HOOJAE GONG (KOREA NATIONAL UNIVERSITY OF EDUCATION)

ANALYSIS OF ELEMENTARY SCHOOL TEACHERS’ AWARENESS OF COMMUNICATIVE LANGUAGE TEACHING METHODOLOGY BASED ENGLISH EDUCATION POLICIES : LANGUAGE PLANNING AND LANGUAGE POLICY

Due to the nature of the curriculum education policy, it is teachers who carry out educational activities in the classroom that play a critical role in implementing the policy. Therefore, it is important to find out how teachers accept the policy and what attitude they have towards it. However, there is almost no research on Korean teachers' awareness of elementary English education policy that critically approaches Communicative Language Teaching, which is the core of Korea's English education. The purpose of this study is to find out the awareness of elementary school teachers regarding CLT based English Education Policies and to analyze the enactment of the policy according to context. This paper was conducted as a mixed study combining survey research and interview research. The survey study examined the knowledge and attitude toward CLT English education policy, targeting 357 teachers. For interview study, elementary school teachers' awareness and enactment on CLT based English education policies were investigated depending on the context with five teachers. As a result of the analysis, the CLT based policy with the lowest level of awareness and reflection was Online Video Class by Native Assistant Teacher targeting underprivileged learners. Overall, attitudes were low compared to policy understanding, and the policies with the largest difference in understanding and attitude were Teaching English in English and Native Assistant Teacher. Based on these findings, it was proposed to develop English education policy suitable for EFL environment, and policy alternatives such as strengthening English accountability education and Context approach were suggested.

First author: Hoojae Gong is a doctoral student in Graduate School of Educational policy and Administration, Korea National University of Education, Chungju, Korea. Co-author: Seongcheon Kim is a professor in Graduate School of Educational policy and Administration, Korea National University of Education, Chungju, Korea.