[KS] failed Koreanists littering the streets

[Horace H. Underwood]

Dear All

I am not writing as a failed Koreanist, though I am one (good speaking
ability but almost illiterate).  Rather, I write as a language program
administrator.

The whole "Korean is a hard language" string started by making the point
that non-heritage learners are unlikely to get very far in Korean language
study if all they do is take undergraduate instruction in the US.  John
Duncan and Ross King have expanded the critique to include language schools
currently in Korea, and suggested the need to start the equivalent of
Japan's UIC in Korea.  But a major point of the Koreanists based outside of
Korea seems to be that the job would be a lot easier if done IN Korea.  Fair
enough.  But....

Part of my job for the last 16 years has been organizing and administering
Korean language courses for American university students.  I have had the
advantage of being able to organize those courses in Korea, where I had no
dearth of native speakers, no dearth of language teachers who could claim to
be "trained," no dearth of a range of student ability to fill more than just
the eternal "beginning" levels.  Nonetheless, as the song "Southern Cross"
says, "we never failed to fail, it's the easiest thing to do."

1.  The programs currently in Korea (Yonsei, Sogang, SNU, Ganada) can be
criticized, but we should recognize that they are in fact good at meeting
their real market, which is to provide Korean-style education for heritage
learners of Korean (and to Japanese).  The textbooks in use, the teaching
styles in use and the teaching styles which are taught in the teacher
trainging programs are well adapted to those learners, and I have had
literally hundreds of Korean-Americans who have told me that they had an
outstanding educational experience at, for instance, Yonsei's KLI.  The
non-heritage beginners find it a disaster, almost uniformly, semester after
semester.

2.  The programs currently in Korea (same list of suspects) are sometimes
though not always adequate in the upper levels even for non-heritage
learners; once you get up to "intermediate," i.e. after the first 400 hours
of instruction, the gap between heritage and non-heritage learners can
narrow.  This could be because the non-motivated learners never get that
far, or because the survivors have learned not only some Korean but how to
learn in a Korean manner, but the convergence seems true.

3.  There is no textbook available in Korea (well, none that I've found yet)
that is satisfactory for the non-heritage "beginning beginner" North
American student, and few teachers either.  With no text and no teachers,
there is therefore no program that is satisfactory for those beginners.
Despite the oversimplifications involved, American learners have been
trained to learn by one method, and Korean teachers have been trained to
teach by a different method, and there is a lot of cross purposes and futile
effort.  Heritage students, not surprisingly, often are more prepared to
learn in a "Korean" way.  Furthermore, 80% of the language learners at
Yonsei KLI, in the Yonsei ID program or in the summer programs, in ANY
program in Korea (and in any program in North American universities also,
according to the postings) are heritage learners.  The only place I found
good materials designed for non-heritage learners was a few years ago in
Australia, where the majority of the students WERE non-heritage learners -
and even then, my reaction may have been "grass is greener" rather than
their actually having better programs.  Further-further-furthermore, finding
good teachers ("good" in western terms) is an even harder problem than
finding texts.

4.  For the last 10 years Fulbright has been teaching six weeks of Korean to
our Fulbright English Teaching Assistant (ETA) grantees as part of their
orientation program.  One key and important factor is that the ETAs (unlike
the regular Fulbright graduate student grantees) are 80% non-heritage
learners.  It should be an ideal situation - no grade pressure, I have total
control of program, text, and teacher selection, an outstanding group of
students, the language learners should be motivated by knowing that they
need the Korean to survive their Fulbright year in Korea, the training takes
place outside of Seoul in Chunchon in the Korean language ocean, etc.  Every
single year has been a failure, particularly in the beginning beginner
classes, leading to by far the greatest volume of complaints and
anatomically impossible suggestions.  The reality is that I can't find the
right textbook, I can't get the teachers to focus on student learning rather
than on "covering" the material, the students hit the wall immediately and
give up, the students are all high achievers and not used to finding things
they can't learn.

5.  After six weeks of bad language training and six months in a non-Seoul
Korean middle or high school and six months in a Korean homestay, the most
motivated of the ETAs use their winter break (Jan-Feb) to study Korean.
Most of them have gone to Ganada in Shinchon, and most of them have been
full of praise for the Ganada program.  Is Ganada so much better?  Or does
it just attract the motivated ones?  Or have my ETAs gotten into
"intermediate" status and over the first wall?  Did they just finally "get"
it, as their time at their secondary schools shows them that they DO need to
learn this stuff?  How can I apply this lesson to beginning classes?

6.  From all this, some comments about the idea of North American academics
starting a Korean language program in Korea.  The idea is vastly tempting.
But who is your audience?  The IUC program apparently works in Japan
because, as already noted, the percentage of non-heritage learners of
Japanese is much higher.  The heritage learners of Korean have adequate
programs - programs that they (and their parents!) like a lot.  The
non-heritage audience is small, small, small.  Aside from the fact that you
would need to write textbooks and train teachers in the desired teaching
methods, as long as the Korean language, for all the econo-geo-political
reasons already discussed, attracts only a few non-heritage learners, the
situation is going to be hard to change.

Horace H. Underwood
Executive Director
Fulbright Korea