This study analyzes vocational English textbooks through Content-Based Instruction (CBI) for specialized vocational high school students. The purpose of this study is to improve vocational English textbooks based on CBI. The compositional ordering of ...
This study analyzes vocational English textbooks through Content-Based Instruction (CBI) for specialized vocational high school students. The purpose of this study is to improve vocational English textbooks based on CBI. The compositional ordering of vocational English textbooks affects specialized major content based language learning, communication practice, and task activities as the improvement direction. Vocational high school students, thus, learn background knowledge with comprehension and script schema with communication.
Vocational textbooks should be composed of content based on vocabulary learning and reading for background knowledge before writing, listening, and speaking activities. The four skills process of vocational English learning is reading, writing, listening and speaking such as the schema activation. After four skills learning, the vocational teacher should complete a task-based assessment near the job site. Due to the nature of specialized vocational high school students in Korea, communication in vocational English classes should be improved by incorporating the guidelines of English dialogue processes and using real documents in the job world.
For the analysis objective achievement, this study conducts its survey targeting twenty-five vocational English teachers and six hundred twenty-five students in specialized vocational high schools for finding an improvement direction for vocational textbooks. The result of the survey is as follows. First, the vocational English class needs to have some English background knowledge with the vocational English textbook before the English speaking activity for the actual condition of Korean specialized vocational high school students. Second, the vocation English textbook should be included with the various procedures of communication and task-based job situations.
Analysis tools of vocational English textbooks, which are made based on preceding research and results of surveys, are checked for validity from five English experts. Through the revised analysis tools, nine types of vocational English textbooks of the Korea Research Institute for Vocational Education and Training (KRIVET) are applied through analysis standards and deducted from the result to the purpose of analysis. First, vocational English textbooks do not consist of the content based learning activity with English. The English vocabulary learning, content learning, English pattern drills, or Korean background knowledge without activities are presented in vocational textbooks. Second, vocational English textbooks should to be reinforced to the background knowledge based visual and auditory materials, guidelines of communication procedures, job culture in Korea and other countries, and basic grammar learning activities. Third, there are not various task based activities as the assessment in each lesson part of vocational English textbooks. Vocational English students, therefore, cannot learn authentic English activities for practice nor gain strong motivation.
In conclusion, this study found through the survey from specialized high schools and vocational textbook analysis tools that KRIVET vocational English textbooks consist of the major content learning more than the content based English activity learning with communication such as the reading and writing activities of vocational English textbooks. The background knowledge learning and speaking practice are overly focused on in vocational textbooks, not CBI. The vocational English textbooks should be included with the major contents based reading and writing activity for authentic CBI in the vocational English class. To improve, this study suggests that English education experts interested in vocational English develop a separate CBI for Korean specialized high school EFL in the English education theory.