Teaching Korean in English

입력 2009. 4. 23. 01:45 수정 2009. 4. 24. 00:05
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Robert Fouser, the first foreign professor at the Department of Korean Language Education at Seoul National University, is in new academic territory.

His job is to teach Korean students how to teach Korean - in English.

Fouser is teaching language-related courses such as sociolinguistics for undergraduate Korean majors and teaching Korean as a foreign language for graduate school students.

For Fouser, Korean education for foreigners is in an important turning point. Before he came back to Korea last September for SNU, he taught English and teaching methods in Japan. At Kagoshima University in particular, he set up a Korean language course and taught Korean to Japanese students.

"Some people might treat Hallyu as superficial, but the real boom place (of Korean language education) is Japan," Fouser said. "The fascinating thing about Korean was that Japanese students don`t like English but they like Korean."

As a professor engaged in the spread of Korean language at an international level, Fouser said a dramatic change was under way thanks partly to the popularity of Korean pop culture in Japan and elsewhere in Asia.

When Japanese students did a review of his Korean class at Kagoshima, more than half of them said they were teaching their mothers Hangeul - underscoring the interest in the Korean language in Japan.

"So they go home and teach their mothers what they learn," Fouser said. "If you teach English in Japan, nothing goes out of the classroom."

But Fouser said Korea was yet to sharpen and promote its cultural identity, which could attract foreign learners of Korean. The majority of Western students interested in Asia tend to choose either China or Japan studies, a trend that has not changed much in recent decades.

Fouser said Japan had a sort of exotic orientalism that draws in Western students, and China has a scale that dwarfs its neighbors. He noted that Korea could not fight against the existing characteristics of Japan and China studies. Rather, Korea should focus on its lesser-known strength.

"What is appealing about Korea is flexibility, and ability to change," Fouser said. "You wake up in the morning but you don`t know what you are going to do in the afternoon because there`s spontaneity."

Fouser said Korea also has an informality and openness to change, related to the rapid growth of information technology - a cultural aspect clearly different from China and Japan.

While some Koreans tend to apologize for their fast-paced cultural quality, Fouser said Korean should turn that into a positive aspect that can be viewed unique and appealing as from an academic perspective.

As for the translation of Korean literature into English, Fouser said state institutions and cultural foundations should not attach restrictions on the qualifications of translators. In recent years, major state agencies gave out more grants to pairs between a Korean translator and English-speaking counterpart, assuming that a single translator might be at a disadvantage in terms of translation quality.

Fouser, however, said that there should be no restriction for translators as long as the candidates have good English writing skills. Fouser, who translated "Understanding Korean Literature" into English in 1997, said he believes that, native speaker or not, the person has to have good English and some sense of Korean to apply for a translation grant.

As for the English education fever, especially targeting young learners, Fouser said Korean policymakers should rethink the practical aspect first. For instance, many young Korean learners can benefit in many ways when they learn Chinese characters rather than English. The Korean language uses plenty of words based on "hanja," or Chinese characters, many of which are shared by Chinese and Japanese speakers.

"I`m not impressed with the idea of early English education," Fouser said. Good English education can start later in life, and what`s important is not how early one starts learning English but how long he or she extends the skills at a practical level, he said.

In this regard, English programs at high school and college level should be strengthened, he added.

Fouser also encouraged Korean learners of foreign languages to develop writing skills. Writing is widely considered a difficult field compared with speaking, reading and listening, but he said that writing can be the most useful skill in the era of e-mail and online communications.

"With English being an academic language, being able to write in English gives you good communication skills, it helps you organize your thinking, it helps you review grammar and strengthens vocabulary," Fouser said.

Fouser, born in 1961, majored in Japanese language and literature at the University of Michigan. To study another Asian language, he came to Korea after graduating in 1983 and studied Korean for a year before returning to the United States, where he earned a master`s degree in foreign language education.

In 1987 he returned to Korea to teach English for six years at Korea University and the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology. In 2001, Fouser obtained a Ph.D. in applied linguistics at Trinity College Dublin.

By Yang Sung-jin

(insight@heraldm.com)

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