ScholarWorks@숙명여자대학교

초록

This study seeks to enhance university students' self-efficacy and address the issues of elective second foreign language courses by designing a class that moves away from a competitive atmosphere and focuses on collaborative communicative tasks related to the target language's culture. The study compared self-efficacy and academic achievement between two classes of a "German 1" elective course, one following a theme-based approach and the other a textbook-based approach, through quantitative and qualitative data analysis. The results indicated that the theme-based class showed statistically significant improvement in the self-efficacy domain of confidence and academic achievement. This improvement is attributed to engaging communicative tasks related to interesting themes in the expansion stage, which provided students with a sense of accomplishment, motivation, and active participation through cooperative learning. This resulted in meaningful learning by practically applying the language knowledge. In contrast, students in the textbook-based class reported increased memorization burden as the difficulty level rose after the midterm exam. In conclusion, theme-based second foreign language classes offer meaningful learning experiences by using the target language within a context, which positively impacts self-efficacy and academic achievement. This study provides empirical data that can support the verification of the effectiveness of theme-based instruction integrating cultural contexts in various language courses and contribute to the development of learner-centered teaching methods.

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