Korean Studies Internet Discussion List KOREAN STUDIES REVIEW
Dong Jae Lee, Sookeun Cho, Miseon Lee, Min Sun Song, and William O'Grady, edd. Hanin Hakkyo-ûi Han'gugô Kyoyuk Yôn'gu (Studies on Korean in Community Schools). Technical Report No. 22, Second Language Teaching and Curriculum Center. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2000. 254 pages. ISBN: 0-8248-2353-4.
Reviewed by Myoyoung Kim
SUNY Buffalo[This review first appeared in _Acta Koreana_, 4 (2001): 159-63. _Acta Koreana_ is published by Academia Koreana of Keimyung University.]
The book Hanin Hakkyo-ûi Han'gugô Kyoyuk Yôn'gu provides rich information on Korean Language schools and classes in the United States, theoretically as well as practically. All articles in this volume are in Korean, which is unusual and clearly shows that most readers of the book will be Korean teachers or parents. It is encouraging that in the United States there is a demand for books published in Korean. However, fewer readers will be able to access it than if it were in English. The case studies and report of current trends are confined to settings in the United States alone. The book is composed of two parts; the first consists of five chapters in which a general introduction to bilingual language education, and external factors of language acquisition such as motivation and parental support are introduced. The second part of the book deals with various topics related to Korean language education in the U.S. Topics in the second part cover theoretical background and reviews of literature on various aspects of the Korean language, including Korean-English contrastive syntax and phonology. Case studies then illustrate the whole spectrum of speaking, listening, reading, and writing in terms of acquisition and language development.In chapter 1, "Korean Language Education in the United States" by Ho-min Sohn, directions in Korean language education are explored. The author reports on the status of Korean language education in the United States from a language education administrator's point of view. This article explains why Korean language teaching/learning is especially important and worthwhile in the United States. The author offers an explanation for why Korean language education has continued to increase since 1970 and reports on the status of current Korean language education in different school settings. He also provides a demography of the number of Korean language learners. Finally he makes some suggestions on how to develop Korean language education in the future, and outlines the ultimate goal of such education.
In chapter 2, "Bilingualism" (Miseon Lee), the author reviews the theoretical background of bilingualism. She begins the chapter with a definition of bilingualism, and then focuses on second language acquisition: the factors that affect acquisition, English as a second language for a minority population and the development of the first language, and the role of input for bilinguals. She also summarizes features of bilingual children's language use, such as language choice, code mixing, and code switching. Psychological factors such as attitude are also considered. By presenting the advantages of speaking two languages for children in terms of their language development, cognitive development, academic achievement, and development of personality, she tries to calm the concerns of parents and to correct wrong assumptions. At the end of this chapter, she concludes that to be successful, Korean-English bilingual education must be a coordinated effort by the Hangul School and the parents' Korean language education at home, and should meet the United States government policy on bilingualism.
The third chapter, written by Dong Jae Lee, calls for parental support of the Korean language education of Korean-English bilingual children. The author returns to the topic of parents' concerns by providing optimistic research results. He briefly contrasts theories of language acquisition (contextualized) with foreign language learning (decontextualized) and suggests that parents should be major providers of great amounts of input in the context of real life situations.
Chapter 4 treats ways to develop diverse teaching methodologies in order to enhance family motivation (Heyoung Kim). The author provides teaching tools that can be used in Korean language classrooms and which focus on all four aspects of language: reading, writing, speaking, and listening. I think the part on teaching reading is very good and useful, and so is the section on teaching speaking/listening. She makes the point that in natural communication, listening and speaking go together, so these two aspects should not be separated in teaching. However, she did not sort the materials by levels, so it would be better if she suggested materials in terms of beginner, intermediate, and advanced levels. The section on teaching writing seems to be a little unrealistic, especially section 4.2. The activity is too challenging for students, and they will only be frustrated. In addition, it is not clear whether by teaching writing the author means teaching spelling or how to make better compositions.
In chapter 5, Chang-won Kim argues that children's literature can be used as a second language teaching tool, and suggests a list of age-appropriate books. The books on the list are classified by genre, complexity of vocabulary, and level of grammar according to the reader's age. The books are real examples so they are very practical for both parents and teachers.
In the second part of the book, specific topics are explored which focus on each aspect of language learning: syntax, lexicon, phonology, and literacy. Background information comparing the two language systems precedes a chapter of case studies.
Two chapters (chapters 6 & 7), both written by Sookeun Cho, are devoted to the onset of syntax acquisition. In separate chapters, the author summarizes the syntactic difference between English and Korean. If the author intended to provide information for laymen on the basic structure of Korean grammar, this chapter is too technical, and it would be better to focus on a small number of specific features that are unique to Korean in contrast to English, such as honorifics, word order, the function of verb endings, and the particle system compared to English. This would be more useful in real teaching situations. In the succeeding chapter, he first outlines the stages of monolingualism in English and in Korean language acquisition. Because Korean children who are growing up in the United States are expected to speak English, their Korean is more likely to be influenced by some aspects of English such as word order, the omission of particles, use of the passive, or the structure of relative clauses. The author points out the problematic structures in order to recommend what is helpful for Korean-English bilingual children's sentence acquisition. However, his description is too broad as well as very technical, and he tries to cover too many topics.
The next chapter (chapter 8) concerns Korean-English bilingual children's lexical acquisition (Miseon Lee). Since there are not many studies of lexical acquisition of Korean, her study is meaningful. However, there are some weaknesses: The words used in this study are mostly the ones that are very Korean-oriented in terms of culture: kinship terms, 'wear' verbs, honorifics, number, and counters. If her intention were to see whether children can use these words and to draw from this the conclusion that they are fluent bilinguals, it would be a fine argument. However, she does not provide information on when Korean monolingual children acquire those words. She presupposes that Korean-American children acquire such words late, so that they must be overtly taught these words. In educational settings, teachers have noticed that many students choose very culturally oriented Korean words correctly because parents, who consider them to be very important keys to understanding Korean culture, emphasize these words. However, these students tend not to know very basic verbs because most parents permit the use of English words in otherwise Korean discourse, and whenever they insert English words, they are hardly ever corrected. Kinship terms, on the other hand, are always corrected. In addition, the author focuses on structures that do not have semantic equivalents in English. She seems to assume that Korean-English bilingual children at the same level have mastered the basic verbs and acquired the basic nouns that Korean monolingual children acquire early. From my own teaching experience, students usually know the culturally embedded lexical items, but even if they understand certain basic words in speech they are unable to produce these correctly.
The next two chapters (chapters 9 & 10) are about the acquisition of phonology. A case study (Min Sun Song) follows a review of the phonological structure of English and Korean (Sang-I Chun). Two experiments were conducted for the case study; a mastery test with a single stimulus, and a contextual test with paired stimuli. Results show that unlike foreign language learners, three-way distinction of Korean obstruents (plain-aspirated-tensed) does not cause problems for Korean-American children. This confirms that Korean children growing up in the United States are not foreign language learners but maybe passive bilinguals because they were able to discern even single phonemes although they are not fluent. At the end of the chapter, the author points out how difficult it is to give students minimal pairs or triples in real classroom situations, which I find to be true in my own classroom experience. In the appendices, she also provides tables made from her experiments and they are very helpful. One concern is the difference between percentile and statistical significance. Even though some results might look different visually in tables, these differences are not always significant statistically.
The final chapter of the book (chapter 11) addresses the acquisition of the Korean writing system, han'gul (Sunyoung Lee). The article is interesting but it has some problems. First, at the bottom of p. 248, she reports that the word 'school' in Korean is written as hak.yo or ha.kyo. The former would be the case if a child were influenced by the incompletely acquired Korean spelling rule, but the author's interpretation of the latter example seems to be doubtful. It might not be because they perceive the tense [k'] as a plain [k] as in her interpretation, but because they are aware of the rule that the spelling of a word can be different from the way the word is pronounced, or because they do not match a sound to a correct orthographic consonant. Thus, to support her interpretation, it would have been better for her to show the percentiles of cases of wrong spelling. The second problem of this article is derived from statistics. The author reports results different from those in the table she provides in the chapter. For example, on p. 251, line 8, she says that no one spelled 'chalhuk' correctly, which is the result reported in table 5 on p. 247. However, in line 19 of the same page (p. 251), she also reports that the proportion of right answers is 10% in the case of 'chalhuk,' which contradicts her statement in line 8 and in table 5. Rather, it seems to be the percentile of how many children got the right answer for double final consonants in total, which is a broader issue. On p. 251, second to the last line, it is reported that students at the advanced level scored 59% correct, but there is no mention of how she got that percentile. If it is the total mean number of right answers from her nine tables as illustrated in her chapter, my calculation indicates a 64% total mean number of right answers. The interpretation of this result is also problematic. She argues that 59% correct does not show that students are aware of spellings, but to what standard is she making the comparison? Except for resyllabification of single words (table 4, 31%) and final consonant cluster simplification (table 5, 11%), students at the advanced level showed much better ability in spelling, almost double in the rest of the cases (simple words: 98%, coda neutralization: 78%, resyllabification of multiple morpheme words: 81%, nasalization: 69%, and aspiration: 76%). Thus, the results can be interpreted as being influenced by two outliers, which skew the total mean percentile. In addition, the term 'consonant cluster' referring to a double final consonant is not correct. A consonant cluster means a sequence of two sounds but a double final consonant in Korean (pach'im) is not a phonetic feature, but an orthographic feature. Even in table 4, students in the advanced class showed much better performance compared to lower level students, even though the absolute mean from the advanced class was low (31% vs. 4%). The author interprets the indication of the results from table 5 and 9 (vowels) as students still being in a transition period so the percentiles do not show consistency since the students' level has not yet stabilized. If that is the case, the low percentile from table 5 where intermediate students got higher scores (14%) than advanced students (11%) can be interpreted the same way. When statistical interpretation is given in an article, more careful attention should be paid, and there should be a clear and explicit statement of the results.
For anyone who is interested in Korean language education, however, this book can be used as a reference or a source of background information on Korean-English bilingual children's language acquisition: how to maintain their heritage language of Korean while acquiring English. The issues discussed in the book give insights for further research to support and better understand Korean language education in countries other than Korea.
Citation: Kim, Myoyoung. 2001
Review of Hanin Hakkyo-ûi Han'gugô Kyoyuk Yôn'gu, edd. by Dong Jae Lee et al.,(2000)
Korean Studies Review 2001, no. 07
Electronic file: http://koreanstudies.com/ks/ksr/ksr01-07.htm
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