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The Korean Association for the Study of English Language and Linguistics
[ Article ]
Korea Journal of English Language and Linguistics - Vol. 26, No. 0, pp.546-563
ISSN: 1598-1398 (Print) 2586-7474 (Online)
Print publication date 30 Apr 2026
Received 09 Dec 2025 Revised 23 Mar 2026 Accepted 12 Apr 2026
DOI: https://doi.org/10.15738/kjell.26..202604.546

영어교과서 코퍼스 분석 기반 2022 개정 영어과 교육과정 기본 어휘의 학년별 수준 구분

Seoyong Choi ; Kitaek Kim ; Sun-Young Oh ; Min-Chang Sung
(First author) Doctoral Student, Department of English Language Education Seoul National University solideogloria0614@snu.ac.kr
(Corresponding author) Professor, Department of English Language Education & Learning Sciences Research Institute Seoul National University 1 Gwanak-ro, Gwanak-gu, Seoul 08826, Seoul, Korea, Tel: +82-2-880-7680 kitaek@snu.ac.kr
Professor, Department of English Language Education & Learning Sciences Research Institute Seoul National University sunoh@snu.ac.kr
Associate Professor, Department of English Education Gyeongin National University of Education mcsung@ginue.ac.kr
Grade-level classification of the basic vocabulary in the 2022 revised English curriculum: A corpus-based analysis of English textbooks


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This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons License, which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

This study aimed to classify the basic vocabulary list specified in South Korea’s 2022 revised English curriculum into detailed grade levels through a corpus-based analysis of English textbooks used nationwide. To this end, three key criteria—range, type frequency, and token frequency—were established and comprehensively applied to determine the grade levels of 2,879 lexical items. By integrating multiple corpus-based measures, this study proposes a systematic approach to assigning vocabulary items to grade levels within a national curriculum. The results indicate that these three measures can serve as useful indicators for English vocabulary profiling. The analysis yielded 98 words for Grade 3, 83 for Grade 4, 196 for Grade 5, 157 for Grade 6, 390 for the first year of middle school, 357 for the second year, 344 for the third year, 514 for the first year of high school, and 740 for the second year and above. Based on these findings, the study discusses pedagogical implications for establishing grade-appropriate vocabulary benchmarks and for informing principled vocabulary selection in English textbook development.

Keywords:

2022 revised national curriculum of English, basic vocabulary list, English Vocabulary Profile, corpus analysis

Acknowledgments

This work was supported by the Learning Sciences Research Institute at Seoul National University (0767-20250011).

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