The Seven Continents of the World

Abstract

The portfolio is designed to make a theme-based textbook for a social studies English class for the students in a private elementary school. As we are living in the era of globalization, parents in Korea are becoming more concerned about English education, and schools teach English with greater importance. Some Korean private elementary schools have begun to teach students English through other subjects. However, based on my experience of teaching Social Studies to Korean EFL learners, one of the subjects used for teaching English, I have encountered a few difficulties. One of the problems was that there is no language support in L1 books, so the vocabulary as well as sentence structures used in the content are difficult to understand for Korean EFL learners. Secondly, some of the topics and contents are unfamiliar and irrelevant to Korean children. In the school where I am currently working, I have used Social Studies books designed for native speakers with the topics of geography, climate and culture of North America; however, as the students have not learned about North America in detail, they seemed to have difficulties with understanding the content. For example, they do not even know about representatives and senators, but the textbook assumes that the students already know about the jobs. In other words, English education has been provided to the students with little consideration to the students’ proficiency level and the cognitive ability of the students and their interest.