This study aims to enable marriage immigration women to self-examine, become emotionally stable, and pursue internalization through Korean language education using essay text reading. The need for an educational program that helps them find their iden...
This study aims to enable marriage immigration women to self-examine, become emotionally stable, and pursue internalization through Korean language education using essay text reading. The need for an educational program that helps them find their identity, achieve self-realization, and raise their voices beyond mere communication triggered this study. To accomplish this goal, teaching materials used by local organizations and support centers for multi-cultural families where marriage immigration women commonly learn Korean language were examined mainly as ‘reading’ aids. It takes intermediate level and above learners to carry on with connected activities after reading an essay text. Since the majority of participants examined in this study were intermediate level learners, the coinciding intermediate level teaching materials were analyzed. Most teaching materials used by teaching centers were found to lack literature text including essay. On the other hand, teaching materials commonly used by university-affiliated Korean language centers were found to include numerous literature texts but favored works of certain writers thereby lacking variety. When Korean learners are exposed to various authors as well as diverse literatures, their learning will be enhanced in understanding language and culture. Especially many things they experience in Korea after leaving their home country, such as marriage, giving birth, and raising their kids have something in common with the characteristics of essay, a type of literature which normally is based on one’s memoirs and plagued with pursuing enlightenment. As such, this study suggests teaching-learning method based on ‘reading’ of the essay text written by the author of this thesis while pursuing internalization through appreciation of the essay. Among the marriage immigrant women, those who resided in Korea for an average of ten years and verified as intermediate level learner based on public resource were selected for this study. Specifically, a total of five marriage immigrant women participated on this study, three participants holding TOPIK level 3 to 5, one participant capable of reading fairy tale book to her children, and one participant teaching after school English at elementary school and kinder garden. Since all participating learners were employed but also had to do their housework, they were under time and place constraints in taking a lesson for this study. As such, individual teaching was selected over gathered learning considering conditions and circumstances of each participating individual. Through individual teaching, deeper teaching-learning experience was possible which solidified internalization of the participating learners. In Chapter 2, the significance and necessity of literature-based learning were explored. In addition, the efficacy of Korean language education using essay text was analyzed in detail. Based on this, the effectiveness of essay text-based learning was validated when applied to the marriage immigrant women. Various reading pedagogies using essay text were presented in Chapter 3. First, the detailed contents of reading based on proficiency level were inquired referencing to the “Applied Research for the International Standard Curriculum of Korean Language”, a study conducted by the National Institute of Korean Language. Different teaching contents coinciding with different stages in reading were then explored. Specifically, approaches to maximize efficiency of reading were analyzed based on activities coinciding with different stages of reading ? prior to reading, during reading, and after reading. The fundamental goal of reading is to understand the text contents. Content understanding will be enhanced when different reading strategies were applied at each stage of reading the text. In Chapter 4, specific teaching-learning method and pedagogies using essay text were suggested. Since the essay text used in this study is dominantly a creation text, the efficiency of creation text-based learning was analyzed. Original essay text containing numerous advanced-level vocabularies and rhetoric was adapted to intermediate level text. Adapted text contents were presented with the original contents so that contents before and after changes can be compared. The overall research outcomes were presented in Chapter 5 along with the results of participating learners’ self-assessment using questionnaire. This study verified that essay text-based Korean language reading education enhanced self-examination of marriage immigrant women while supporting their internalization which adds to the significance of this study.