Impressing Heaven by Barbara Waldern - HTML preview

XI. A view from the other side

Yes, I have been studying Korean albeit haphazardly, but with Korean language education being less in demand and the teaching methods conservative, I have not practiced much. I get grammar book after grammar book and plug along, picking out the alien words and the things that bind them like a bear lumbers through shrubbery picking berries. I see tutors on and off. I wade through lessons like said bear stumbling through icy waters clawing at the fish swimming between its legs.

I try to learn Korean but it is very slow even though I live in a Korean speaking environment. Of course, I am here to speak and teach English and everyone wants to make the most of that.

I attend a class here and there until so utterly frustrated and impatient with the unrequited desire to actually say something in Korean and the average teacher’s usual desire to lecture about the language as if it were a subject like history, a thing of the past existing only in books. Such may have been the case for Latin, but ENGLISH? I feel driven me away time and time again in a fit of fury and disappointment, only to try yet another beginner intermediate class reviewing beginner intermediate material, and then again.

I try one book for awhile until I cannot continue, then take a break and find another book covering the same material and go through it again. I listen to the accompanying tapes and CDs again and again, or the internet programs, repeating on those rare occasions when there is actually a gap for the listener to mimic what’s been voiced in Korean, the Korean utterances usually being at a fantastically sped-up pace. It is done that way, I imagine, so as to give students authentic language experience yet it is so rapidly fired off that rarely could any real person could ever attain such a galloping elocution in real life.

Speaking of real life, I think that Koreans could have a little more tolerance for hearing a foreign newcomer try out their language. Hard for the North American if not all speakers whose first language is English to imagine a person feeling that their language is so sacred it is not to be tainted by alien lips.

At least I have studied European languages whereas one cannot say that of so many English-teaching expats whose mother tongues are English and who have made this a long term or even permanent home that one ordinarily finds in this country. Funny how English on demand is pretty much expected by certain folk while the demand to learn others is significantly retarded. There being some rare exceptions at very studious or gifted Korean learners among the “native English speakers” from “the West,” I think foreigners generally could try to learn Korean more and learn it better. Let’s say, then, that there are attitude problems on both side of that (rather high) fence.

There are theoretical and pedagogical explanations for the adult’s sluggish learning. Adults must study hard for several hours every week to learn rules and memorize vocabulary and phrases and, in order to learn new habits, they must have extensive repetition.

How much do Korean language teachers even know that adults learn differently from children? How many know about that and other principles of language learning and teaching? We, the learners, particularly those of us trained in teaching English, suppose the average Korean teacher knows little of it.

Not only is English education a mandatory facet of neo-liberal globalization conquest, it is a buzzing industry itself. All manner of gold-seekers are eager to make their fortune in it, including the inept and unprepared. Teaching English as a foreign language is probably the most advanced and most active pseudo-sciences around! It is probably the least environmentally friendly, for all the stuff it produces! In addition to all the English language education textbooks and the academic literature about the theory and pedagogy of teaching and learning English as a second or foreign language, textbooks for students of the English language abound filling whole library sections, online catalogues and bookstores in most large cities of the world. Entire study programs and academic departments, even whole institutes are devoted to it.

Yet, where are their Korean language counterparts for teaching and learning Korean? They are few and far between and scattered about. In fact, it can be hard to find them in Korea.

If there is a TESOL for Teaching English to Speakers of other Languages, where is the TK-SOL for teaching Korean to speakers of other languages? Does anybody care much about the best theories and methods for teaching Korean to non-Korean speakers?

Language teaching as a whole in Korea is stuck in a time warp where it is always the 1950s. It seems it will never mature beyond the grammar-translation approach.

Learners and candidates for tutelage in Korean wonder, no doubt, whether Korea wants them to learn. Not enough demand by which to create an industry, no doubt.

Probably, the apparent lack of tolerance for hearing the “Westerner” struggle with uttering Korean phrases is because they do not have the habit of hearing their native language groan, whine, fart and shriek under exertions like diesel bus darting, turning and breaking in rush hour in Seoul. Just as it is for someone living constantly in that sort of commotion, is it because they just cannot perceive their own noise?

I liken the experience of trying to learn and use Korean to riding a horse sometimes. The horse being the language, it has too much power and will for the stranger-novice to manage with little training, knowledge and skill. But you know what they say: “Practice, practice, practice!”

“Do not take the horse away from us, let us learn to ride it,” I say. “We just need more time in the paddock going round and round until we get it right. We will make mistakes just like you.”

They show us a book, lecture at us, and ask us to read aloud here and there, then we are expected to make show-jumps. Let us learn to trot comfortably and confidently first, for goodness sake!

Perhaps they do not accurately estimate their own level of proficiency in English. Perhaps they just like to do it their own way. I have actually heard Koreans say that they prefer to hear the battered and bruised version of English that other Koreans, or other Asian speakers speak. “I can’t understand Westerners speak English,” one such person complained to me one day. You see we, the non-Asians just do not look right anyway we act or anywhere we go, whatever we try. We will still be non-Asian. We the Korean-as-a-foreign or second-language-learners will always look like circus clowns riding elephants, not elegant equestrians. The horse will always feel and sound like jerking and stubborn mules. How is it they can ride our horse like a grizzly bear on a unicycle and get away with it?

We can try on their language but it will not fit well. It will sag here, and pleat there and pucker this way and pull that way, making it all look inappropriate. How is it that everybody got away with wearing English however oddly?

Why is it okay for everybody to stumble through broken English with endless stuttering and horrid pronunciation?—because English is so dominating and we must accept it. We must first understand the position of those that dominate. Others perhaps are so interested on protecting their language and cultures from this hegemony that they are a little reluctant to share.

To be sure, several years of English classes are compulsory in the public school system as English has replaced Chinese as the priority in second language acquisition in perhaps that past, say, 15 years. It must be said, however, that the teaching has been rather limited considering that English classes, like all school subjects in the national curriculum, is driven by quantitative testing and therefore focused on the memorization of grammatical rules and vocabulary. Students generally have not had speaking and writing practice. Parents do spend fortunes on paying for extra exposure in the after school institutes but, as in the public schools, few English teachers actually speak and write English, and they rely on mimicking sounds emitted from CDs or rote learning of phrases and dialogues found in books (books often written by Koreans in bad English). Lately, though, the strictures of the globalizing economy have been requiring increasing bilingual spoken language in international business and diplomacy. Competency in English in Korea is improving year by year because of the deployment of native English speakers from abroad. In the schools, however, the one lone foreign English teacher might have to split his time among some 1500 students in up to 25 classes a week and, for that reason, school students get very little opportunity to speak with the foreign teacher. The breakthrough is the further training of Korean teachers who are motivated by a recent Ministry of education regulation dictating that they must teach in English within four years, a law prompting more teacher training in English with foreign teacher trainers, more teachers spending time abroad in English speaking communities, more supplementary studies in order to hone speaking and writing skills, and so on and so forth. Young well motivated students of English with excellent scores on government tests are coming through with improved oral and written competency.

I have some exemplary students. Not only are their vocabulary and pronunciation advancing, they seem to grasp cultural concepts as well. Cultural understanding is probably the key. It can be best developed through direct contact with the foreign culture and its people. I want to ask them where they have been and who they have met to develop that kind of competency. Gradually, I work up to a full inquiry.

Part of my concern is that younger generations are adopting the attitudes and values of corporate globalization because its English speaks its ideology. I know my reasoning is circular, without conclusion. Many dimensions of the phenomena of English language learning pique my curiosity all the time. I would like to sort it all out but I do not know whether the contradictions can be overcome.