외국어로서의 한국어교육학, 어디에 위치하는가? - 학문분류체계 속의 정체성 탐색

Where Does Korean Language Education Fit in the Field of Foreign Language?: Exploring Its Identity in the Academic Field Classification

This study investigates the academic identity of Korean language education as a foreign language and its placement within Korea’s academic classification systems. Despite the field’s quantitative and qualitative growth, its boundaries with related disciplines—such as national language education, foreign language education, linguistics, and education—remain ambiguous, and a clear classification framework is lacking. To examine the current status, the study analyzed the Korea Research Foundation’s Classification of Academic Research Fields, the National Standard Classification System for Science and Technology, and the Korean Decimal Classification (KDC). The results show that Korean language pedagogy is generally classified as a subfield of curriculum education within the social sciences, a categorization that does not fully capture its linguistic and pedagogical nature. In the national classification system, it is not clearly recognized as an independent field of language education, and in the KDC, it is grouped with general Korean language materials, obscuring its identity as a foreign or second language. Accordingly, the study proposes: (1) establishing a new subcategory of “language education” to avoid confusion with Korean language education, and (2) reclassifying the field under the humanities. These measures are expected to strengthen its academic identity and provide a foundation for interdisciplinary research.