When I was little, I had a great opportunity to live in the U.S. with my family for almost two years, which is when I first learned English and made foreign friends. I attended ESL or English as a second language classes at school with other international students whose parents were graduate students there like mine. During the first few days, the most difficult flash card to remember was “bread and butter” because, for me, “bread,” “and” and “butter” were three “unassociated” words instead of one like “apple” or “grapes” on other flash cards. Seeing others eat bread together with butter and doing so myself, however, I was soon able to remember this phrase, as eating bread with butter quickly became as natural as eating rice with kimchi. This was a 7-year-old Korean girl version of “living the language” and learning language by linking it to culture.

Language learning can never be whole without general cultural understanding. Understanding the cultural context of daily conversational conventions such as thanking, apologizing, forms of address, and level of politeness enables foreign speakers to know what is appropriate to say in different situations to different audiences, which is far more important than just being able to form grammatically correct sentences and pronounce them in a native-speaker way.

Koreans tend to be good at explaining Korean cultural context as we recognize that cultural understanding is especially important for a language like Korean that has different forms of address and levels of honorific forms. Take Psy’s “Gangnam Style,” for example.

How do you explain the meaning of “oppa” in this song without explaining the cultural context? If you just give the literary translation, “older brother” or “older male,” foreigners will think all the ajeossi can also be oppa and won’t understand why Korean males are so keen to be called oppa especially by girls they are interested in.

English is no exception. Let’s now take a 30-year-old adult example. When I went back to the U.S. as a graduate student myself, I started using “excuse me” frequently in various situations, for example, when calling a waitress or requesting passage. During the first few months, I thought my neighbor was a very rude person, because he kept responding “sure” or “no problem” to my “excuse me” requesting passage. I felt that he was extremely rude to say “sure” instead of “I’m sorry” when he was the one blocking others’ way. Then, I noticed that others were not apologizing in such a situation either. But how could everyone be so rude? Eventually, I learned that I was the one asking them to excuse ME. I happened to be using the English phrase “excuse me” with the Korean translation in mind where the other party would normally apologize for blocking passage.

Over time, I learned that American culture is much less apologetic than Korean culture as Americans tend to see an apology as an admission of wrongdoing or individual responsibility and culpability, and that this difference is reflected in daily conversational conventions as well. This was another example of “living the language” for me.

As you can see from my experience, I believe the best way to learn English is to “live the language” in an English-speaking country with full cultural immersion, whether through a language course abroad, exchange year, volunteering or a working holiday. We should also improve the ways of teaching English in schools in Korea as well.

English teachers in Korean schools should try to incorporate cultural context into their curriculum as much as possible, which will allow the students to acquire better communication skills. Rather than giving homework such as ppack-ppack-i, for example, where students are asked to show that they have written down certain vocabulary words over and over again to memorize them until the paper is full of words, the teachers should train the students to use those words in sentences in cultural context.

Also, the current one-way Confucian teacher-student norms should change where the teacher lectures and the students listen to two-way interactive teaching style which encourages students’ conversation practice.

In order for the teachers to be able to provide such English communication training to their students, which will make better use of the instructional time already allotted to English, the teachers themselves should first be trained to identify key cultural items in English and how to lead and facilitate the communication practices.

I understand the government is making an effort to better train our public school English teachers through training programs organized both in Korea and abroad. I would like to further encourage the government to expand this effort and remind the officials that the training should not be only about language but also cultural context and pedagogy.

However, these efforts will go in vain if the students are not tested accordingly. If the students’ English competencies are still measured on tests that are heavily weighted toward an older notion of proficiency, neither the teachers nor the students will ever focus on gaining conversational fluency.

A recent column in The Korea Herald about math education in Korea commented that “when the metrics for learning are limited to standardized testing as it is so pervasively in Korean educational system, any type of reformed practices in the mathematics classroom are bound to fail.” The same goes with English education.

We will be able to see successful results only when comprehensive national teacher training programs focusing on pedagogy and cultural understanding are paired together with education reforms including testing method reforms.

Most importantly, this has to be based on a society-wide change in mindset that the end goal of English education in today’s world, where three-quarters of English speakers are non-native speakers, should be successful communication, rather than inflexible standard of correctness or native-speaker pronunciation.

By Yoon Seon-joo

Yoon Seon-joo is the country manager of EF Education First Korea. ― Ed.