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Problems for learners in South KoreaIt is evident from the reports on tests given South Koreans?such as the General Training Module IELTS?that serious problems remain in the teaching of english here. Considering the huge amounts of government money and the ubiquity of native english speakers across the educational system, it is an ongoing disgrace that South Korea ends up dead last or second to last in such tests, among all the nations of the world. Apart from the different alphabet, the different word order, the lack of articles ?the? and ?a? and other issues I will address later, Jon Huer of the Korea Times points to South Korea?s cultural stubbornness and insularity. Only in Korea, he says, ?are national pride and learning a foreign language natural enemies of each other. They want english to come to Korea?s culture?to fit Korea?s way of thinking, not the other way around?(The Korea Times 6.14.09 Jon Huer, emphasis mine). For the recent IAAF Championships in Daegu, the only major world track and field event of 2011, the city issued an all-purpose card for transportation, calling it ?Toppass?, missing a sexual overtone that could easily have been caught early on by a native speaker; which it probably was, but the correction was resisted! The Korean system in general emphasizes copying and memorization over interactive models familiar in the West; in this, they follow Confucius, reflected also in the teacher-student relationship, which favors all-giving on the teacher?s part, and all-receiving on the students?. As a result, as Timothy O?Donnell points out in the Asian EFL Journal(p.7), ?english has been mainly taught through grammar translation in acquisition-poor environments?. Exacerbating this misfortune is the canting of all educational effort, from late grade-school onward, toward university entrance and the big exam for high school seniors held around Nov. 10th annually. As Cho Byung-Eun of Sung Kong Hoe University, Seoul, says ?this tends to make students extremely exam-conscious leading to excessive emphasis on reading and grammar?(East Asian Learner Vol 1(2) Nov. ?04, p. 31). As for the actual interface between the two languages, professor Cho goes on to say that ?the phonetic system, the syntactic structure and the semantics of the two languages are so different that the transition from one language to the other requires enormous efforts for the learner?(Cho, op. cit. p. 32). Phonetically, in Korean each letter corresponds to a sound unit(phoneme). english letters(graphemes) do not have one sound but can be pronounced in several different ways from word to word. Korean consonants are voiceless while english has voiced and voiceless stops, fricatives and affricates; for example, with the english letters b,d,g,r,th and z. The notorious r/l quandary for Koreans is due to the sounds both being liquid in Korean. Korean syllabic form requires that a consonant be followed by a vowel, posing a difficulty for the learner with our 2 and 3 consonant combinations, such as in ?straight?. In accordance with its strict one-to-one correspondence of letter and sound, Koreans put a full stress for vowel sounds while english has unstressed and even silent vowels in words. In regard to actual speaking, Korean is syllable-timed rather than stress-timed, making it difficult for the english learner to understand that a single sentence with exactly the same words can mean 6 different things, depending on the rhythm and sound. From the point of view of syntax, Korean sentence order is SOV rather than SVO, as in english. Verbs do not conjugate and the syntax rules almost prohibit the common english use of relative and dependent clauses. Thus, the learner will want to express his thoughts one at a time, as in ? I want to meet Obama. I will write him a letter? rather than ?I will write to Obama, whom I want to meet?. To the extent that language acquisition requires interaction , flexibility and risk-taking, the Korean learner is at a considerable disadvantage. As professor Cho says, the students ?have been trained to express themselves indirectly and to think inclusively in case they might offend others?( Cho,op.cit. p. 34). Despite their wonderful friendliness and welcome, it is dismaying to realize that having said ?Hello?, many of my Korean students are unable to answer the question ?How are you??, much less anything beyond small talk. I can understand with professor Cho that through lack of native speaker ?intuition?, the Korean learner is stuck with getting the face value but not the nuances of english expression. In effect, the student has been dropped into a maze with ?a? ?an? and ?the? appearing and disappearing seemingly without rhyme or reason; and this leaves aside the problem of prepositions with their perverse habit of completely changing the meaning of the verbs with which they are paired. I feel sorry for my students, but I also admire their pluck and willingness ?for the most part?to continue struggling with english. The invention of Konglish, though extremely annoying at times, represents to me a visceral response to an impossible waterfall of senseless idiosyncratic data coming at them, in which they dimly sense there must be something of value. After all, it is the world language, and there is only one world. But wait! Maybe if we could just find a planet out there where only Korean is spoken(and no Konglish).
