With recent increases in the number of foreigners who are interested in studying at Korean universities and graduate schools, there is a need to further develop Korean textbooks and curriculum for the study of academic Korean. Academic students have t...
With recent increases in the number of foreigners who are interested in studying at Korean universities and graduate schools, there is a need to further develop Korean textbooks and curriculum for the study of academic Korean. Academic students have to develop the skills of speaking, listening, reading, and writing for academic purposes. In particular, academic learners frequently use academic reading skills when writing assignments and when preparing for examinations. Learners of Korean for academic purposes need to develop competence in skimming, scanning and critical reading.
The aim of this study is to analyze reading activities in advanced Korean textbooks and to investigate whether these activities are suitable for academic reading. With reference to Jensen(1986)'s academic reading activities, and the reading activities in Hood et al.(1996) and Graves et al.(1994), reading activities designed for academic purposes were classified into various types. These types were then used in the analysis of advanced Korean textbooks.
The analysis showed that many pre-reading activities were readings that related to learners' lives and to activating background knowledge. Among post-reading activities, most activities were based on scanning, questions, and discussion. The reason these activities were frequently used is that they help in the understanding of the text. In advanced Korean textbooks, during-reading activities were seldom used, as the purpose of while-reading activities is to concentrate on reading the text.
Following the analysis of textbooks, five Korean teachers were interviewed. The teachers indicated that they used activities which related to learners' lives and which activated background knowledge in pre-reading; oral reading activities in while-reading; and questioning and scanning activities in post-reading. The teachers also saw no difference between general purpose reading activities and academic purpose reading activities.
This study showed that although advanced Korean reading textbooks have academic reading activities, they lack critical reading activities which are important to the student studying Korean for academic purposes.
There are two limitations to this study. Firstly, only a small number of reading textbooks were analyzed. Secondly, reading activities are very closely related to text types, and this relationship needs to be researched. However, this study focused only on reading activities.
This study is expected to assist other researchers in the study of the relationship between reading activities and text types, and in the analysis of the needs of Korean teachers when using reading activities for academic purposes.