Current Status and Challenges of Korean Synonym Education Research for Foreigners

The purpose of this study is to collect and analyze all academic papers and dissertations from 2000, when research on Korean synonym education as a foreign language first began, to examine the research trend of synonym education and to explore the direction of future research. As a result of analyzing the quantitative changes of the thesis by period, the initial 10 years in which only one or two papers were published or the hiatus was repeated could be divided into the first period, and after 2010, when the quantitative increase was somewhat irregular but without gaps, it was possible to divide into the second period. As a result of qualitative analysis on the three aspects of research subject, scope, research topic, and research method, it was confirmed that research on the emotional adjective semantic group was relatively active, and the main research topic was the selection of educational vocabulary lists and the establishment of discriminatory semantic information rather than educational status or teaching methods. Regardless of the type and purpose of the paper, it was confirmed that the research was conducted leaning on the description of meaning in the dictionary, usage, and corpus analysis of the native speaker. This shows that vocabulary meaning as well as syntactic and conversational information for practical use are necessary to distinguish synonyms. However, when selecting educational content, the vocabulary list and the meaning list of vocabulary must be distinguished, and the meaning list of vocabulary should not uncritically accept the dictionary's meaning skills. Meaningful, syntactic, and pragmatic information for semantic discrimination should also be hierarchical in consideration of the learner's proficiency.