Korean Job Discussion Forums

[JFuller317]

I hadn't noticed this until very recently, when I realized that a few students in one of my lower level classes were consistently mis-pronouncing certain words the exact same way. Then I noticed some of them occasionally writing in the textbooks. I took a look to see what was going on, and I found that a few of them had written extensive "pronunciation guides" for some of the sentences in Konglish.

In my opinion, Konglish can really hold students back because it teaches them certain systemic mispronunciations. The fact is that while we can just about write any Korean word with the English alphabet, the same does not hold true in reverse. They simply don't have some of the sounds that we use, particularly the letters F, V and Z. They also don't have certain combination sounds like Th. While certain sounds like the combination vowel "oi" or most consonant combinations can be approximated, some of our sounds simply don't exist in their alphabet.

On the other hand, since many words can be approximated in Konglish, I feel that it might actually help a few of the very early students. But I'm not sure what to do about it. Right now my policy is to make them erase the Konglish whenever I see it. But I'm thinking, with some of my larger classes, where there are a few students who for whatever reason aren't learning to sound out words using the English alphabet, maybe it would work to let them use some Konglish so that they aren't holding back the entire class.

Any thoughts?

[jadarite]

I think you need to have them feel comfortable spelling words in groups. It doesn't have to be the whole class, just a few friends. When you see the mistakes, then you can correct them. The advantage of doing groups instead of assigning homework is that one you have to correct all of it, and the other reason is that other students might be having the same problem and if they correct it by themself, then you aren't correcting as many students individually.

If you want to be a good translator, you have to be ready to go from one language to another, and in this case, a third point (the bridge) which is the romanized version of an Asian language. When they cross that bridge, they should obviously use the native language as much as they can in a learning situation.

[JFuller317]

I have to follow a set curriculum, some of which I really don't like. But our school seems to want to the kids to be interested more than they want them to actually learn, so we're spending three months on the "Ready Action" series of Children's Storybooks. Basically these books take some fairy tale (Snow White, Three Little Pigs, etc) and turn it into a really stupid and inane play with pictures. So I'm supposed to have the kids read their parts and go through the story. Of course, sometimes there are words and concepts in there that they haven't learned yet in their other classes, which is a real nightmare, because I don't speak enough Korean to explain anything. I still shudder when I think about the time I had to try to get a bunch of first graders to understand "yesterday," "today," and "tomorrow."

So the long and the short of it is: there's a lot of repetitive reading and very little writing. I really hate that, but it's the set curriculum, and our head teacher seems to value ease and "fun learning" over other methods that might help the students improve faster. But it seems like they see my job as more of a "pronunciation coach" than anything else.

As for the Konglish vs. Romanized Korean, I don't care much for Romanized Korean myself, and I always try to read in real Korean when I'm studying the language. But the big difference is, we can get something almost exactly the equivalent of the Korean words using the Roman alphabet, while this simply isn't true with Konglish.

[withnail]

Why don't you teach them the phonemic symbols found at the back of many coursebooks? I think it would be a good help and a useful skill for them to have, especially with those ubiquitous electronic dictionaries they carry around.

Also would impress your co-teacher/boss to see you do it!!