Korean Language Education to Improve Multicultural Acceptance: Practical Methods in Connection with the First and Second Grade Middle School Curriculum

Since its first public announcement in 1954, Korea’s national curriculum has undergone ten revisions and has focused on desirable human characteristics of the era. The current 2015 revised curriculum particularly emphasizes the importance of global citizenship education as a way of developing desirable human characteristics in students. In the present study, we chose one of the ten global citizenship learning topics, ‘multicultural education’, as an appropriate and timely topic for Korean middle school students as middle school is a period in which individuals develop values. Specifically, based on 『2015 Revised Curriculum Teaching·Learning Materials』, we designed an educational model that linked Korean language curriculum and multicultural acceptance education. Then, to test the efficacy of the designed model, we recruited 227 middle school students. The students were assigned to an experiment group (-designed model) and two control groups (-regular curriculum); then were provided education for 10 months. Using a multicultural acceptance scale, participants’ level of multicultural acceptance was measured before and after the education. As a result, there was no significant difference in the level of multicultural acceptance across the groups in the pre-test. However, in the post-test conducted after 10 months of education, the experiment group reported significantly higher multicultural acceptability. This means that through the educational model designed in this study, the multicultural acceptance of middle school first and second graders improved significantly. Based on this, the implications and limitations of this study were discussed, and future directions were suggested.