Andrew Morse

NAC000-147 Tesol Practicum

Dr. Cho & Dr Peter
7/8/15
Instructional Unit Narrative

Part 1:
South Korea has presented all of us in the practicum course with a very
interesting cultural climate to attempt to understand and adapt to as EFL
teachers. South Korea as a nation is simultaneously placing a huge
emphasis on english education for their students, and seemingly
disregarding the importance of actually being able to speak English
proficiently. This is evident by the fact that the KSAT primarily evaluate
students on extremely difficult reading and listening comprehension exams.
This outlook has resulted in parents superseding the state educational
system en masse by sending their children on early study abroad. In this
neoliberal society, language is viewed merely as a commodity that
increases open individuals economic value, and both the society at large
and the parents continue to disregard the identity changing experience that
english education and study abroad certainly imposes on the young
students. When these students come back they are not only expected to
remain completely culturally Korean, but are faced with the widely held
opinion that they cannot enjoy the same purchase on the English language

that a native speaker could. This paper will explore all of these issues and
how they have been relevant and evident in my practicum experience.
In the 1990s the South Korean government began to include English
comprehension tests as a requirement on college entrance exams. Feeling
that students could not truly master and become effective in English use
without being educated in a native English environment, parents began to
send their children abroad to study even after early study abroad was
outlawed in 2000. "According to a report from the ministry of education and
human resource development (2006), more than 35,000 elementary and
secondary school students went abroad in the school year 2005-2006"(Jinkyu park, pg 53). Being unwillingly displaced by the parents and an English
above all mentality, many of the students are made to feel insecure about
the value of their first language, and in turn their country. They are also left
with the sense that they do not have intrinsic value to their parents, rather
their value is determined by their academic success and future job
prospects. Some of these proposed effects have made themselves quite
obvious at Kyunghwa. When one class asked what they thought common
Korean stereotypes might be, one girl suggested "korean girls are ugly".
When the size of South Korea was compared to Texas during one lesson, I
heard students shout with disappointment "Korea is so small!". I've also
heard a number of students comment that their eyes or noses are too
small, and that Americans are more attractive than Koreans. In addition,

many students have been both surprised and ecstatic to learn that
Americans are interested in their country and language. This isn't only a
result of the the emphasis placed on English language acquisition, but also
on 90's media policy change. In the 90's a ban was lifted that previous
prohibited foreign models to be used in Korean marketing, and soon after
that, the Asian financial crisis introduced a sense of insecurity over the
stability of the Korean economy. With all of this in mind, some of the
students seem to be experiencing a form of reverse nationalism, or reverse
ethnocentrism, and feel a general sense of insecurity in their Korean
identity.
Concurrent to this sense of insecurity in their identity, all of the
students are under an extreme amount of pressure to perform well
academically. Entrance into elite Korean universities is cut throat, and
academically driven students want desperately to achieve scores that will
allow them entrance. One major flaw that has emerged from this mentality
is a focus on standardized testing. Because an English section is present on
the KSAT, nearly all English education programs are catered only to doing
well on the KSAT. Strangely, the "KSAT does not include speaking and
writing components, thus leading to very little, if any, teaching of speaking
and writing in high school"(choi, pg 41). Without any focus on English
production, the English program falls into the general pattern observed in
the Korean education ideology whereby students are thought as vessels to

be filled with information, and not as humans who have their own
contributions to make. This results in many high school students who are
able to accurately read and fill in multiple choice over extremely complex
material, yet are unable to complete a writing assignment where they're
asked to summarize an article. At least not without our guidance, which was
carefully doled out to those students already confident enough in their
English use to ask questions. Many students were not comfortable enough
to do this, and as such a huge proportion of the class failed the assignment.
Kyunghwa, by having a conversation based class, does seem to be
attempting to combat this shortcoming observed throughout the country,
but with the class being worth 10% of their overall English grade, it is still
obvious where their priority lies.
It is my belief that the academic ideology that currently prevails in
Korean secondary school is creating a generation of citizens who have been
molded to be ideal consumers, with very little means of becoming
producers or asking the questions necessary to drive positive change. This
trend is not specific to South Korea, as under a neoliberal ideology where
humans are valued for their potential economic contribution as workers,
countries the world over place greater emphasis on standardized testing.
Parents, under the often veiled blanket of this ideology, treat English as a
commodity, a means to increase their children's or their own value. Early
study abroad then is not carried out with a concern for personal growth, but

for "marking the speaker as a valued individual in the global economy"(park

and low, pg 157). An outcome that for many is still impossible to achieve,
as returning students are not guaranteed job security, and are often viewed
as "suspect characters" who may threaten Korean cultural values (park and
lo, pg 157). These specific outcomes have been a little more elusive to my
observation at Kyunghwa. Kyunghwa, due to the personal life of its founder,
conspicuously fosters positive feelings and beliefs towards the United
States. With this in mind, it perhaps should have surprised me less when I
learned that the students had never heard of any of the numerous atrocities
committed by American soldiers during the Korean War. Students who have
studied abroad and wield a greater mastery of English at Kyunghwa seem
to be respected and envied by their peers, and as I am unfortunately
unable to observe the nature of their relationship with their Korean
teachers, this is the only impression I have of the social climate.
Part 2:
Kyunghwa is a private christian girls middle/highschool in Gwangju
Gyeonggi South Korea. Gwangju is a large suburb of Seoul, home to three
hundred thousand citizens, and Kyunghwa is a highly ranking private girls
school that attracts hard working and intelligent students from all over
South Korea. As such, only 30% of the schools students are from Gwangju
The other 70% who come from outside Gwangju live in the two girls
dormitories. The discrepancy in English competence between students at

Gwangju is vast and apparent. Most of the more proficient English speakers
have studied abroad, but some had surprising fluency only through their
regular school and self study. Most students though, even being high
achievers still have great trouble with English production. To attempt to
remedy this shortcoming, the school has chosen to employ native English
speakers to take a class period from the non native English teachers once a
week in order to work on conversation. This decision reflects some of the
points made by Moussu & Llurda (2008). The decision to employ native
speaking teachers implies to Kyunghwa students that the ability of native
speakers should always be trusted over that of non native speakers, and
negates the possibility of NNS teachers becoming Greatly admired by their
students because they are successful role models and are often very
motivated... And also examples of people who have become successful L2
users(Moussu & Llurda, pg 323). Instead, we were brought in as foreign
native speakers, simultaneously viewed as experts and fun, well-behaved,
and passive foreigners who's cultural differences could potentially interfere
with entrenched Korean ideology (Watson, pg 247). With these
discrepancies and factors in mind, one evident challenge in the practicum
was designing lessons that could both challenge low level English
speakers, and still engage the more proficient speakers. Another challenge
was designing lessons that would prevent the more advanced speakers
from simply completing the activity or classwork for the others. We wanted

to give the students a new perspective on foreigners, relieved of many

previously held stereotypes. And finally, a challenge that many of us felt
should be considered was how to make sure students feel pride in their
culture and their L1 while teaching the L2 required by their country.
My first lesson plan aimed to help students practice the format, and
acquire comfortability in asking English Wh questions. In Korea, English is
primarily learned through wrote memorization of KSAT examples, because
of this most students seemed uncomfortable with forming questions in
English. To me, asking questions, and knowing what questions to ask are
both extremely important parts of English proficiency and academic
advancement. By creating an activity that involves competition within
groups of three I was able to ensure that each student would have to
produce with their own questions, and could not rely on a stronger speaker.
The poster game was very effective in carrying out my language objective,
as it not only required each student to produce and ask a great number of
questions, it encouraged them to consider which questions would be the
most effective when considering each members knowledge of Korean and
English movies. The activity used approximately half English titles and half
Korean titles with the intention of not emphasizing the value of one cultures
movies over another.
My second lesson on past, present, and future tense attempted to
engage students on both a cultural and moral level. I noticed that many

students in conversation struggled to produce past or future tense

sentences, and instead spoke all of their sentences in the present tense. To
approach this perceived shortcoming, and to engage the students with a
relate-able topic, I wrote a story about a homeless elderly Korean woman, in
a Korean context, and drew upon Kyunghwa's instilled moral values of
Love, Serve, Act. The attempt of this lesson was get students to rewrite
present tense sentences in the past tense, and then to produce original
future tense sentences with an umbrella theme of helping others, and
finally to read these sentences aloud to their classmates. Without a reward,
convincing students to volunteer proved highly difficult, but when stickers
were offered as a reward, most students were able to successfully complete
the objectives. Because of the openhandedness provided by free form
writing, both intermediate and advanced English speakers were able to
complete the object with varying complexity. Overall in my lessons I
believe I was able to accomplish my goals of engaging high and low level
speakers, emphasizing and reinforcing the value of Korean culture, focusing
on dynamic English production rather than English consumption, and
addressing obvious production shortcomings shown by many of the
students. Having finished this program I am honestly able to say that if
nothing else was achieved, many students that I met grew immensely in
their confidence in using English and approaching an English speaker.
Many also explicitly expressed their joy and appreciation of our groups

interest in South Korean, and of the great growth they feel they underwent
in only six weeks.

Works Cited
Choi, I. (2008). The Impact Of EFL Testing On EFL Education In Korea. Language Testing, 25,
39-62. doi:10.1177/0265532207083744
Lucie Moussu and Enric Llurda (2008). Non-native English-speaking English language
teachers: History and research. Language Teaching, 41, pp 315-348. doi:10.1017/S0261444808005028.
Park, J. (2009). English Fever In South Korea: Its History And Symptoms. English Today,
25(01), pp 50-57. doi:10.1017/ S026607840900008X
Park, J., & Lo, A. (2012). Transnational South Korea as a site for a sociolinguistics of
globalization: Markets, timescales, neoliberalism1. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 16(2), 147-164.

doi:10.1111/j.1467-9841.2011.00524.x
Watson, I. (2012), Paradoxical Multiculturalism in South Korea. Asian Politics & Policy,
4: 233258. doi: 10.1111/j.1943-0787.2012.01338.x