Earticle

The South Korean government has made enormous efforts to promote various special education programs for only a limited number of selected gifted and talented students; however, there have not been any established national-level education programs that systematically support mathematically promising students. This research was initially motivated by felt the necessity for more extensive educational opportunities for the students who have not been selected as gifted ones but still have some potentials in math. I taught two classes in the A and the B elementary school eight times with the same education programs. In summary, in order to verify the effectiveness of the education program designed to enhance the students’ abilities in mathematics, I reviewed the pre- and post- program evaluation results of 15 students from each elementary school, in terms of intellectual and emotional aspects. Thus, throughout this research, I seek to verify the effectiveness of the education program, originally designed for a small number of mathematically gifted children, even on those who are not the government-selected gifted ones but have some potentials in mathematics. The research analysis indicates that the education program which has being conducted only to the government-selected gifted children was beneficial to the mathematically promising students in developing their intellectual and emotional attitudes and abilities.

The essay section of the University entrance examination, introduced in 1986, has changed its character through various social demands and trial and error for more than 20years. Currently it has gained the structure which is the integrated subjects essay. If the original essay examinations were to test the humanistic capacities, the integrated subjects essay that has been introduced in the year 2008 is starting to systematize and within each system the fact that the subject essays are integrated is the main difference between the essay tests of the past. Because integrated subject essay is a new assessment tool, it is true that there is limited research on it as an assessment tool for natural science majors, and it is also true that essay examination of different universities have different formats. Through the analysis of recent three years mathematical essay questions of seoul regioned universities, the objective of this research is to first, verify the differences of mathematical essay questions from those of academic examination and University entrance examination questions. Second, is to verify and investigate whether the mathematical essay questions are appropriate for the cause of its introduction.

This article is dealing with history of Gaya, ancient league of states in Korean Peninsula in the 5th century, from Korean and Japanese textbook of history. Korean highschool texts describe Gaya in three ways. First, it says Gaya fell during united kingdom phase, and focuses on Geumkwan-Gaya and Dea-Gaya only. Second, the textbooks say the main reason of Gaya's fall is pressure from Beakje and Silla. Third, even though highschool textbook is using historical method of section system, we can't find many mention of Gaya history. All of 11 Japanese textbooks are sorted by three ways. First, it is interesting Japanese textbook call Gaya in different name. Second, it is relationship between Gaya and Yamato government. In the 5th and 6th century, their history is too modified in bad way. It has problems that students could think Gaya is colony of Japan. Third, Gaya's immigrants culture. We can find Gaya's immigrants culture rarely. It is same as Korean textbook. So we need more research to complete that. Gaya, had existed for more than 500 years, is not the passive government, but the active league of state.

This study is aimed at reviewing whether the high school history textbooks of both Korea and Japan, which are two parties of the Japanese Invasion of 1592(Imjin Wearan), describe the Imjin Wearan from an impartial and objective point of view, and clarifying how the perception of the war expressed in historical descriptions has influenced the awareness which two countries have of the counterpart. The history textbooks of two countries show a tendency to describe specifically the success(or victory) of his or her own country, and to evade the description of their failure(or defeat). Besides, Korea imputed every war guilty to Japan, the invader, and Japan did not reflect actively the standpoint of Korea, the victim even though she admitted the fact of invasion. Nevertheless, unlike Korea which has the only one history textbook, Japan has eleven history textbooks, among which there is a textbook like “High School Japan History B(Jitkyo)”, which describes actively the invasion of Japan and the suffering of Korea.

The main purpose of this study is to analyse the middle school students' attitude toward the Korean and the math class through the semantic differential measures and to compare the two. Osgood (1957) suggests that there are three semantic dimensions when estimating the image about something: evaluation, potency, and activity. Evaluation loads highest on the adjective pair 'good-bad'. The 'strong-weak' adjective pair defines the potency factor. Adjective pair 'active-passive' defines the activity factor. In this article, the questionnaire contains total 32 pairs of adjectives: 16 pairs of adjective for evaluation, 8 pairs for potency, and 8 pairs for activity. Each items has five levels positioning the two opposing adjectives at the tips. And the respondents are asked to choose the levels. The results show there are meaningful differences between the two subjects according to the gender, grades, reading skills and their preferences of the subject. Also the students' attitudes toward Korean class is more positive than those toward math class. Considering that people's attitudes relate their positive or negative evaluations for an object, the students' positive attitudes toward Korean class will positively affect their Korean learning in real class.

The purpose of this study is to examine how elementary school teachers perceive genres, which this may become a basic research about how elementary school teachers reflect their context or genre centered perspectives on elementary educational sites. This research has two questions. The first one is ‘how elementary school teachers categorize and understand the genres included in textbooks?’ Another one is ‘how they think about the inclusion of extended genres into textbooks?'. This research reveals that genres are classified by various approaches, such as literature-based, language skills-based, dichotomy-based(literature or not), and text type-based approach. Also the factors which affect the teachers' categorization of genres are the their knowledges acquired in high school period, the Korean language curriculum of educational university, and their teaching experiences at school. In addition, the elementary school teachers' perception of genre changes by the domains of language skills. Teachers put reading domain on the center of their discussion about perception and extension of genres. But they responded to each domain differently when they discuss about instructional method of genres.

The main purpose of this study is to analyse correlation between second language learners' oral communicative competence and the results of a school mid-term/final-term exam which is to be considered as a valid assessment tool of students' overall L2 competence. After reviewing current researches concerning L2 performance assessment, the study found out limits of practicing performance-based test in schools and desirable ways to assess oral communicative competence effectively. L2 learners' oral communicative competence is measured by Korean teachers' observation stamp card recording the degree of interaction with their native teacher in terms of students' communicative language use and participation during English conversation classes. It can be interpreted that there does not much relationship between learners' scores of school exams and the degree of interaction with native teacher. Although there is no cause-effect relationship between the variables in correlation studies, the results implicate that there should be a big gap between L2 learners' practical communicative competence and scores of tests in schools. Finally it suggests that we should make judicious use of traditional testing and performance assessment, pointing out that one form of testing is not desirable under all circumstances.

From 2012, NEAT( National English Ability Test - speaking, writing ) is to be administered in South Korea. And the goal of the Ministry of Education will be to decide if NEAT will be able to replace the current KSAT( Korean Scholastic Aptitude Test ) that same year. This is a significant paradigm shift in that an English speaking and a writing test are to be introduced for the first time in Sough Korea for university admission, hopefully changing English education in high school into communication-oriented education. English speaking and writing tests will be included in middle and high school no later than 2011. In this context, this thesis deals with an English speaking test in a public middle school in Bundang area of Seongnam City. This is designed first to find if there is any meaningful change after a rater training on a rater in the scoring results, and second, if there is strong correlation between the two raters on the same speaking samples. The main results are as follows. First of all, there was no meaningful difference in the scoring results before and after the rater training. And also, on the same speaking samples, the two raters' correlation coefficient was sufficient.