[KS] failed Koreanists littering the streets

[jrpking at interchange.ubc.ca]

Dear listmembers: 

Thanks very much to John Duncan for his comments. I would like to add a few more remarks in reply. 

>First, the Defense Language Institute used to produce something in the range of 70-80 graduates per year. …very few (and I mean very, very few) of them ever acquire more than a rudimentary knowledge … Admittedly, what I witnessed was in the late 60s and early 70s, …makes me believe that little has changed over the past 20-30 years. …At any rate, I think it is safe to say that the U.S. military has been a great failure in terms of producing significant numbers of U.S. citizens who are competent in Korea[n]. 

First, I hope I didn’t give the impression that I somehow thought the US military was doing a bang-up job of KFL education and that they were some sort of model for all of us. But the DLI and its experience, as well as the statistics they produce, can be quite telling. And in fact, I think things HAVE changed a lot since John Duncan’s observations. So, while I, too, am not in possession of detailed statistics, I can relate at least the following. Way back in 1991 at a conference in Moscow hosted by the Korean Society of Bilingualism, the then-head of the Korean Language School at the DLI, with justifiable pride, announced that his school had recently graduated its 13,000-th ‘Korean linguist’  (as they’re called). That’s 13,000 soldiers with a 2+ in two of the four skills (I forget which two: listening and reading?) on the 1-to-5 proficiency scale, where a “3” is ‘ability to use the target language in a work environment’. Language salary bonuses kick in with that “2+.” To reach this “2+”, those 13,000 soldiers had between 2200-2500 hours of classroom instruction. It must be over 20,000 now.

Since then, the Korean Language School at the DLI (or so I am told) has grown rapidly to become the largest school – the Director of the Korean Language School regularly shows up at AATK conferences practically begging Korean graduate students to apply for teaching jobs on staff – they can’t hire enough teachers to keep up with the demand. So at least that one particular corner of the USA is investing in Korean language education, but it doesn’t really help us civilians much in our work. 

The point here: if (tens of!) thousands of ‘America’s finest’, after 2200+ hours of classroom contact in what, arguably, are pretty good facilities with pretty good teachers(?), can still barely speak Korean when they get to Korea, and are hopeless with more ‘academic’ or ‘intellectual’/research-oriented forms of Korean, what does that tell us about the chances of training students over a 4-year undergraduate curriculum with at most 150 hours per academic year? Another point for comparison: I have encountered some graduates of Yonsei’s KFL program who, though linguistically gifted and otherwise intellectually topnotch, are still far from being able to –say-- read Korean short fiction in the original, let alone handle academic articles and dissertations. Or understand the KBS 9 o’clock news. This is not a slam of Yonsei (though I could do that elsewhere) – it reminds us of the magnitude of the investment needed to get up to DLI level 4, for example. 

>Second, as difficult as Korean admittedly is, it is no more difficult than
>Japanese. … If Japanese can be mastered, why not Korean?

Sure, in theory, and John Duncan makes a number of good points here. The reasons Korean ends up being so ‘difficult’ in practice have less to do with inherent linguistic/structural features (though I would contend most of these outweigh Japanese…) than with characteristics of classroom demography, teacher training, textbooks, native speaker language ideologies, etc. Many of these are things that people on this list can do something about - but not without concomitant long-term and aggressive investments from governments or whoever!

> It can be done, given the motivation, the support and, perhaps most importantly for academic purposes, the kind of quality language training programs that are offered in Japanese and Chinese at such places as the IUC in Yokohama and the center at National Taiwan University. Such programs still do not exist in Korea, despite the efforts of such schools as Yonsei, Koryo, Sogang, and SNU. Perhaps it is time to establish something like the IUC in Korea.

Here John Duncan has preempted something that was on the tip of my tongue last posting. I confess I do not yet know much about the finances and organization of the Chinese and Japanese ‘Inter-university Centers’ (other than that my own UBC used to belong to the Chinese one but was too cheap to pay the annual fees so dropped out!), but I am convinced now that NONE of the Korean university programs like those mentioned above will ever truly serve the needs of North American university students in general, or of the more ‘academically/scholarly’-inclined specialists, in particular. Maybe it IS time to start talking about an IUC for Korean in Korea? 

Ross King
Associate Professor of Korean, University of British Columbia
and
Dean, Korean Language Village, Concordia Language Villages