[교사교육] A Study on the Perceptions and Attitudes of Elementary School Teachers on Elementary English Education Policies

With the change to the era of internationalization, the ability to use English has become an essential factor in enhancing national competitiveness. In particular, in Korea, English plays a major role as an evaluation standard in major entrance exams, employment, and promotion, so the interest of students and parents in learning English is enormous. However, due to the lack of research on how the school s teachers perceive a series of curriculum revisions and changes in teaching and learning methods, and how they are actually performed in classrooms, the effectiveness or improvement of the policy has not been sufficiently elicited. In this study we selected six different English education policies (i.e., EPIK, TaLK, TEE, Elementary English Subject-Specialist Teacher System, English conversation instructor System, Master Teacher System) that seem more directly related to elementary education in Korea and examined the perceptions and attitudes of elementary school teachers toward them. A survey was conducted with a total of 93 teachers as informants, which was followed by in-depth individual interviews with seven teachers. The survey results showed that while the teachers perceptions varied from policy to policy, it was found out that they did not employ any specific strategy in any cases. They tended to think that the policies we covered were not familiar to them; throughout the survey there was not a single case when the participants mentioned any other policy than the six we addressed. All these may suggest that the government should try to communicate with teachers more actively when introducing a new policy to them. Teachers, as one of the major stakeholders, have the right to express their own views about the government-driven education policies. This study also stresses that elementary school teachers should play a more active role in English education in Korea.