• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
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• v.17 no.11
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• pp.242-251
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• 2017

For the purposes of this research, a corpus of words was created from the English textbooks of the "First Middle School" for the gifted in North Korea, and using the corpus, their linguistic characteristics were analyzed. Although there have been many studies that identified the traits of English textbooks in the North Korea's general middle school, not much focus has been placed on the English textbooks used at North Korea's First Middle School. Initially, the structure of English textbooks of the first, second, fourth, and sixth grades that had been procured from the Information Center on North Korea was reviewed, after which their corpus was created. Then, by using Wordsmith Tools 7.0, linguistic properties and high frequency content words appeared in the English textbook of the first grade were analyzed specifically. Basic statistical data gathered indicated that while the number of vocabulary did not increase as students progress through the grades, the words used tended to diversify incrementally. In the mean time, a distribution of the high frequency content words by grade illustrated that a big difference was found between the content words used in the English texts of each grade, and it was a subject matter of the texts that determined such difference.