Children’s English Novels Lexically Appropriate for Korean Elementary School Students: A Corpus-Based Study

Sung, Min-Chang; Kim, EunHyoung; Kim, Kitaek

doi:10.30961/lr.2023.59.1.43

Lang. Res. 59(1):43-68

pISSN: 0254-4474, eISSN: 2586-7113

DOI: https://doi.org/10.30961/lr.2023.59.1.43

Article

초등영어 어휘 수준에 적합한 영어 아동문학 작품 탐색: 코퍼스 기반 연구

성민창¹, 김은형²^,^†, 김기택²^,^†

Children’s English Novels Lexically Appropriate for Korean Elementary School Students: A Corpus-Based Study

Min-Chang Sung¹, EunHyoung Kim²^,^†, Kitaek Kim²^,^†

Author Information & Copyright ▼

¹경인교육대학교

²서울대학교

¹Gyeongin National University of Education

²Seoul National University

^†Corresponding Author: 부교수 사범대학 영어교육과 서울대학교 08826 서울시 관악구 관악로 1 E-mail: kitaek@snu.ac.kr

ⓒ Copyright 2023 Language Education Institute, Seoul National University. This is an Open-Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Received: Mar 02, 2023 ; Revised: Apr 19, 2023 ; Accepted: Apr 20, 2023

Published Online: Apr 30, 2023

ABSTRACT

This study aimed to determine the number of word types that Korean elementary school students should know in order to comprehend English- language novels for children. We selected 14 novels that are educationally appropriate for Korean elementary school students and analyzed the word types and tokens in a corpus of the novels. The study assumed that the students knew the 800 elementary-level basic word types in the Korean national curriculum and other comprehensible word types (e.g., loanwords, proper nouns, numbers). We then analyzed the number of word tokens that would be comprehensible to the students. The results showed that 2,613, 3,211, and 4,729 word types covered 90%, 95%, and 98% of the total token frequency, respectively. Of these, 151, 749, and 2,267 word types were found to be incomprehensible to the target students. Based on these results, we discuss suitable lexical sizes for comprehending children’s English novels and the role of teachers in supporting their students while reading these novels.

Keywords: English-language novels for children; comprehensible input; elementary English education; token and type frequency; the 2015 revised Korean national curriculum of English

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