Abstract

In the foreign language education, learners are an important part of education, however in the Korean language education, the study of learners was insufficient compared to the contents of education, teaching methods and textbooks. Therefore, it is meaningful to analyze how learner research, especially learning strategy research, has been conducted and derive areas that need research for better education. In this study, co-word analysis was conducted on the titles of academic journals and dissertations in order to analyze the learning strategy research in Korean language education. I found it is about “reading” that the most studies related to Korean language learners’ learning strategies were conducted and those studies’ subjects mostly were ‘Chinese international students’ and ‘marriage-immigrants’. In addition, the results of the subgroup analysis on the research topic show four major subgroups: a group related to ‘reading for academic purposes’, a group related to ‘request, rejection, conversation, etc.’, a group related to ‘writing’, and a group related to ‘vocabulary, listening’. This shows that the researchers’ major interests in studying Korean learner’s strategies are “reading” and “speaking” and their studies have been concentrated in the specific areas. Therefore, it is necessary for researchers to study various functions and subjects in Korean language learner’s learning strategies.