Symbol is an expressive method to reveal meaning beyond a world not to be described as language. If one of the purposes of literature education is to understand and to embrace general emotions of human being, symbol education should aim to extend mean...
Symbol is an expressive method to reveal meaning beyond a world not to be described as language. If one of the purposes of literature education is to understand and to embrace general emotions of human being, symbol education should aim to extend meaningful language usage to make consciousness of learners broaden by improving abilities of learners to understand literary symbol in texts. Based on this foundation of the aim for symbol education, this study has purposes to suggest cases of symbolic words’ symbol action in text books and to suggest specific methods to understand the symbol actions.
Symbol of literature expresses metaphysical notions through specific physical things, and it has power of association by connecting images and ideas. In intrinsic correlations between symbol and meaning, symbol could have ambiguity and complexity because of omitted original idea and imagination. Based on this symbolic conception of literature, this study researched symbol actions of poems in the textbooks. From that, it explained symbolic words have similarity between specific physical objects and abstract ideas, indicated by the physical objects. Also this study describes that symbol with an object does not reveals just one idea but brings multilayer meaning through an aspect of complexity.
However, symbol education contents of the current Korean language textbooks for middle school show their limitations that they just make conceptual understanding or explain meaning of symbolic words in individual works. For solving the limitations, this study researched cases of specific aspects of symbol actions and understanding processes of symbolic meaning, by utilizing notions of integrated indicators and systematic indicators of Todorov.
Todorov suggests integrated indicators and systematic indicators as brining symbol. The integrated indicators could be found in relationship with other communications, included for communication and context, and the systematic indicators could be found in friction with shared knowledge of a community, which have communication and collective memory. By making this indicator classification into specific things, this study divided the integrated indicators into things from excessiveness and other things from lack, and it divided systematic indicators into mythological elements and historical elements, so that this study researched symbol actions. From that, this study identified specific aspects of symbol actions and researched actual cases of symbol actions.
This study has a significance that it researches specific cases of symbol actions of poems in textbooks to improve literary appreciation ability of learners in this reality not to suggest authentic education contents or practical education methods about the symbol actions in school fields and it suggests methodological framework to understand symbol.