Best Seller and Korean Language Education
Mun, Young-Jin
Korea Institute for Curriculum and Evaluation
Korean Language Education Research Vol. 17 pp.79-108 (2003)
Abstract
1. Best sellers can be defined as books that sell in very large numbers during a short period of time. They have been often treated as popular literature and their value has generally been underestimated. A growing distance between young generation and canon has brought them relatively close to best sellers. Even before the controversy over the possibility of bringing best sellers to the educational field, they have greatly influenced students and deeply intervened in their making emotional structure. For this reason, it has become the reality that we have to intervene in best sellers from the educational viewpoint, for example, the matters concerning justification, philosophy, and approaches of intervention. 2. The philosophy of the educational intervention into the best sellers can be that we should approach to best sellers as a mediated device which can bring a joy of reading, examining their strong and weak points of reading at the same time. We also need to understand that the contact with best sellers can play a role of mediator which help readers become a mature, critical reader. 3. Therefore, we need to increase the opportunity of inviting best sellers to public discussion such as talking and writing about best sellers. These opportunities should be extended. This is also true of best sellers in the media. Approaching with awareness of the effect of the media, positive or negative, we should help students seek for the meaning of best seller books. 4. Best sellers should also be treated in relation to other texts such as canons by using strength and weakness, associated effect, and narrative analogy etc. 5. We also need to analyze the way of producing best sellers in view of production(writing). In this respect, the cultural studies may be more effective and meaningful than the traditional aesthetic approach.
Keywords
best sellerkorean language educationcultural studieseducational interventionmature reader
