By Kang Shin-who
Staff Reporter
Japanese is the most taught foreign language at high schools in Seoul following English. According to the Seoul Metropolitan Office of Education, Tuesday, about 90 percent, or 278 of the 308 high schools in the city, provide Japanese language courses to students as a second foreign language.
Chinese came next with 189 schools, followed by French with 52 and German with 47. A growing number of high school students are selecting Japanese and Chinese as their second foreign language.
As for Spanish, only four schools are offering the language course and two foreign language high schools are teaching Russian.
However, no schools are running Arabic language classes, which some 300 million people in the world use. Ironically, Arabic was the most selected language by Korean students for the college admission test last year.
With this trend, many German and French teachers have given up teaching their majors and are teaching other subjects such as Korean literature and English.
Accordingly, universities are reducing admission quotas for German, French and other unpopular language departments.
According to the Ministry of Education, Science and Technology, 29,278 high school students out of 99,693m, or 29 percent, adopted Arabic language for the second foreign language test of the Scholastic College Ability Test last year because the Arabic test was easier than other foreign language tests.