'Fluency over Correctness' is the agenda of th Foreign(English,) Language Education under the Sixth Educational Program by the Ministry of Education. It also emphasizes comprehension over production. This means the goal of English education which had ...
'Fluency over Correctness' is the agenda of th Foreign(English,) Language Education under the Sixth Educational Program by the Ministry of Education. It also emphasizes comprehension over production. This means the goal of English education which had relied heavily upon translation and grammar for last 50 years and whose objective is to equip linguistic competence, not communicative competence. That is to say, communication becomes the most important goal of English education.
English Education under the new educational program is based on Krashen's Natural Approach. It proposes that the second language should be acquired in the same way as children learn their mother tongue. Thus, according to Krashen (1983) the following is the most ideal and proper comprehensible input :
1. It should be comprehensible.
2. It should be relevant and meaningful to the acquirer.
3. It should be provided in sufficient quantity.
The purpose of the thesis is to propose a model for the problems in the listening part of the English Test in the SAT( Scholarly Aptitude Test) in Korea. The English Test in the SAT sets up its major objectives as follows :
First, it should include questions measuring a student's comprehensive understanding of English. Secondly, it should emphasize fluency rather than correctness in using English and measure whether a student can comprehend a whole passage rather than fragmentary details. Thirdly, it should have various types of questions which can measure a student's comprehensive ability in English, including four skills of language.
The actual questions in the English Test in the SAT, however fall short of its theoretical objectives. Above all, it focuses on questioning the rough idea of the passage and neglects the structural understanding of English. It leads students to solve some questions by mere guessing, not by full understanding.
Thus, by the analysis of listening problems from the year of 1994 to 1998, we try to find a couple of problems in the SAT in terms of the style as well as the subject and to make a proposal for improvement First of all, there are some problems about the subject.
First, questions do not consider cultural differences between the Orient and the West. Second, similar subjects keep selected such as time, place, and so on.
We also have problems in the style of script. First, there are too many key words which can give students crucial clues too easily. Second, the answer can be found just by listening the first sentence or the last sentence. Third, questions asking the atmosphere of the contents can be too easily detected. In other words, students tend to learn the techniques with which they can infer the right answer without fully understanding the contents, the questions ignoring comprehensive study of English.
Thus, to meet its original goal, the English Test in the SAT must include such types of questions as can measure the students' comprehension ability based on fluency,
The improvement of the listening part of the English Test in the SAT can be made with the material related to the culture of the high school students, and the questions which can be answered only by understanding the general meaning of the contexts.
Thus, I suggest that the problems proper to and familiar with the high school students of Korea should be studied and chosen in the test. There are some of the topics which I propose to meet the criteria :
1. A dialogue between students and the clerk of the fast food store.
2. A description of pop music and movie.
3. A dialogue between friends about their future.
4. A plan of the weekend and school life.
The thesis is organized in this way. In chapters 2 we introduce the theoretical background of listening to foreign language. The agenda of the foreign language education of the 6th Education Program under Krashen's Natural approach is discussed in chapter 3. After examining the problems of the English tests in the SAT from 1994 to 1998, we make proposals for the improvement of the test in chapter 5. We conclude the thesis with the summary in the chapter 6.