Changes in English Language Teaching (ELT) Textbook Syllabuses in Korea Since 1994

The textbook used in a foreign language course has a profound influence over what material is taught, when it is taught and how it is taught. It provides a structure and a syllabus for the program and may also help train inexperienced teachers. The syllabus of a textbook affects the content, the layout and the order of the materials in the textbook. The author looked at the evolution of university level English conversation textbook syllabuses over the last 30 years to see if there are trends that may relate to what was going on in Korea at that time. He did this by evaluating the syllabuses in sixteen English conversation textbooks he had collected over his time teaching in Korea. In the early 1990s, fueled by globalization, the Asian Games in Seoul and the Seoul Olympics, "English Fever" began to take hold of Korea, affecting Koreans' perception of English, government policy, and the way English was being taught. The perception was that English teaching was failing in Korea, in large part due to the use of the grammar/translation method of teaching and a new emphasis was put on obtaining communicative competence. The author found some patterns. Notably, that the structural syllabus, although it did not increase in popularity, moved from being a primarily grammar based syllabus to having significant lexical input, probably because of the increase in corpus research enabled by the increasing computer power at the time. He also noted that the skill-based syllabus was used in almost all textbooks and became the dominant syllabus. Finally, he found that the syllabuses, since 2008, have converged, so that syllabuses from different publishers and different years were similar. This raises a concern that stakeholders may be getting complacent about examining the textbooks they have available and about the limitation of textbook choice among teachers.