키워드로 본 영어교육 연구의 흐름

A Research Trend on English Education Based on the Key Words: Corpus Analysis

This study analyzed the key words of 158 articles published in Studies in British and American Language and Literature to investigate the research trends in the field of English education from the 1960s to 2019. The key words were analyzed by the corpus analysis. The results showed that the studies on English education in the 1960s had not been actively conducted; on the other hand, research in the 1970s focused on grammar-translation method and audio-lingual method grounded on the behaviorism and structural linguistics. In the 1980s, experimental studies appeared for the first time. In the 1990s, research on SLA was prevailed, and researchers began to pay attention to studying effective ways of teaching methods and improving communicative competence. In the 2000s, one of the interesting findings was that the research trend changed from the teacher-centered education to the student-centered education; as a result, students’ learning styles, their anxiety, strategies, preferences, and beliefs were major topics for the research. Lastly, in the 2010s, study topics dealt by the researchers were more diverse; and research on language functions, motivation, and programs was prevalent. In addition, key words such as TEE, ESP, convergence, and kakao talk began to be mentioned. Overall, it was acknowledged that research paradigms have progressively changed with keeping abreast of the times, so it is necessary to take notice of the new paradigms emerging in the near future.