Abstract:

This study is intended to investigate the relations among three school subjects using three groups of students attending elementary, middle, and high schools. In Korean educational setting, up to college entrance exam, Korean, English and math are considered as the major school subjects. Since in Korea, most students’ energies are geared for entering prestigious university, the scores of these major courses are highly valued in college entrance exam.
This study is related to transfer issue. In the second language acquisition literature, the effect of 1st language competency affects the L2 competency. Literature on transfer of L1 effect on L2 was done mostly using correlation method. Regarding the influence of the L1 on L2 in reading, two sources of difficulties were identified (Alderson, 1984): One is L1 reading ability and the other L2 linguistic proficiency. L1 reading ability transfers to L2 reading, and the threshold of L2 linguistic proficiency is necessary before L1 reading ability transfer to L2 reading. If that is true, high level L2 readers transfer their L1 reading ability more successfully to L2 than lower level readers. Many studies investigated this using the same age groups. Researchers using quantitative research methods utilized test scores to investigate both threshold effect and interdependency hypothesis. This study is designed to investigate how the plausible transfer effect was shown at each grade level (elementary, middle school, and high school) by investigating Korean, English and math scores patterns.
Participants were from the Seoul Educational Longitudinal study of 2010 (SELS2010). The test score of three different groups of students who participated in the SELS2010 were used to explore the possibility of the transfer of L1 language ability to L2 comprehension and other less language dependent subjects, math. To understand the relationship between L1 and L2, two types of analysis were conducted: first, cross-lagged path model was used to understand the effects of the L1 scores of the 1st year on the L2 in the 2nd year, and L2 score of the first year on the L2 in the second year, and in the second model, factors associated with L1 and L2 in year2 scores including math scores were incorporated in the full path model to understand the effect of private tutoring, after school programs and L2 independent study time on L2 scores.
Preliminary analysis shows, as expected, that the correlation between Korean and English was higher than that of Korean and math or that of math and English at the elementary school level. However the pattern changed from middle school on, i.e., the correlation between English and math became higher than that of Korean and English. This study will investigate the relation using path model.

Keywords:

Korean, English, math, private education, independent study time, cross-lagged model.