An analysis of the curriculum and textbooks for air and correspondence high school in Korea

방송통신고등학교 영어과 교육과정 및 교과서 분석

Since Air and Correspondence High School (ACHS) in Korea was established in 1974, it has been serving many people who couldn't take the opportunities for learning in the regular high school due to several reasons. Regardless of the rapid change in technologies and educational needs during the past 31 years, however, ACHS hasn't changed much. Concerns have been recently made about the validity of the unchanged school system and many issues have been discussed relating to the innovation of the school system. Focusing on the teaching and learning contents, one of the important issues with respect to the school system, this paper examines the 7th English Curriculum for ACHS. The paper also investigates the textbooks used in ACHS to see how closely they align with the students' English proficiency and ACHS' instructional method by employing McDonough and Shaw's(1993) framework for textbook analysis. The results revealed that the current curriculum does not sufficiently reflect ACHS's characteristics, which leads to the adoption and development of inappropriate textbooks in terms of overall coherence, proficiency level, etc. The results suggest that the development of the curriculum and textbooks for ACHS should be based upon the students' needs and their level of proficiency rather than depending on the national curriculum and government-authorized textbooks intended for the relatively homogeneous school-age learners.