By Alfred Oshin
When I feel a bit nostalgic about my time as a professor in Korea and I want to take a stroll down memory lane, I don't look at the thousands of pictures I took or films I made with my camera.
I use the radio. Nothing brings me more intimately closer to the past than hearing English Korean radio stations. I guess it's the presenters' distinctive and mellifluous American mid-west accent fused with Korean. It's so warm and soulful.
Even simple things like a weather or traffic report take me back to my days in Korea and fill me with a pleasurable pathos, albeit a strange one, mixed with happiness, the type of feeling you have when you remember a lost love or an old, dear friend. As I write this, I shed inner tears. I yearn to be back in Korea. I digress.
Midweek, I tuned in halfway through a program that was about helping children learn English. A professor whose name I cannot remember spoke of a new pedagogic style using popular and current pop music to not only help children acquire English but correct pronunciation. This caused me to think about the main hurdles and stumbling blocks in learning English for Korean students. I concluded that it is not so much pedagogy that has to change, but Korean perceptions stopping students from reaching their considerable potential in speaking English. Let me explain.
What is a native English speaker? A person who was born and brought up in a native English-speaking country I hear you reply. For many Koreans, whatever their education, this is not such a simple question; it has many racial aspects attached to it.
For many Koreans, a native English speaker is a white person from the many English-speaking countries. Even though many Koreans have family in Western nations, visited Western nations and know a lot about them, they still have a homogeneous view of them. It's as if non-white people are fake Westerners. It always fascinated me when my Canadian girlfriend, whose parents are Korean, told people she was Canadian and was often told in turn ``but you look Korean." Unbelievable.
As a black professor, some of my students seemed to have great difficulty accepting that I was British. It seemed to them a contradiction in terms that someone who is black is British. When they got over this, I noticed their learning drastically improved. It seemed to me that perception was the major hindrance in enabling Korean students of any age to learn English.
I was one of the fortunate teachers to have a director who employed professors not according to skin color, but qualification and experience. I've heard first-hand accounts of black teachers and Korean teachers born in English-speaking countries being refused employment because they weren't white. I've equally heard of teachers who were hired quite simply because they were white.
As a white Canadian friend of mine put it, ``There's a lot of love for us here." For many Koreans, a white English teacher equals a good teacher. This even applies to unqualified white teachers. The logic being, if you can call it logic, that a Korean student's close proximity to a white teacher, however unqualified, would improve his or her English.
The educational dream of the government is a polyglot society, where Koreans can speak English just as fluently as Korean. If this is to be realized, and I believe it can be, as many countries are bilingual, the Korean perception of what a native English speaker looks like has to change.
The writer taught English at Honam University in Gwangju. He has a bachelor's degree in ancient history and is currently studying for a master's degree in the same field at King's College, London. He can be reached at alfredoshin@hotmail.co.uk.