[KS] failed Koreanists littering the streets

[Duncan, John]

A couple of things come to mind.

One, perhaps we academic Koreanists should start making efforts to identify
and recruit some of the DLI "linguists".  I'm not sure what the climate is
like in the military today, but perhaps we can convince some of the
non-career military that there can be a rewarding future in pursuing Korean
and Korean studies.

Two, a couple of years back I broached the idea of an IUC in Korea with a
representative of the Korean Foundation.  The response I got was a not
unsympathetic "saenggak haebol munjeda."  I regret to say that with all the
fish I was trying to fry, I did not follow through.  As we all know, the KF
has both limited resources and a long-term strategic plan that, while
initially investing heavily in North America, now calls for developing
Korean studies in other parts of the world.  

It is clear to me that an IUC for Korea will remain nothing but a pipedream
without some coordinated planning and agitation on our part.  I've still got
way too many fish in the frypan, but I think this is an important issue and
am willing to devote what time and resources I can muster.

John Duncan  



-----Original Message-----
From: jrpking at interchange.ubc.ca
To: koreanstudies at koreaweb.ws
Sent: 4/15/2003 2:56 PM
Subject: Re: [KS] failed Koreanists littering the streets

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