[KS] Grammar, KFL and KHL

[jrpking at interchange.ubc.ca]

Rob Carruba’s posting reminds me of another major shortcoming in KFL teaching these days: grammar (and the rules thereof that linguists keep trying to figure out).

KFL learners (including heritage learners, I would argue) are doubly disadvantaged when it comes to learning the nuts-and-bolts of Korean morpho-syntax – the mechanics, if you will, of how different verb types attach to endings (and which ones they can or can’t attach to), and how particles attach to nouns and what functions they serve. 

And Lord knows Korean has particles and endings up the yin[g]yang (or should I say, eumyang), with lots of funky stuff going on at the morpheme boundaries.

And if one doesn't get this right in the very first stages (year or two) of study, one can pretty much forget about ever being good in Korean. 

Doubly disadvanted because:
1)	their Korean-speaking instructors are rarely able to explain any of this in English, the textbooks they publish in Korea don’t get it right, either, and/or they are governed by a covert language ideology that says ‘a foreign learner can never really, truly, understand this anyway, so why bother getting the details right? Taech’ung uro salja!’

2)	the ideology driving most of American foreign language pedagogy is one of ‘action’ and ‘performance’ and ‘proficiency’ that can’t be bothered with the details of structure. So much so that ‘grammar’ is a dirty word in language pedagogy circles – one doesn’t discuss it in polite company, let alone in a language class. 

There is a very interesting critique of this American language teaching ideology in Claire Kramsch’s 1993 book, _Context and Culture in Language Teaching_ (OUP): ‘American foreign language education values action over reflection’, ‘Most foreign language teachers in the United States … value action and communication rather than metacommunication.’ She (Professor of German at Berkeley) stresses the importance of teaching ‘metalanguage’ – using the language classroom not just for foreign language talk, but for talking _about_ the foreign language (and especially about the target culture and key differences between it and the learner’s – her main point is not grammar, but one can easily extend it this way…). 

Finally, it is also interesting to note that some of the most very recent research on ‘heritage language education’ is claiming that it is actually grammar instruction that many heritage learners need. Rich Robin (2002) (Professor of Russian at Georgetown, I think) has written as follows about heritage learners of Russian (2002): “the methodological tide has been pulling away from precisely what heritage learners need the most: explicit instruction in grammar and writing conventions.”

Robin, Rich. 2002. Helping heritage hares with the race. The NCLRC Language Resource, Vol. 6, no. 2.

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