4차 산업혁명이 한국인 영어 학습자의 기본적 의사소통능력 발달에 미치는 영향에 관한 비판적 검토

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to theoretically evaluate the impact of the Fourth Industrial Revolution (e.g., machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL)) on English education in South Korea. Few studies have investigated to what extent ML/DL technologies have instructional potential for Korean English learners’ development of English proficiency. To this end, this study deals with the four research issues by extensively reviewing previous literature on computer science and SLA theories. First, this study introduces several well-known concepts and architectures of ML/DL for the following discussions. Second, the study critically examines the opinions of those who claim that recent progress in machine translation can dramatically reduce the need for foreign language learning. Third, this study highlights the significance of basic communicative competence in English learning contexts in South Korea, which―as specified by the components and principles of construction grammar―enables Korean English learners to generate sentence-level utterances without resorting to memorized formulaic expressions. Finally, this study presents three types of English learning applications built upon ML/DL techniques whose validities are evaluated from a perspective of basic communicative competence. As a final remark, this study suggests that ML/DL techniques guided by the principles and components of construction grammar should be applied to Korean English learning contexts as a way to develop their basic communicative competence in English.