More Teachers Instruct Other Subjects
By Kang Shin-who
Staff Reporter
Nearly 1,500 German and French teachers have given up teaching their majors as a growing number of high school students select Japanese and Chinese as the second foreign language.
As a result, most of them have been retrained for a year to teach other subjects such as Korean literature, English, Japanese, or Chinese.
According to the Statistical Yearbook of Education, high schools nationwide have seen a decrease in the number of German teachers from 1,180 in 2000 to 276 in 2006 and French teachers from 726 to 225 during the same period.
On the contrary, they have seen a sharp increase in the number of Japanese and Chinese teachers from 1,678 to 2,638 and from 326 to 879, respectively.
Universities that produce German and French teachers are voicing concerns on the trend, urging that the Ministry of Education and Human Resources Development should balance curricula of second foreign language.
``Actually it was wrong that second language curricula focused on German and French in the past as well. As the demands for the languages have decreased rapidly, our graduates cannot teach their majors. It is very regretful that the students I have taught are teaching other languages,'' said Kim Jung-yong, professor at the department of German language education at Seoul National University.
``We need to remember European countries play important roles for Korea's development and their languages are essential for good relations with them,'' he added.
Also, European embassies in Korea including Germany and French embassies are promoting their language in the wake of the trend in cooperation with Korea Institute of Curriculum & Evaluation.
``I hope that Koreans know that German is one of the most important languages in Europe. It is the native language for more than 100 million people. More than 16.7 million people worldwide learn German, half of them live in Europe,'' said Grau-Gunther, deputy director of Goethe-Institute Korea.
However, the ministry has been sticking to a policy that education should follow the demands of students since 2003.
``As many European countries can speak English well, we don't need to put effort into learning their languages. It is more beneficial for us to learn languages of our neighboring countries nowadays,'' Kim Kwang-ho, a ministry official, said.
Also, Kim pointed out that teacher-training universities are resisting against the educational trend today. ``As they have still more professors who majored in German and French, universities cannot easily reduce the admission quota on the departments. To solve these problems, the schools need to nurture teachers who can teach more than two foreign languages,'' Kim said.