’Communication skills key to globalization’

Prof. Joe Dewberry, director of the International Center at KAIST’s Business School, speaks about Korea’s education zeal during an interview with The Korea Times at the school in Seoul on Aug. 5. / Korea Times

By Yun Suh-young

The level of English proficiency among Korean students has improved greatly over the years, but their communication skills are still not good enough to compete on the global stage, according to an American professor who has taught at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) for the past 11 years.

“In the late ’80s and early ’90s, there were concerns in Korea that if you learned another language when you were really young, it would interfere with properly learning to speak Korean and learning Korean culture,” said Joe Dewberry, director of the International Center at KAIST’s Business School.

“But the financial crisis in 1997 was a turning point. People were open to becoming global and were much more willing to let their kids learn languages when they were young.”

But in order to become a proficient English speaker, much more than “willingness” is required. One has to become a good “communicator” rather than a good listener, the professor said.

“Communication is like playing tennis. You learn it by playing,” he said. “With English, you don’t learn it by just listening.”

Dewberry has lived in Korea for the past 30 years, most of that time as an educator.

His connection with Korea was serendipity in disguise. He landed in Korea as a Peace Corps volunteer, but Korea was not his first choice. His somehow accidental relationship with Korea turned into a necessity. He felt his value was much more appreciated in Korea than it was back in the United States.

“My work here was always more meaningful,” he said. “I see the desire to learn, especially to learn a language, here is higher than people trying to hone the same skills in the U.S.”

Interestingly, Dewberry teaches a course on newspaper reading and discussion, which is a required course at KAIST. For a Business school, such emphasis on media research seems rather odd.

“Being able to communicate has much more to do with global communication than just business. You don’t want people to only discuss a narrow range of topics. Being able to discuss globally means you can discuss a broad range of topics. If students only talk about business, their language skills won’t take them very far,” Dewberry said.

He says more students need to speak up and engage in discussions even in Korean classes, not just in an English discussion class.

“What I found here was that there were Korean professors who got the impression that students weren’t able to do that,” he said.

Students have two personalities, according to the professor. One is passive, which is required to function well in a lecture class, with students reluctant to speak. The other is animated, which is displayed in a newspaper reading and discussion class or a case studies class where they engage in lively discussions.

“With me, they are open, critical and show very good thinking skills in terms of analyzing, but that doesn’t transfer when they go to other classrooms. I want them to take those critical skills - speaking, questioning and participating - and transfer those outside of my class into more of the real world environment. That’s my biggest desire,” he said.

One way to encourage students to speak up is to create an encouraging environment for discussion, a strategy that he suggests to other teachers.

“If you set up a classroom where everybody’s involved in communication in a noisy setting, not speaking would be considered strange. Students will think sitting back quietly is unusual and engage lively in discussions. But if you’re focusing on one student at a time, that student is going to be nervous and everyone else will be looking at him and be nervous too,” Dewberry said.

If there’s one drastic change in English education here from 15 years ago, it’s the willingness of parents to allow their children to learn English.

More and more people are becoming bilingual these days but still much more needs to be done if Korea wants to become truly global, says a professor who has been teaching in Korea for longer than his students have been alive.

“I was in KAIST for the past 11 years and the language level of the people coming to KAIST has gone up exponentially so that now most of the students are intermediate, high or advanced,” said Dewberry. “This is a big change from the past when most people were at the novice or intermediate level because the focus on language was much weaker at that time.”

KAIST is having many of its programs converted to English. Its finance programs and information media MBA programs are all taught in English. Other programs are slowly shifting to English, and the language is becoming an important part of school life for both students and faculty.

KAIST ranked 99th in the Global 100 MBAs survey conducted by the Financial Times this year, and came in 7th among Asian schools. But there’s still much more to do for the school to better compete globally, he said.

“A big step would be to convert our program completely into English. Right now it’s at 70 percent, I think. If schools in Korea want to globalize, the essential infrastructure is language,” Dewberry said.

“You can’t invite international students and scholars to the school if no one in the school is ready to focus on the language perspective. If we want to attract the best international students to KAIST, then we have to assure them that they can come here and can take any classes they want and can get involved in student activities as deeply as possible.”