Existing KSL(Korean as a Second Language) education has focused heavily on Basic Interpersonal Communicative Skills(BICS), failing to sufficiently support Cognitive Academic Language Proficiency(CALP) necessary for academic adaptation. Due to this, ne...
Existing KSL(Korean as a Second Language) education has focused heavily on Basic Interpersonal Communicative Skills(BICS), failing to sufficiently support Cognitive Academic Language Proficiency(CALP) necessary for academic adaptation. Due to this, newly arrived immigrant students face significant barriers in understanding academic vocabulary and advanced academic questions during subject classes, making it difficult for them to adapt to the curriculum. This study aims to address this issue by developing and proposing a modular KSL education plan that enhances CALP, essential for academic adaptation. To this end, the study compares and analyzes the KSL curriculum and the general subject curriculum, presenting specific methods for modular lesson design, thereby enabling newly arrived immigrant students to understand subject content step-by-step according to their proficiency level.
Chapter 1 addresses the issue of academic maladaptation among newly arrived immigrant students and explains the necessity and direction of customized modular lesson design to solve this problem.
Chapter 2 emphasizes the importance of CALP for academic adaptation and explains the linguistic challenges faced by newly arrived immigrant students, such as a lack of basic vocabulary, difficulty understanding academic questions, and interference from their native language. It also confirms that while the KSL curriculum focuses on BICS, the Korean language curriculum aims to cultivate critical thinking and advanced language skills, indicating a lack of support for academic learning needs.
Chapter 3 analyzes existing KSL textbooks and Korean language textbooks, revealing that while KSL textbooks primarily consist of content centered on basic communication and school life, they lack the academic language elements necessary for subject learning, such as advanced vocabulary and reasoning activities. This suggests the need for the development of subject-centered learning materials.
Chapter 4 presents a detailed proposal for the design of a modular KSL education plan, consisting of core modules and elective modules based on the learner's level and learning goals, allowing students to selectively learn necessary content. The modules are further divided according to the four language skills—listening, reading, writing, and speaking—and include supplementary and advanced learning stages according to the learner's level of comprehension. This modular lesson design allows students to gradually improve their CALP, while providing teachers with a systematic guide for lesson preparation and implementation.
This study holds significance in that it supplements the limitations of existing KSL education, which has been focused on everyday communication, by empirically presenting a customized learning program that includes the academic language proficiency necessary for subject adaptation. Through this, teachers can effectively utilize lesson structures and learning materials tailored to students' learning stages, opening the possibility of customized education for newly arrived immigrant students struggling with subject adaptation. However, experimental research to verify the effectiveness of modular KSL education in actual classroom settings is lacking, and the study was limited to first-year middle school students, highlighting the need for comparative studies targeting various grade levels. Future follow-up studies should expand the development of modular programs linked to elementary and high school students and different subjects, ultimately completing a systematic educational approach to support the academic achievement and curriculum adaptation of newly arrived immigrant students.