Recently my daughter’s middle school English teacher held a demonstration class. He had invited parents of his students to sit in on his class. He began to conduct his English class in broken English. No sooner had he started than his students sitting in the first row asked him, “Why don’t you teach the same way you usually do?” This anecdote reminds us of the two stark realities of English education in Korea. The first is that everybody knows that it is desirable to teach students English in English. The second is that it is often impossible for Korean teachers to do so.

Some scholars may argue that English should be taught in a way that students are not scared or discouraged, and therefore taught in Korean. That way, the argument goes, students will “understand” the lesson. Others attribute many Korean students’ inability to learn English to their low intelligence. The students who are exposed to an English-speaking school environment can speak English well, regardless of their intelligence. So we encourage our students to go abroad to learn English not because they are smart, but because they can afford it. It is money that makes them talk.

When Korean students go abroad, they usually take ESL courses. These ESL courses are never taught in Korean. More often than not, students take regular courses at the same time they take ESL courses. These students learn English just the way we have learned Korean since we were born. Our mothers did not attempt to make us understand what they were saying by speaking “Wombish.” Our mothers must have wished that they understood what we were babbling in Wombish. They waited patiently until their babies acquired Korean. I repeat, “acquired.” Some scholars argue that we cannot acquire a language after we pass puberty. But that does not mean that learning a language is not a process of acquainting ourselves with a new system and therefore does not require practice, preferably saturation training.

I wish I had learned English the way I acquired Korean, my native tongue. I wish I had learned to understand spoken English first, just as we learn to understand our spoken native tongue first. The reason is intuitive: Once we get the hang of the nuance of basic words and sentence structure and become familiar with the language, it does not require much effort to learn how to read. All you have to deal with is words. And your ability to command a language will increase by leaps and bounds. A command of spoken English would bring students more opportunities to expose themselves to English simply because they could understand spoken English as well as written English.

So the issue of whether or not it is desirable to teach English in English is not moot. My daughter’s English teacher knows that it is better to teach English in English. The knowledge is shared by the general public, an increasing number of whom is sending their kids abroad to give them an opportunity that was denied them. Therefore, I do not understand why many Korean professors won’t teach English in English to their students who cannot afford to go abroad for English immersion.

Let me also address the issue of inability of most English teachers to conduct their classes in English. The Korean English teachers should not be blamed because they are nothing but the product of the Korean English education system, which they are perpetuating. The English education system has hardly changed. It is the demand that has changed. The demand is for a better education. The demand is being satisfied by private English language institutes and by studying abroad.

It is disheartening to see the situation is no better in the universities. English major students at universities are being deprived of their last opportunity in Korea to receive a good English education because their classroom environment is no different from that of their middle school and high school. There are few universities that try to fulfill the demand of university students for better English education. The time is fast approaching, though, that universities will have no choice but to change the way they teach English; the number of high school graduates is going to drop sharply soon.

Universities should change, not because they are forced to, but because education is about providing the best that can be given. English departments should stop teaching English in Korean and break the vicious circle of producing English teachers who cannot conduct their English classes in English. The survival and success of English departments depend on how closely they can give their students what the professors in the English departments already provide for their own children: the advantage of learning English in an English-speaking environment. 

By June Her

June Her is a professor at the Graduate School of Interpretation and Translation at Sun Moon University in Asan, South Chungcheong Province. Ed.