2015 영어과 교육과정 기본 어휘 목록 개발

Development of the Korean basic English word list of the 2015 revised national curriculum of English

In September of 2015, the Ministry of Education of Korea announced the 2015 revised national curriculum of English in which the revised Korean Basic English Word List (KBEWL) is included. The present study attempted to examine how the KBEWL was developed by applying the three vocabulary selection criteria of ‘frequency’, ‘range’ and ‘familiarity’ to an 8 million word mega-corpus. The words making up KBEWL were selected and refined through a three-step process: 1) frequency and range, 2) familiarity, and 3) experienced English teachers’ heuristic. Through the comparison of the KBEWL with 10 other representative English word lists including the 2009 KBEWL in the text coverage, this study attempted to validate the effectiveness of the 2015 KBEWL. The results show that the 2015 KBEWL reflects the authentic use of the vocabulary very well as the existing representative vocabulary lists do. In addition, in the present study, several vocabulary regulations stipulated in the 2015 national curriculum of English were introduced. Lastly, some suggestions and educational implications were provided for developing an English word list in the future.