Korean Job Discussion Forums

[garykasparov]

English education in Korea is failing




Last Saturday evening, my boss and I were at a local bath-house. We noticed a boy of about 14 and his cousin in the changing area. My boss immediately leapt on this opportunity to quiz the boy in English, telling me to ask him some questions.
So I asked him some fairly routine questions - What's your name? How old are you? Were do you live? What school do you go to? Do you study English? To my surprise, he couldn't answer these simple questions. Even when my boss asked him questions, he didn't understand. When I spoke to him in Korean, he replied in Korean.

Gimhae has had a policy for the past two years of one foreign teacher for every class. I understand it to be two hours of instruction by a foreign teacher each week.

My understanding is that the foreign teacher is there to teach a basic command of English and interact with native Korean speakers.

Where on earth has it all gone wrong? The Korean taxpayer has invested a lot of money, yet after two years of lessons this middle school student couldn't tell me his name in English.

The boy lives in an affluent neighborhood, and attends private English institutions, so-called hagwon, where he is taught grammar for the TOEIC exam. Should we blame the parents? This is a society where it would appear the achievement certificate is worth more than the ability.

Should we blame the teachers? Perhaps the native English speaker is at fault for not enforcing the use of basic English. Perhaps he or she doesn't have a teaching certificate and has never set foot in a classroom before entering Korea.

Or should we blame the system? Is it not the system that promotes test scores? Is it not the system that allows haphazard, underqualified employees in the classroom?

But we shouldn't be running around playing the blame game. The Korean government should be trying to fix this problem. They need to tighten controls to bring suitably qualified teachers, Korean and foreign, into the classroom. I have met many Korean English teachers who cannot speak English. They got their jobs because they lived out of the country in English-speaking cities like L.A. or Vancouver, but they clearly socialized more with Koreans and not natives.

My boss was shocked when he learned that this boy had two years of native instruction under his belt.

He was deeply annoyed that his taxes had paid for such an education. I am pretty sure if average Koreans knew what was going on with English education and their money, they'd be shocked too.


By Angus M. Harrison




Angus M. Harrison is head teacher at a private language institute in Gimhae, southern Gyeongsang Province. His views don't necessarily express those of The Korea Herald. - Ed.




2007.11.14

http://www.koreaherald.co.kr/NEWKHSITE/data/html_dir/2007/11/14/200711140066.asp

[air76]

Personally, I think that the primary cause for the lack of progress in the Korean English learning scheme stems from the teach-to-test methodology. At the very least the Korean education system needs to realize that LANGUAGE cannot be taught with a fill-in-the-bubble scantron test score being the desired end result. Until the system itself realizes that the teaching methodology to successfully teach a language is not repeat and memorize but instead use and internalize then there won't be much of an improvement in the students' abilities to actually construct sentences and ideas as opposed to mastering translations of vocabulary.

I think that it is short-sighted to blame the problem on unskilled teachers....first off, it isn't as though hordes of unskilled teachers got together and decided to sell themselves as English teachers to Korea, it worked the other way around. The massive lack of labor in the Korean market led to the influx of unqualified teachers, and not the other way around.

But the bottom line is that a qualified ESL teacher is so very different from someone who studied Education at University. I think that all too often these two things get confused. In a 1-month training course (a good training course that is) any reasonably intelligent person can learn the gist of a decent teaching methodology....not to mention they can learn GOOD language games for the kids, and not crap like Hangman (which doesn't teach the kids anything and is merely a cop out for the teacher to make the kids happy and fill up the last 7 minutes of class)....so the problem is not in the teachers, but in the Hagwans' inability to TRAIN their teachers....any reasonable business that hires staff that is new to their trade actually TRAINS these new workers to at least have the basic skills that they need. Hagwan training generally consists of 4-5 hours of observation of another untrained teacher who has survived 6 months of teaching and therefore must know what they're doing.....the irony is that the Hagwans lose money by not offering proper training to their teachers....I would imagine that 50% of all runners would be prevented if they had the skills they needed to enjoy their job, not to mention that the retention rate would skyrocket if teachers were better at their job and therefore it was easier for them.....too often people point at the teachers and say that they're lazy, not trying hard enough, indifferent, but in my opinion this is a misnomer and the majority of these teachers would love to be better teachers if someone helped them to learn how. Believe it or not it actually takes LESS work to be a good teacher than be a bad one.

I do agree with you as well, though, that much of the fault must fall on the parents....they continue to support an industry that isn't teaching their children to actually speak English, but unfortunately as long as the test scores go up the average Korean family is happy.

[andrew]

.....

[tiger fancini]

I bet the same student in the bath house would have scored highly on a "fill in the blank" or grammar test. My feeling is that most students in Korea don't see foreign teachers as being as important as Korean teachers. We've heard plenty of stories of how the foreign teachers job is primarily to entertain, and I'm sure we've all, at some point, been urged to "make it fun!"

At present, I'm working in a high school. The only instructions I was given when I started were "teach whatever you like." Now high school students have some pretty stressful stuff to deal with, and obviously it's going to be much more difficult to engage them if they know that they are not being tested on anything from my classes. My last school was a middle school, and before each set of tests, most of classes were cancelled so that the Korean English teacher could "prepare" the students for the tests.

I think the main problem is that conversation is not taken particularly seriously. Students aren't given meaningful tests on it, so tend to ignore it. I can't blame them for that, I'd do the same if I were them. I've told my high school students over and over again, that if they want to go to a good university and/or get a job with a decent company, then they WILL have to answer questions in English at an interview. Understanding complex grammar rules and being able to listen and fill in the blanks will not impress if they can't answer basic questions about themselves.

[GreenlightmeansGO]

I hope I can get some Korean teachers to read this.

[Unposter]

While there are some good responses so far, one still must say...it was at a freeking bathhouse! ???In the changing room??? Imagine your a kid and some stranger comes up to you and starts quizing you on a foreign language in the changing room of a bathhouse...there is a legitmate chance you are going to clam up.

Furthermore, we are left with anecdotes. One case...one kid...in a bathhouse...and all of Korean English education is a failure. I'm sorry but this proves absolutely nothing!

It is pretty funny though...or creepy if you really think about it.

[The_Conservative]

I agree with Unposter here.


Could have been just been a unwillingness to speak in English in front of a strange native speaker.

Plus as Unposter accurately pointed out, one student is not representative of anything.

[Ilsanman]

Maybe he was a dunce.

Anyways, the title of this thread is an understatement. It reminds me of the Core French Program in Western Canada.

[some waygug-in]

It really wouldn't matter where you had met him. I think it's a safe bet his responses would have been similar.

I have experienced this myself.

It's hard to get any kids to say more than ...My name is yon su, nice to meet you.

Part of the reason it is failing is the large class size.

Another reason is the awful textbooks.

Another reason is the confusion over co-teaching roles.

Another reason may be that Korean teachers don't seem to want to allow foreign teachers the freedom to make and conduct their own lessons.

Schools that don't have the resources that go with the books.

I'm sure there are others as well, but it's always easier to blame the foreign teachers and say they don't know what they are doing.