A Hunger for English

Kim Hyo Jin, a timid junior high school student, stood before her American teacher fidgeting. The smiling teacher held up a green pepper and asked in clear, enunciated Eng­lish: "What is this?" "Peemang!" the South Korean teenager blurted out, then covered her mouth with a hand as if to stop—too late—the Korean word that had left her mouth.

Mortified, she tried again. Without looking the teacher in the eye, she held both her hands out and asked, this time in English: "May I have green pepper?" ⁴ Kim took the vegetable with a bow, and darted back to her giggling classmates—beaming and feeling relieved that she had successfully taken a small first step toward demolish­ing what South Koreans consider one of their biggest weaknesses in global competitiveness: the fear of speaking in English to Westerners.

Kim was among 300 junior high school students going through a wecklong training in this new "English Village." Built a few kilometers from the western border with North Korea, the government-subsidized language camp is, at 280,000 square meters, or 3 million square feet, the largest of its kind in the world, officials say.

The complex—where the motto is, "We produce global Koreans!"—looks like a minitown scooped up from a Eu­ropean country and transplanted into this South Korean countryside dotted with pine groves, rice paddies and mili­tary barbed-wire fences. It has its own immigration office, city hall, bookstore, cafeteria, gym, a main street with Western storefronts, police officers and a live-in population of 160 native English speakers. All signs are in English, the only language allowed.

Here, on a six-day immersion course that charges stu­dents 80,000 won, or $82, apiece, pupils check in to a hotel, shop, take cooking lessons and make music videos— all in English. There are language cops around, punishing students speaking Korean with a fine in the village cur­rency or red dots on their village passports. To relieve the stress, the authorities do permit students to speak their na­tive tongue a few times during their stay, usually at meal­times.

Across South Korea, the English Villages are sprouting up. Ten are already operating, with more on the way. They represent the latest big push in South Korean parents' multibillion-dollar-a-year campaign to give their children a leg up in conquering English skills.

Despite the fact that South Korea has very few natural resources, it realized early on that it must push exports and produce high-quality work forces. Education is an obses­sion. Mastering English is a nationwide quest from kids to office minions in corporate giants like Samsung and Hyundai.

"It's funny because Koreans know English," said Jeffrey Jones, former president of the American Chamber of Commerce in Korea who heads the Paju complex. "They can read, probably better than I can. However, they have trouble speaking."

Although they spend a lot of time learning English, when many Koreans see a Westerner coming their way on the street, they detour or run away.

South Korea has become one of the most aggressive countries in Asia at teaching English to its citizens. Outside the school system, parents are paying an estimated 10 tril­lion won a year to help their children learn English at home or abroad.

Nevertheless many college graduates falter in chats with native speakers. South Korean officials arc often ac­cused of grouping together in international conferences, afraid to mix with native English speakers. That, linguists say, is a result of a national school system that traditionally stresses reading and rote memorization of English gram­mar and vocabulary at the expense of conversation.

In Korea University of Seoul, 30 percent of all classes are now in English. Speaking English with a native accent has become a status symbol.

Date: 2015-12-18; view: 1668