English is widely used for communication at present not only between English-speaking countries but also between non-English-speaking countries, so it is also called the "World Language" or "International Language".
According to these changes, in the English curriculum revised in 2015, it was defined that 'English is a major means of communication between people with different language backgrounds, and the goals of English education are to promote communication skills in the international society and develop consideration, tolerance, and interpersonal skills based on an understanding diverse cultures'.
In addition, the national curriculum revised in 2015 includes six key competencies required in the future regarding the vision of an educated person. In the English curriculum, these are specified as English communication skills, self-management competency, civic competency, and knowledge-information processing skills.
Therefore, the purpose of this study is to research whether the key competencies and cultural elements were integrated well in the high school English textbooks. In addition, there has been no analysis of textbooks based on the key competencies which were newly suggested in the national curriculum revised in 2015.
In order to achieve this goal, each topic of the texts was analyzed by key competencies of the English curriculum revised in 2015. Next, the background countries and activities of the cultural contents were examined whether they were properly presented for cultural understanding.
In this study, the results were as follows:
First, the analysis of the topics showed that the key competencies were selected relatively evenly, and aesthetic-emotional competency was the most frequently introduced, accounting for 32.7%, followed by 26.5% for civic competency, 21.4% for knowledge-information processing skills, and 19.4% for self-management competency.
Second, the results of the language material analysis. The analysis showed that the highest ratio was 19.4% for general cultural materials, followed by 14.3% for volunteer and cooperative materials, and 13.3% for literature and art.
Third, the analysis of the background countries of the cultural contents showed that the ratio of English countries was 28.4%, followed by European countries at 26.7%. Asian countries were also relatively high at 20.3%, but only 4.7% of Africa and 6.5% of the other regions indicated little coverage in most textbooks.
Fourth, as a result of the analysis of the activities of the cultural contents, all textbooks presented information retrieval activities, and ten of them presented communication activities. However, only six of them included authentic experiential activities. Finally, only five textbooks presented all three kinds of activities.
The English curriculum revised in 2015 enabled to learn more meaningful experiences by adding cultural elements to language materials and integrating them with the language functional areas for an understanding of diverse cultures and aesthetic-emotional competency.
However, the language materials of the national curriculum revised in 2009 were applied without development and a few definitions of the materials were not clear, so some improvements would be needed to them.
Finally, the limitation of this study is that only texts and cultural contents within each unit of the textbooks were analyzed, therefore, other various sections such as listening and speaking were not reflected.
In addition, the link among the other English textbooks which were first reflected the English curriculum revised in 2015 has not known. Therefore, by 2020, when the English curriculum revised in 2015 would be fully implemented, further research on the key competencies and cultural contents of English textbooks would be needed throughout the entire curriculum.