The English education policy of Korea has focused on cultivating communicative competence in Korean students. Especially the 6th national curriculum adopted a notional-functional syllabus instead of a grammatical-structural syllabus. The syllabus design of the 7th curriculum is different from that of the 6th curriculum in that the 6th curriculum adopted just one syllabus design-the Notional-Functional syllabus, but the 7th curriculum includes various syllabus types. The present study has two purposes. The first purpose is to historically survey syllabus design development in Korea : grammatical-structural syllabus(the 1st-5th curriculum), notional-functional syllabus(the 6th curriculum) and a new syllabus model(the 7th curriculum). The second purpose is to analyze the syllabus design of the 7th national curriculum according to the following criteria : a) communicative functional categories, b) sample sentences. The data was collected by analyzing the 7th grade English textbooks adopted on the basis of the 7th national curriculum.