Introduction
After years of high-speed economic growth most of the 22 countries in the Asia-Pacific region have stumbled. A regional financial crisis has left currencies weak, work forces diminished, and the links between business and government exposed to outside scrutiny. As a result, fewer language learners study abroad, fewer companies offer language training, public institutions are increasingly being relied upon, and Ministry of Education-approved curricula are more open to criticism.
For half a century, Asian banks, labor, management and government invested heavily in technology and education. Interest in foreign language learning, notably English, reached its highest level ever in the multi-year curriculum plans approved by many of the region's ministries of education. In 1995, the two Koreas, Thailand, Indonesia, and China acted almost simultaneously to introduce English classes at the public elementary school level.
This month's column profiles the teaching of English to children in South Korea under an eight-year Ministry of Education plan. Korea's newest curriculum emphasizes the communicative learning approach and challenges conventional teaching roles, and, for the first time, allows public schools to purchase commercially published English textbooks.
In contrast, Japan is still making plans for English to be taught as a part of general studies to improve international understanding. Such classes intend to expose Japanese children to other cultures, and promote the enjoyment of English, not necessarily the acquisition of communications skills.
by David McMurray, Fukui Prefectural University
The Korean public educational system has been overhauled six times since the end of the Korean War in 1953. Each major change was made in response to dramatic shifts in politics, the economy, and perceived new opportunities in the educational environment. The focus of the current national curriculum is to effectively introduce English education at the elementary school level.
Korean elementary school administrators and teachers are now grappling with several new changes that concern the way current policy-makers want English to be taught to children. The new curriculum ranks speaking as the most important of the four skills. Schools have been directed to become places of learning rather than teaching. Teachers have been asked to help students develop their own learning styles, and encourage students to learn by doing. Classrooms are being divided into separate areas for students to participate in small group activities according to these learning styles. For the first time, administrators and school librarians have been permitted to purchase English textbooks other than those officially commissioned by the Ministry of Education. School boards have been directed to purchase audiovisual equipment, although they are also under intense pressure to reduce spending.
This paper examines these and other changes that have resulted from the latest national curriculum directive to introduce English at the elementary school level, focussing on textbook writing, teacher-student roles, and the classroom.
The National Curriculum
Public education in Korea is guided by the national curriculum, a legal directive from the Ministry of Education to administrators of elementary, and junior and senior high schools. The national curriculum dictates textbook writing, teacher roles, student activities, classroom interactions, and pre-service and in-service teacher training. It controls all textbook publication and related educational materials such as computer programs, language laboratory tapes and test papers. The curriculum also sets the tone for the particular thrust that government leaders would like to see instilled in young Koreans.
During the post-war history of Korea, each national curriculum survived approximately eight years before being changed to meet perceived new needs. Over the past thirty years, English education in Korea has gradually shifted its focus from a grammar-translation method, to audio-lingual approaches, to a communicative approach. Despite this changing focus on the methodology, English education has always been criticized for producing structurally competent but usually communicatively incompetent students (Johnson, 1982). The latest curriculum sets out to improve this weakness. The introduction of English education at the elementary school level has placed a heavy emphasis on how students use English rather than on what they know about English.
Historical Development
The Ministry of Education has been in charge of setting the national curriculum since 1954, the first of which lasted until 1963. The needs of education at that time were identified as vocation, ethics, and anti-communism. The curriculum named the subjects to be taught, and specified the timetables for each different grade from elementary to high school level. The first curriculum was put to an end as an incoming new government took over in a military coup. The second curriculum ran until 1973. It emphasized self-determination and self-reliance. The Ministry of Education joined in a strong centralized government push towards improving the economy. Pragmatic goals were set under the influence of the American educational philosophy of that time. The third curriculum (1973-1981) focussed on learning skills and ethics to placate an increasingly restless population. The fourth curriculum lasted until 1987, emphasizing science and technology, civil and physical education. The fifth curriculum (1987-1995) focussed on basic skills training, computer education, and efficiency. It introduced a guidebook of instructions on how to implement the policies set in the increasingly complex national curriculum. The current curriculum took effect in 1995 and is based on past precedent. It should also last for eight years. If so, it will carry the country into the new millennium. It updates the previous curriculum centered on computers and special education. The first to focus on improving foreign language education, the sixth curriculum provides the basis for introducing English education into elementary schools.
The Current Curriculum
The Ministry of Education (1995) identified the following reasons to support its policy to promote the learning of English into the new millennium:
- Korea is a world trading partner and the commercial trading language is English.
- The Korean government wants to promote the installation of an information infrastructure connecting information centers with homes and schools. Over 85% of information available by computer is conveyed in English.
- The Korean job market demands competent Korean and English bilingual speakers.
An assessment by Lee (1994) of the current command of English reports that Korean university students are generally not able to continue conversations longer than one or two sentences. This is attributed to the students' high school study pattern that over-emphasized the attainment of correctness at the sentence level. The sentence is the maximum unit for grammatical analysis, and the correctness of grammar rarely exceeds it. Concepts of communication and appropriacy are needed to take users beyond this level (Hymes, 1972).
Since students cannot communicate more than a few sentences after six years of study at junior and senior high schools, the Ministry decided it needed to begin its overhaul of the education system at the elementary school level. Elementary school students are curious, and their experiences strongly influence their thoughts and actions. Elementary English education can utilize these conditions to motivate the young to learn English and to continue until later in their lives.
The goals set for elementary school English learning are to help students to be confident and maintain an interest in English and to learn basic communicative competence. The specific aims set down by the Ministry are:
- Acquire competence in listening and understanding simple English (i.e., greetings, introductions, asking favors, requests, directions, and suggestions).
- Acquire competence in reading and understanding simple English (i.e., the alphabet, relationships between verbal and written English, words and their meanings, and simple sentences).
- Acquire competence in verbal expression (i.e., pronunciation, greetings, introductions, thanks, apologies, asking favors, requests, directions, suggestions and short directed conversations).
- Acquire competence in writing simple English (i.e., the alphabet, simple words and sentences, punctuation, distinguishing lower and upper cases).
To overcome the Korean students' poor performance in conversation, the Ministry decided that the current national curriculum would be based on the communicative approach. It therefore changed the conventional roles of teachers and students in the Korean classroom by specifically directing elementary school teachers to implement communicative, cognitive, and humanistic approaches. Since the communicative approach regards language as a socio-cultural product and its prime purpose is communication, the Ministry asked that language learning focus on activities which would enhance communicative competence.
The cognitive approach in language learning encourages the connecting of new materials and topics to the students' already existing network of knowledge. Most elementary school subjects are taught by one homeroom teacher, therefore the learning environment fits well with this approach. Teachers can integrate these different courses through topics, functions, and materials. For example, the alphabet song can be taught in both the music and English classes.
The current curriculum also emphasizes taking a more humanistic approach. Humans have different ways of learning, and teachers were asked to assess their students' preferred learning styles and subject contents.
Educational Materials
Formerly, all elementary textbooks were produced by the Ministry of Education as commissioned projects. Since 1996 however, competitive screening procedures have been implemented to allow the selection of textbooks published by commercial publishers. These books must still meet rigid curriculum guidelines and standards, but this change is a major breakthrough. Additional resources include teachers' guides and audio and video tapes.
In Korea there are two kinds of textbooks in use from elementary to high schools. Class I books are produced as commissioned projects by the Ministry. Class II textbooks are published by private companies and conform to the national curriculum. Most current elementary English textbooks belong to Class II. All English texts contain 16 lessons. One lesson covers four class hours. The structures in general show that listening activities appear at the beginning of each lesson and speaking follows. The listening portion of textbooks include games and pointing to the appropriate pictures while listening. Speaking sections include songs, repetition activities, pronunciation practice, and communicative activities. As they are designed to foster the oral proficiency of students, the materials look like picture books, without many written words.
The emphasis on oral proficiency has meant that audio-visual equipment was purchased for every classroom to provide authentic pronunciation. For most elementary school classrooms this has meant a new overhead projector, an opaque projector, 43-inch wide television screen or multi-vision monitor, a video, and an audio set.
Audio tapes contain authentic recordings by native English speakers using the textbook dialogues, songs and chants. They are distributed to students along with textbooks. The audio tapes are mostly used for students to review what they learned in classes by listening to the authentic pronunciation of native speakers. Video tapes for teachers and their students show ideal situations of how to conduct given activities and how to sing along to songs with gestures in the text. Video tapes usually contain the key content of each class and present it in a interesting format such as cartoons, animation, and role plays.
The teachers' guide contains an explanation of the national curriculum, a brief history of teaching methods from grammar-translation to communicative approaches, the structure of textbook, the usage of audio and video tapes, and a procedural guide for each lesson. Picture books without any written text or instructions to the student create a real need for teachers' guides on how to use the textbooks effectively in classrooms. Teachers depend on the teacher's guide because of the combined use of audio and video materials.
Conclusion
Elementary English education is not unique to Korea. It has become a recent Pan-Asian phenomenon spanning China, Thailand, North Korea, Iraq, Malaysia, Laos, Indonesia, and Nepal. Japan has decided not to implement the teaching of English as a foreign language at the elementary level. Instead, by the year 2000, students will be introduced to English through studies of international understanding (Lee, 1994, pp. 11-13).
Elementary school children in Korea have had only three years of formal English instruction. It is still too early to judge whether or not English education at the elementary school level in Korea was a wise decision. Collaborative research into the effects of early English education by administrators and the teachers in these Asian countries could be helpful to speed the implementation and evaluation process.
References
Hymes, T. (1972). On communicative competence. In J. B. Pride & J. Holmes (Eds.) Socio-linguistics. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books.
Johnson, T. (1982). Communicative syllabus design and methodology. Oxford: Pergamon Press.
Lee, W. (1994). Chodung yeonge kyoyukron [Elementary English education]. Seoul: Moonjin-dang.
Ministry of Education. (1995). The national curriculum of study. Seoul, Korea: Author.