KSL 교육과정에서의 ‘학습 한국어’의 개념 및 내용 체계 고찰

With the advent of globalization era, people with diverse linguistic and cultural backgrounds have begun to flow into Korea. As the numbers of students with various linguistic and cultural backgrounds have increased in schools, the revised 2017 Korean language curriculum following the 2012 one has been developed and implemented to address the needs of these students. The new curriculum concretely defines the concept of ‘Academic Korean’ into more specific systems. Additionally, the fact that the new curriculum attempts to reorganize a list of target words and grammars is noteworthy. In particular, it has not only divided academic Korean words into the categories of ‘words for thinking tools’ and ‘words as common knowledge’, but has also improved the list through the careful selection and ranking of each word. Despite these changes, the method in establishing relationships between ‘Basic/Daily Korean’ and ‘Academic Korean’ and between ‘Korean as a learning tool’ and ‘Korean for academics’ has been controversial. Many are also concerned about the contents of ‘Academic Korean’ that are neither qualified nor clearly defined. Accordingly, this paper identifies four problematic aspects of this 2017 version of curriculum. The first is that the only contribution that this academic Korean curriculum has made is on the emphasis of the ‘academic tool’ vocabulary list. Secondly, the issue of adjusting Korean in this context has not yet been considered theoretically or practically. Furthermore, the standards and list of grammar for the appropriate strengthening of literacy for school age students have not been established on a sufficient enough basis to be actualized. And fourth, it can be noted that other related subject topics, text genres, registers, and cognitive skills have been insufficiently taken into consideration by being excluded. Upon completion of the investigation regarding various methods of devising the organic combination of language study and subject study, this paper proposes a way of systematizing the contents and content structure of ‘Academic Korean’.