21세기 영어 교육을 위한 수정 모델 제시에 관한 연구

A Reform Model for English Education in Korean Schools in the 21 Century

During the drawing years of the 20th century we have seen the appearance of a digital revolution that is transforming the way in which the world socializes and does business. This is a so-called digital revolution which will change everything we do in our daily lives -- home, business, and education, Digital revolution has transformed multimedia elements such as text, sound, video, animation, graphics, and other elements into the single digits of 0 and 1. Thus, we can send the information packed with these multimedia elements to the person at the other end of the globe at the speed of the light. Gates prophesied that digital revolution will have greatest impact on education in the 21st century. It is then possible to adduce that foreign language education can be best improved by using the new computer medium which lies at the heart of the emerging information technology. In light of this epoch-making change, this paper proposes a reform model for English education in Korean schools at the dawn of the 21st century. The purposes of this paper are then two folded. First, it sets up the target level which Korean English education should reach, drawing upon previous research on first and second language acquisition. The paper subsequently stresses the necessity not only to increase the number of weekly teaching hours by Korean educational institutions, but also to improve their teaching practices dramatically. Second, the paper schematizes a reform model for English education to yield in a successful point. This model consists of seven factors: 1) more strict teacher licensing procedure and post teacher training, 2) an English curriculum update by institutions which produce English teachers, 3) improvement on language teaching environments, 4) improvement on language teaching materials, 5) an adoption of consistent language testing, 6) an increase of weekly teaching hours by all levels of institutions, and 7) multimedia-assisted self-training of foreign language at home. Finally, the paper concludes that Korean government ought to implement multimediaassisted language learning into foreign language classrooms at all levels of instruction in order to achieve the level of success which English education is recommended to reach.