As the number of foreign workers residing in Korea increases, for their learning of Korean the segmentation of textbooks and curriculums is required. However, teaching resources such as regular curriculums are deficient. Because of frequent business t...
As the number of foreign workers residing in Korea increases, for their learning of Korean the segmentation of textbooks and curriculums is required. However, teaching resources such as regular curriculums are deficient. Because of frequent business trips and overtime, businessmen are unable to find sufficient time to sign up for group classes or even private lessons to learn Business Korean. Significant commitment and effort from learners is required to keep up the study. One possible approach to the problem is to take advantage of modern technologies such as mobile devices and the Internet as a way to offset the chronic lack of structured study time affordable for such learners. Unfortunately, an online only curriculum has its own disadvantages! Due to the nature of language teaching, online only approach is limited in its ability to facilitate maximum effectiveness of language learning.
The topic of this research, hence, is to try and take advantage of blended learning of face-to-face classroom teaching and mobile learning. This research worked with business Korean learners and teachers to examine recognition and needs about blended learning and mobile application and to suggest a curriculum design.
First, a random sample of business Korean students were surveyed. After the survey, a Korean textbook that is most commonly used by business Korean learners was selected and learners who have experiences in using the textbook were interviewed about contents of the textbook. Semi-structured interviews for business Korean instructors were conducted and interview results reconstructed learner survey and interview questions. In addition, three mobile applications that were most commonly used by the learners were selected and analyzed. Based on the results of the analysis, a sample implementation of a mobile business application was suggested.
The results obtained through the needs analysis are as follows. First, recognition and needs for business blended learning were found. Both learners and teachers were willing to have face-to-face class primarily and study using mobile devices as a secondary supplement. On the other hand, Korean institutions or firms showed the need for applied blended learning to replace the class itself.
Second, the result of surveys and interviews show that a demand for a mobile application to study Korean is high but there is no application that satisfies the users. Therefore, various mobile applications according to the learners’ needs should be developed.
Third, even though the characteristics of mobile learning encourages an interaction with social network service (SNS), business Korean students do not advocate to use this interaction due to lack of time. Moreover, teachers also consider face-to-face feedback in class more effective.
Fourth, learners prefer an application that has learner-centered function for them to learn by themselves. Shadowing, a priority selection for syntax learning, learning function through lexical repetition and review through quizzes and games were the functions that learners would like to use in the application. Survey result shows that a function for user generated content creation is not needed.
Finally, mobile application should be easy to use and have a simple screen configuration to use. Because the screen is small, simple user interface(UI) was preferred. The mobile application should provide grammar and vocabulary explicitly in their languages.
This research gave an example of implementation based on the result of needs analysis, but it did not reach the actual development. Therefore, I suggest that follow-up research should evaluate the validity and examine the learning effect of a developed mobile application.
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