The bottom line on foreign English teachers

By Cashel Rosier

The recent decision in Gyeonggi Province to drastically scale back its number of foreign English teachers must be troubling to any observer who has looked on excitedly at the rapid growth of Korea’s image abroad.

Indeed, Korea’s recent successes are stunning. The G20 being hosted in Seoul and the 2018 Winter Olympics in PyeongChang come immediately to mind, and the future is only getting brighter. Korea now has many influential voices on the global stage, and whether it is Ban Ki-moon or Kim Yu-na, these voices speak in fluent, confident and elegant English.

This is why the elimination of foreign teachers due to budget cuts is a costly decision that could potentially halt the momentum the nation has moving forward. Korea’s push to become more competitive in the cultural arena is still in its incipiency; hansik and K-pop are gaining ground abroad but have nowhere near come close to reaching their full potential.

In campaigning for the credibility of Korean culture abroad, perhaps no better salespeople exist than foreign teachers. Of a group of 800 foreigners in Korea (about the number that could be lost in Gyeonggi Province), a significant number will recommend a Korean restaurant to their friends in New York, another group will send a 2NE1 CD to their younger sisters in London, and others will tell their parents in Sydney to tune in when Kim Yu-na is competing.

Some may even take the plunge into learning Korean. It is puzzling to see Korea treat these foreign teachers as merely expenses and not as investments that will continue to pay dividends down the road.

Since Korean English teachers’ skills have continued to improve, the argument has been made that foreign teachers are becoming irrelevant and expendable. Certainly, Korean English teachers are extremely qualified and gifted. I would argue that in many situations a Korean English teacher is better suited to helping students learn than is a foreign English teacher.

But this is not to say that foreigners do not have a role to play. Learning a foreign language implies a certain willingness to engage with outsiders. For many Koreans (both students and teachers), their first experience with outsiders comes from meeting foreign English teachers in their public schools. It is a wasted effort for a country to learn English to communicate with itself (especially when it has such a vibrant language as does Korea).

There needs to be a constant avenue of communication open to outsiders to reinforce the effort undertaken to learn a foreign language in the first place. I like to joke with my students, ``There is no test in my class ― I am the test!” For Koreans to gain confidence speaking in the new global community, there is no better rubric and stepping stone than their foreign teachers at school.

Another of the main arguments for eliminating foreign teachers is that they are inefficient. But this argument quickly loses validity when we ask a simple question: inefficient for ``whom?” For the 700 students of an average public school who have weekly conversation classes, with opportunities to join both extra after-school classes and lunchtime English debate clubs?

Is it inefficient for the thousands of cash-strapped parents who do not have to feel obligated to send their children to expensive private academies because they are confident that their public schools are providing superior education at a fraction of the cost? If this is still not enough to convince policy makers of the value of foreign teachers in public schools, then the argument needs to shift towards finding better ways of utilizing these teachers. I’m sure students, parents and educators wish to see the current system improved, not eliminated.

Finally, I believe policy makers need to see the ubiquity of foreign teachers in public schools is something that sets Korea apart from other nations and gives it a major competitive advantage in the 21st century. While I understand budgets are tight, it would not be wise for other provinces in Korea to follow Gyeonggi’s example and take a simple, bottom-line view of the value of their foreign teachers.

The writer is a public high school teacher in South Gyeongsang Province and has been living in Korea since October 2010. Her recent life goals include becoming Korea’s first foreign soju sommelier. She can be contacted at cashel.rosier@gmail.com.