코퍼스 분석을 통한 공학‧IT 용어목록 추출 및 어휘 교수법 개선방안에 대한 연구

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to propose a way of revising high school English textbooks. We extracted 300 engineering and IT-related vocabularies from American math & science textbooks and English newspapers, and additional 100 idioms from Longman Essential Idioms in English(LEIE) and Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English(MICASE), to be reflected on the textbook revision. It is suggested that high school students exposed to active knowledge-based vocabulary training from early on will be better equipped with English for specific purposes(ESP) communication skills in the fields of science and engineering at college. Such a learning method using the extracted words and idioms is deemed highly necessary in the current hi-tech age as Korea has emerged as an IT power nation. The Importance- Performance Analysis(IPA) method was used for a survey to find out whether college students feel the necessity of the early ESP instruction. The 300 words and 100 idioms were selected through Part of speech(POS) tagging and frequency analyses after basic lexical items were removed by stop-word lists.

Selected engineering & IT lexical items were divided into two groups A and B, and the subjects had a four-week learning session in which group A was given a passive knowledge-based instruction and group B an active knowledge-based instruction. The results of the delayed post test show that group B vocabularies remain more steadily in the learners’ long-term memory due to Gass & Selinker’s(2008) “Saliency Effects” from the process of trial and error.

After finding the effectiveness of the active knowledge-based instruction, the selected idioms were also divided into two groups A and B, in which group A had ‘image helpers’ and group B had no ‘image helpers.’ The subjects had a two-week learning session where both groups were given an active knowledge-based instruction. The results of the delayed post test show that group A idioms with image helpers remain more steadily in the learners’ long-term memory due to some synergy effects resulting from the combination of the active knowledge-based instruction with the image-learning.

During the study, the efficiency of active vocabulary acquisition was also confirmed by ‘Konglish’-based vocabulary instruction, the purpose of which was to find out whether ‘Konglish’ can have a positive effect on L2 English lexical acquisition. The experiment was carried out with a focus on productive knowledge(the ability to correctly use words in speaking & writing), as it, as opposed to receptive knowledge(the ability to recognize & understand words for reading comprehension), is known to directly lead to the enhancement of communicative skills. Two groups, one experimental group educated on Konglish-based words and one control group based on General English words, were compared in terms of the degree of vocabulary retention after a four-week learning session. Although both groups showed learning effects through ‘productive’ education, the experimental group performed better than the control group, for only the former went through Gass & Selinker’s(2008) “process of trials & errors.” We argue that the Konglish-based vocabulary items remain more steadily in the learners’ long-term memory due to the same “saliency effects” from the process of trials & errors. This suggests that Konglish should be viewed as a linguistic asset, not as a negative factor, in learning English. The result of the experiment shows that Konglish can function as a facilitator for L2 English vocabulary learning if classroom teaching practices focus more on students’ productive knowledge rather than on their receptive knowledge.