Look Before You Leap
By Kim Hyun-sook
Having read a great many articles with regard to Korean English education reform since the presidential transition team was launched, one question hasn't escaped my mind: Have policymakers really investigated how our Korean students act and talk in the English class?
When we look into ESL (English as a second language) and EFL (English as a foreign language) classrooms abroad, we can see students from different countries, such as Spain, Germany, Iraq, Japan, China, Korea, Russia and many other nationalities.
They have all different backgrounds and cultures, and they communicate in different ways with various communicative styles.
Generally, students from European countries tend to improve their English much quicker than those from Asian countries. So what factors influence their language progress?
The sociocultural environment can be one of the biggest factors. Our Korean students are perceived as reticent, unwilling and socially deferential while Europeans are conversational (talkative), willing and informal (non-coercive) in the language classroom.
This can mean that culturally acquired patterns of communicating may affect not only how second language students participate in classrooms, but also their second language development.
There are so many approaches and methods in language teaching from the audio-lingual method to task-based language teaching.
Recently, communicative language teaching (CLT) has been widespread in ESL/EFL classrooms with the purpose of promoting meaningful and authentic language use. Consequently, CLT has been infused in Korean English classrooms without any definite object.
However, it is not too much to say that all the approaches and methods have been devised by foreign English educators who have different culture background from us and could overlook the social structure of the host society.
It is the right time to deeply reconsider our English education situation before we take action with several hasty ideas such as the TEE (Teaching English in English), the English Proficiency Test for university entrance exam, recruiting more foreign English teachers, and following another country's English system.
Otherwise, our students who are going to lead our country in the future could sink under the heavy burden of English instead of swimming freely in the vast ocean filled with invaluable resources.
We need to find ways that are culturally compatible and educationally effective for our Korean students. It is critical for English education policymakers to become investigators into how our students act and talk, and to use resulting insights to adapt and adjust our own English classroom talk to match that of our students.
Sometimes, slight adaptations and adjustments can bring great success.
Kim Hyun-sook has studied applied linguistics at Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge. She can be reached at intensivenglish@yahoo.com.