Realities of English-only classes in Korea: teachers should not be blamed

Bong-gi Sohn, Second Language Studies

This study focuses how the present literature investigating teachers in English as a foreign language context is uncritically blaming teachers for language shortcomings. I will also investigate what can be done to resolve this undesirable situation in the field of English Language Teaching. The goal of the current Korean curriculum (Ministry of Education & Human Resources, Seoul, 1998) is deeply influenced by the pressures of globalization and highlights speaking English instead of studying the structure of the language. Based on Krashen’s Natural Approach (1983) and Communicative Language Teaching (Richard, J. & Rodgers, T, 1986), the current curriculum requires teachers to maximize English input, but it ambiguously states how to follow this L2-input only policy. Recent criticism of Korean elementary school English teachers focuses on putative deficiencies as sources for generating classroom English input (Goto, 2004; Lee, 2001). By contrast, this study explores how teachers in Korea perceive their roles as sources of language input, both Korean and English and inquires what kinds of socio-economic barriers they have. There are four participants in this study: an experienced American teacher fluent in Korean, a novice American teacher with little fluency in Korean, an experienced Korean teacher with little fluency in English, and a novice Korean teacher fluent in English. There are open-ended research questions for interviewing these teachers and I will reflect on my earlier classroom observation of all these teachers. Drawn from their responses and classroom observation, I will question whether English-only input is a realistic goal in the Korean context.