Selection and Grading of Meaning for Education of Korean Adjective Polysemy

Objectives The purpose of this study is to construct educational materials on the meaning of Korean vocabulary through a semantic approach to the polysemy of individual words. Methods For this, we systematically analyzed the meaning of Korean adjective polysemy and attempted to standardize the meaning grade of vocabulary beyond the vocabulary grade. For the analysis vocabulary selection, 375 polysemy with two or more meanings were first extracted as a result of a review of 762 Korean language educational adjectives, and 45 polysemy with a vocabulary grade of 1st were extracted as a secondary list. In addition, based on the criteria for determining the importance of vocabulary by Sang-gyu Seo(2019), 7 words with a frequency of using 1,000 or more mother tongue speakers among the words commonly appearing in the three basic Korean vocabulary lists were exemplified in the selection and grading of educational meaning. Results Three Korean dictionaries and SJ-RIKS corpus were used to analyze the meaning of polysemy, and the meaning grade was finally determined by three experts. Despite being the same 1st level vocabulary, there were intermediate-level meanings among the derived meanings, and there were cases where explicit presentation was not necessary. It was also confirmed that vocabulary meaning education reflecting this was necessary because there were differences in sentence patterns used despite being the same word. Conclusions This paper is meaningful in that it has attempted to systematically analyze and grade the meanings of polysemy that have not yet been discussed in depth in Korean education, away from the perspective of equating vocabulary and meaning grades.