbooks under the 2008 revised national curriculum

The purpose of this study is to investigate word density and the decodability of eight primary school English textbooks by two publishers. For analysis, the words of reading texts from eight textbooks were selected and manipulated for decodability measurements, which were conducted using Martin’s (1999) evaluation tool. The analyzed data revealed that there was no significant difference in word-density as well as decodability between the two publishers’ textbooks, and this result was similar to the features of the English textbooks developed within the 7th national curriculum. The current two textbook series showed that the density and decodability of the 3rd and the 4th grade textbooks were higher than the 5th and 6th grade textbooks and the average decodability was comparatively higher across all four grades for beginning readers. The data also showed that the decodability of both publishers’ textbooks were even higher than the reading materials for the American primary school children. The results signify that word repetition is rarely found; therefore, students are not provided any textbook scaffolding accessing the text. These factors, the high word density and high decodability of the textbooks, lead to text difficulty; and as a result, students have decoding problems reading these textbooks. On the basis of the results, some ideas for the word selection of the national curriculum and textbook writing have been suggested.