Development of English Reading Skills and School-based Reading Education in Korea

1. Kyunggi Provincial Office of Education, Foreign Language Education Conference, NEWTeaching, New Learning, 2013. 11. 2 Development of English Reading Skills and School-based Reading Education in Korea Professor Lee, Byungmin (이 병 민) Seoul National University English Education

2. Is there any school-based English curriculum? • A variety of curriculum at school exist • National Curriculum • National English curriculum • Public school English textbooks • English instruction at each class • English examinations at school • A variety of entrance examination • A goal of parents’ English education toward their children • English programs at private institutes

3. Which one is the most influential to Whom? • National English curriculum? • English textbooks? • School-administered English examinations? • English tests in Korean College Scholastic Test? • Or, a parent’s expectation toward their children’s level of English performance

4. Depending on school level • One, KCSAT • The other, parents’ expectations on English education • Orthe textbooks

5. Then, what do our schools do to develop our students English reading skills?

6. What is Reading in English? • Is it simple or complicated? • It is very complicated and demanding • It is highly cognitive-loaded mental activity • Students should learn various levels of knowledge to read the text in English fluently • Phonological, orthographical, word recognition, morphological recognition, suppressing irrelevant meanings of the word, syntactic parsing, semantic mapping, building of propositional meaning, holding information in working memory, inter-sentential inferencing, accessing background knowledge, constructing a coherent meaning or map of meaning of the text • Integration of some lower-level processes & some higher-level processes

7. A Fluent Reader? • An automatic and unconscious lower-level processing of textual information • A strategic and conscious higher-level processing of textual information

8. Strands of Early Literacy Development, Reading Assessment, 2012: 19

9. School-based English Reading Instruction • Translation practices • Grammar explanation • Structural analysis • Exclusively using the textbooks • Sometimes, KCSAT preparation packages

10. School-Based English Reading Program • Too much accuracy-oriented reading instruction • What about fluency or speed? Or Automatic processing of information? • How fast or fluently can students read and understand the texts in English?

11. The Expected Difficulty of English Reading Curriculum • 이런 정도의 글은 읽는 것이겠죠.

12. N. Korea issues threats as U.S. leads exercises • ABOARD USS GEORGE WASHINGTON (AP) — A nuclear-powered U.S. supercarrier led an armada of warships in exercises off the Korean peninsula Sunday that North Korea has vowed to physically block and says could escalate into nuclear war. U.S. military officials said the maneuvers, conducted with South Korean ships and Japanese observers, were intended to send a strong signal to the North that aggression in the region will not be tolerated. Tensions on the Korean peninsula have been particularly high since the sinking in March of a South Korean naval vessel. Forty-six Korean sailors were killed in the sinking, which Seoul has called Pyongyang's worst military attack on it since the 1950-53 Korean War. The military drills, code-named "Invincible Spirit," are to run through Wednesday with about 8,000 U.S. and South Korean troops, 20 ships and submarines and 200 aircraft. The Nimitz-class USS George Washington was deployed from Japan. "We are showing our resolve," said Capt. David Lausman, the carrier's commanding officer. North Korea has protested the drills, threatening to retaliate with "nuclear deterrence" and "sacred war. "The North routinely threatens attacks whenever South Korea and the U.S. hold joint military drills, which Pyongyang sees as a rehearsal for an invasion. The U.S. keeps 28,500 troops in South Korea and another 50,000 in Japan, but says it has no intention of invading the North. Still, the North's latest rhetoric carries extra weight following the sinking of the Cheonan. Capt. Ross Myers, the commander of the carrier's air wing, said the exercises were not intended to raise tensions, but acknowledged they are meant to get North Korea's attention. The George Washington, one of the biggest ships in the U.S. Navy, is a potent symbol of American military power, with about 5,000 sailors and aviators and the capacity to carry up to 70 planes. "North Korea may contend that it is a provocation, but I would say the opposite," he said. "It is a provocation to those who don't want peace and stability. North Korea doesn't want this. They know that one of South Korea's strengths is its alliance with the United States. "He said North Korea's threats to retaliate were being taken seriously." There is a lot they can do," he said. "They have ships, they have subs, they have airplanes. They are a credible threat." The exercises are the first in a series of U.S.-South Korean maneuvers to be conducted in the East Sea off South Korea's east coast and in the Yellow Sea closer to China's shores in international waters. The exercises also are the first to employ the F-22 stealth fighter — which can evade North Korean air defenses — in South Korea. South Korea was closely monitoring North Korea's military but spotted no unusual activity Sunday, the Defense Ministry said. North Korea, which denies any involvement in the sinking of the Cheonan, warned the United States against holding the drills." Our military and people will squarely respond to the nuclear war preparation by the American imperialists and the South Korean puppet regime with our powerful nuclear deterrent," the North's government-run MinjuJoson newspaper said in a commentary Sunday headlined, "We also have nuclear weapons." The commentary was carried by the official Korean Central News Agency. The North's powerful National Defense Commission issued a similar threat Saturday, saying the country "will start a retaliatory sacred war." Its Foreign Ministry separately said Saturday that Pyongyang is considering "powerful physical measures" in response to the U.S. military drills and sanctions. Though the impoverished North has a large conventional military and the capability to build nuclear weapons, it is not believed to have the technology needed to use nuclear devices as warheads. North Korea has been in increasingly difficult diplomatic straits since the Cheonan incident. U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton announced Wednesday, after visiting the Demilitarized Zone dividing the two Koreas, that the U.S. would slap new sanctions on the North to stifle its nuclear ambitions and punish it for the Cheonan sinking. On Friday, the European Union said it, too, would consider new sanctions on North Korea. The George Washington had been expected to join in exercises off Korea sooner, but the Navy delayed those plans as the United Nations Security Council met to deliberate what action it should take over the Cheonan sinking. The council eventually condemned the incident, but stopped short of naming North Korea as the perpetrator. In Seoul, meanwhile, about 150 anti-war activists rallied Sunday near the U.S. Embassy, chanting slogans such as "We are opposing the drills!" and "Scrap the South Korean-U.S. alliance!" The activists said the training would only deepen tension in the region. The rally was peaceful and there was no reports of clash with riot police. 

13. Lexile Features of the Text • 1360 Lexile • 791 words • Mean sentence length 19.29 • Mean Log word frequency 3.01

14. How fast should you read the text? • A total of791words • The total time is 7 minutes 10 seconds • 113words per minute • How fast is it? • How about our Korean students from elementary to high school?

15. President Obama used this morning's meeting of his Middle Class Task Force to, naturally, unveil new plans to help the middle class -- and to echo his pledge to "fight" for their interests. "We're going to keep fighting to renew the American Dream, and keep it alive, not just in our time, but for all time," Obama said. At another point, while sitting next to Vice President Biden (the task force chairman), Obama said that "Joe and I are going to keep on fighting for what matters to middle class families.“ All he told, Obama used the words "fight" or "fighting" four times in a seven-minute speech. The president and aides have been in a metaphorically battling mood since last week's Democratic loss in the Massachusetts Senate race. Obama used more than 20 variations of the word "fight" in his Ohio town hall Friday; expect some more political pugilism during Wednesday night's State of the Union address. The election of Republican Scott Brown in Massachusetts also gives the GOP the power to block an Obama-backed health care bill in the Senate, putting his signature domestic initiative in doubt. That's one reason Obama is refocusing his efforts on jobs and the economy. The middle class package Obama discusses today includes increasing the tax credit for child care, easing student loan payments.

16. What about the text from USAToday • Results Lexile measure 1280L • Mean Sentence Length 21.90 • Mean Log Word Frequency 3.45 • Word Count 219 • http://www.lexile.com/analyzer/

17. What about English Tests in KCSAT?

18. Most people have a vase or two in a cupboard, but lots of things can be turned into stylish containers for a flower arrangement, so before you rush out to buy anything, look around your own home. For instance, goldfish bowls look stunning filled with flower heads or petals, magnifying their contents. Wine, milk, mineral water, or olive oil bottles look particularly good with one or two stems in them. Try a collection of bottles in various shapes and sizes, lined up on a shelf or grouped on a table. An old teapot which has lost its lid becomes an ideal container for a bunch of roses picked from the garden.

19. Reading Difficulty(Year 2010) • Results Lexile measure 1330L • Mean Sentence Length 22.20 • Mean Log Word Frequency 3.35 • Word Count 111

20. Some scientists have shown the practical power of looking at the world through ‘could-be’ eyes. When a group of students were shown an unfamiliar rubbery object and told, “This could be a dog’s chewy toy,” they were later able to see that it might also be of use as an eraser when they made some pencil mistakes. In contrast, students who were told that it was a dog’s chewy toy did not find its alternative use. Another group of students watched a video about physics after being told, “This presents only one of several outlooks on physics. Please feel free to use any additional methods you want to assist you in solving the problems.” On tests of factual comprehension, these students performed no differently from students who had watched the video with a different introduction: “This presents the outlook on physics. Please use the method you see in the video in solving the problems.” But when they were faced with questions that asked them to use the information more creatively, the ‘could-be’ students performed much better than the others. Just a simple of language seemed to invite the students to process and store information in a much more flexible format, and thus be able to look at it and make use of it in different ways.

21. Reading Difficulty • Results Lexile measure 1210L • Mean Sentence Length 21.60 • Mean Log Word Frequency 3.61 • Word Count 216개.

22. 2010 KCSAT

23. 2009 KCSAT

24. 2008 KCSAT

25. The Number of Words in KCSAT

26. Time to Read the KCSAT& Reading Speed(Test Time: 50 minutes)

27. Time to Read the KCSAT& Reading Speed(Test Time: 50 minutes)

28. A Fluent Reader • Automatic and unconscious recognition of words in the printed text • When 1st graders read a text of 100 words, they had 224 eye fixations. • When the 12th graders read a text of 100 words, they had 96 eye fixations

29. “About Three Fixations per Second” Source: What research has to say about reading instruction (2011: 35)

30. Reading Fluency • “Automatic Word Recognition” & Prosodic Oral Reading” • When people read a text, most words are fixated on, but function words like ‘the’ and ‘of’ are fixated on much less than content words. • 90 fixations per 100 words (Nation, 2009; Grabe, 2009: 289). • A fluent reader reads and fixates almost every word in the text.

31. Reading Fluency • Fluent Nativespeakers • 250-300 words per minute • 3 fixations per second = 180 fixations per minutes • 180 words plus some skipped words (a, the, of, highly frequent words, etc.) means that they read more than 200 words per minute • Non-native speakers • 100 words per minute • What about Korean student readers of English? • Approximately ????? words per minute

32. Reading Fluency • 3-5 fixations / second * 1.2 words = 3.6 - 6 words per second • 6 words per second *60 seconds= 216 - 360 words per minute. • If regressions are considered, it goes to more than about 200 words per second. • 2 fixations / second * 1.2 words = 2.4 words per second • 2.4 words * 60 seconds = 124 words per minute • 1 fixation / second * 1.2 words = 1.2 words per second • 1.2 words * 60 seconds = approximately 60 words

34. School Textbook-based English Reading Instruction and the Amount of Exposure to the Text

35. The amount of reading at schools based on only Textbooks

36. The reading difficulty of Textbooks Goes Up too Fast.

37. Reading Difficulty of 1st Middle School

38. Reading Difficulty of 2nd Year Middle School

39. Reading Difficulty of 3rd Year Middle School

40. Reading Difficulty of 1st Year High School

41. Reading Difficulty of 2nd Year High School

42. Reading Difficulty of 3rd Year High School

43. <표1> Reading Difficulty of 1st Year High School

44. Reading Difficulty of 2nd Year High School

45. Reading Difficulty of 3rd Year High School

46. Reading Difficulty of Major English Newspapers Source: http://www.dillon2.k12.sc.us/teachers/Lexile%20information/Lexiles%20SCASL.ppt#362,4,Newspapers

47. So, they should be fluent • At least more than 100 words per minute • They should read texts in an extensive way. • Then, they can develop their reading fluency and speed as well as accuracy

48. Reading Development by Grade in the US

49. ERIK을 활용한 학생들 읽기 능력 진단 1) 학급당, 학년별 ERIK 테스트 실시 결과 가) 2학년 6반 (N=29명) English Reading Development in a Korean Middle School 2nd Year Middle School, 2nd Semester, (박수진, 2010) ERIK Level(이병민, 2009)

50. 3rd Year Middle School, 2nd Semester, (박수진, 2010)