Reading and Writing Textbook for young learners in Korea

Abstract

The rising significance of productive skills is likely to have a positive influence on teaching English in Korean elementary schools. Currently, the national curriculum of English education in Korea has been more communicatively oriented than the previous grammar-based syllabi (Ahn, 1995). Based on the curriculum, students are given more opportunities to speak in English and native teachers have been employed to provide more communicative lessons. As a result, students’ talking time in English has increased in the classrooms in public schools. However, despite the positive movement towards communicative lessons, lessons focusing on developing writing skills for multiple purposes have still been neglected in teaching English. Most of writing activities focus on manipulating language such as dictation, grammar practice, and the construction of isolated sentences (Ahn, 1995). Due to these circumstances, Korean elementary young learners still have difficulty with their writing skills. Considering these issues, this portfolio is designed to improve the students’ writing skills by providing reading examples, communicative tasks to prepare for the writing, and a variety of writing tasks for real communicative purposes. The target audience is a group of fifteen young learners whose ages are from ten to eleven in a Korean public elementary school. They are both female and male in their 3rd and 4th grade. They are learning English in an afterschool program and have never been abroad to study English. Based on the WIDA scale, their language proficiency is Level 3 in terms of listening and reading, and their speaking and writing skills are at Level 2. They can produce short sentences with formulaic grammatical structures orally or in their writing. The current textbooks used in the program, however, focus on reading and listening with a few speaking activities of answering teacher’s short questions. Their homework contains only on listening and reading activities and vocabulary memorization. In terms of writing skills, the students already know how to write the alphabet and even spell some basic level words; however, they do not move on beyond sentence level writing or writing for communicative purposes. The textbook will be based on both Genre-based approach and Intensive Reading. In each chapter, the reading section will be combined with the writing tasks. Reading texts can be used as a model for writing tasks. They can also provide interesting topics, which can be a starting point for creative writing activities. In addition, the language presented in reading can scaffold and be used in the following writing tasks (Hyland, 2003).