By Jason Lim
In magnitude and complexity, the English immersion plan put forward by President Lee Myung Bak rivals his plan for building the ``Grand Canal." In a sense, they both seek to fundamentally remake and rejuvenate the hardware and software infrastructure of Korea.
But while the canal project will be a huge civil engineering undertaking, the English immersion plan represents a massive human engineering challenge since it will have to involve the cooperation and effort of the students, teachers, school administrators, curriculum designers, government officials, and private sector industries. In fact, everyone will have to be involved.
Unfortunately, however, ``everyone" doesn't seem to include the native English teachers who are teaching (or have taught) in Korea. Their voices have not been sought or reflected in the public debate so far. Since they are the professionals actually on the front lines interacting with students and fellow Korean teachers everyday, failure to take their experiences and insight into account would almost guarantee the plan's failure, especially in light of the need to recruit many more of them in the near future.
Therefore, I created a simple online survey tool to ask the native English teachers what they thought about Lee's proposed English immersion plan. The response was incredible ― close to 600 of them responded.
Although online surveys are not probability samples and cannot be scientifically considered statistically representative of the target population, 600 does represent a significant number of respondents in sheer raw numbers.
For now, these survey results are probably the best reflection of native English teachers' collective voice, especially since I know of no other effort ― official or otherwise ― to gather the opinions of the native English teachers.
Since it's impossible to do justice to the results of the survey in an 800-word column, I am going to divide it into three parts. The first part will discuss the demographics of the respondents ― basically, who the native English teachers are in Korea. The second part will discuss the various aspects of their experience in Korea teaching English, including self-evaluation of their teaching effectiveness. Third part will present policy recommendations that MB's government could take into account, collected and condensed from the many serious and thought-provoking comments that the respondents left behind - this will be the most important part of this whole process.
As a group, the native English teachers in Korea are fairly young, with 46.8 percent between the ages of 25-34 and 29.4 percent between 35-44 years old. They are mostly male, who make up 74.7 percent of the respondents. They are also largely white, making up 63.6 percent of the respondents, while ethnic Koreans were the second largest ethnic group at 21.5 percent. An overwhelming majority of 84.6 percent currently lives in Korea, and 72.8 percent of them still teach English in Korea.
They are a highly educated group, with 57.4 percent holding a bachelor's degree and 36.3 percent holding a Master's degree or higher.
In terms of time lived in Korea, we see an interesting double-peak configuration with a valley in the middle: 33 percent have lived for two years or less while 42 percent have lived for longer than five years.
As for time spent in Korea teaching English, we see a more even distribution across the board: one-two years spent teaching English in Korea at 21.9 percent was the highest, followed closely by 20 percent at one year or less. At the same time, more than 45 percent overall have spent three years or more teaching English in Korea, with 31.3 percent for more than five years.
As for their teaching positions, the private sector (Hagwon's and others) came in the highest at 40.2 percent, with the public sector (schools and other government run institutes) coming in at 26.3 percent. About 24 percent of the teachers have teaching experience in both public and private institutions.
In terms of where they teach, Seoul was highest at 47.3 percent, followed by Gyeonggi Province at 26.6 percent. The rest were scattered pretty evenly across the various cities and provinces in Korea, with Busan coming in at a high of 6.9 percent as far as non-Seoul cities go.
What does this set of information tell us about who the native English teachers are in Korea? It seems that, contrary to popular belief, a surprisingly large percentage of native English teachers are committed to teaching English in Korea for the long run for one reason or another. As a group, they are not the fly-by-night transient population. They have a financial, cultural, and personal stake in Korea. As such, they have a lot of experience teaching English to Korean students and also have a big stake in how this English education debate turns out.
Now that we know who they are, my next column will present what their teaching experiences have been like, including their opinion on the management and leadership of their Korean managers, their own teaching effectiveness, and what they think about Lee's proposed English Immersion plan. Stay tuned.
Jason Lim is a research fellow at the Harvard Korea Institute, researching Asian leadership models. He can be reached at jasonlim@post.harvard.edu.