An analysis of study trends on Korean tense

Objectives The purpose of this study was to analyze the trends of the studies on tense in the education field of Korean language and to examine the results of the studies. On the basis of these analyses, future research subjects were presented. Methods The number of papers of the subject of analysis is totally 172 papers, including 111 graduate theses and 61 articles of academic journal. The research trends were analyzed by means of research times, research themes, research methods, and research contents and then according to lower standard of analysis, these papers were classified. By making the use of analysis methods such as summary of content, frequency analysis, and data statistics, the trends of studies were analyized. Results As a result, for over 30 years the researches on tense have been steadily ongoing in the education field in Korean language and quantitative growth of this field has been achieved. Studies on the educational plan of tense expressions and on tense expression acquisition have been main subjects in this period. Research methods have been unequally biased in literature research and survey research ones. The most studies are especially related to the past tense in Korean language and tense expressions realizing at the end of sentences. Conclusions By analyzing these research trends, several tasks of future research were proposed. First, themes of tense research need to be diversified. In addition, studies observing the present tense and the future tense are necessary and studies on complex sentence tense are also urgently required.