The City I Want to Visit

Abstract

The English education system in Korea mainly focuses on teacher-centered grammar, reading, and listening lessons for standardized tests. Even in English classrooms for young learners, students have less opportunity to learn speaking and writing. In addition, young children are not yet in control of their lives and have weak motivation to learn another language (Brewster, 2002). Marion Williams and Robert Burden (1997) suggest that motivation is a state of mind provoking action or physical effort to achieve a previously set goal. They also claim that children's goals are less easy to describe than those of adults, but they can be very powerful. There are two major types of motivation: extrinsic motivation which comes from outside factors and intrinsic motivation which comes from within the individual. Most researchers have concluded that intrinsic motivation produces better outcomes than extrinsic motivation (Harmer, 2007). Therefore, teaching approaches and various activities to raise young learner's intrinsic motivation need to be incorporated in Korean English text books. I would like to adopt Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) and Task Based Language Teaching (TBLT) for this text book. Motivation is also important in that it is the driving force of task completion as well as the decision to learn a language (Lewis, 1999). To increase students’ motivation, this textbook will use pedagogical tasks as the main activity. The aim of the textbook is to get students to learn English and to help them to achieve communicative competence through a variety of interactive activities and tasks. The target learners are 4th - 5th grade elementary students in Korea who are between the ages of 11 to 12. I have chosen this group because they do not have specific goals in learning English even though they have studied English for a few years. The learning context is a private language academy. The class size is twelve to fourteen students. While their reading and listening proficiency level is at B1 level , their speaking and writing proficiency level is pre-intermediate level which is the A2 level according to the ALTE levels. Students at these levels are quite comfortable with giving short answers in English; however, they have not developed the skills required to speak individually in front of others.