The Piquancy of Teaching English to Koreans: A Reflection

Korean cuisine: hot and spicy; Koreans: hardworking. Now, put those adjectives together. That’s what you get when you teach them English. Teaching English to Koreans is a hot job in the Philippines; as a matter of fact, it closely competes with jobs being offered by call centers. And when you start teaching them, it’s like eating their spicy Kim-chi, it’s tempting; it’s engaging. But Lo and behold! You’ve got to be their copycat too when it comes to conscientiousness. Or, you’re out of the circuit. That’s the magic.

Teaching English, specifically to Koreans, has its own magic that can either encourage psycholinguists to conduct more research on second language acquisition or frustrate classroom teachers due to their students’ ineptitude in using their target language. In the Philippines, there are two general things that veteran and neophyte ESL teachers will agree (when it comes to teaching Koreans). First, the interference of their students’ native language in learning English as a second language is further aggravated by their cultural baggage. Second, their students’ “background” in the English language makes it even more difficult to enable them to speak, write, and of course understand English beyond the four walls of the classroom. These two factors, whether overtly or covertly observed, are the challenges that English teachers need to address if they want to make their Korean students speak their target language within the time frame specified in their curriculum.

Sadly, many Koreans feel that their language acquisition improvement is very slow if not dismal. Of course, learning involves many underpinning factors that should always be taken into consideration every time an evaluation is made. As previously pointed out, students have their own share of the problem; however, such a realization can only be thrashed out if teachers are pedagogically and linguistically trained in order to “teach.” This is where the piquancy comes in.

In my years of teaching ESL in the Philippines, I discovered several factors that aggravate the inherent problems of the Korean learners. First, many teachers are NOT properly trained to teach English. As such, the learning process is sacrificed, the lessons are half-baked, and the whole process morphs into a hotchpotch of this and that without a clear sense of purpose and direction.

Now, what do I mean by “not properly trained”? It is a fact that 90 percent if not 100 percent of the existing (Korean) language schools in the Philippines are owned and managed by Koreans themselves. Most of these owners are businessmen; some of them are Christian missionaries. The former, just like any other businessmen, obviously want to gain profit; the latter, however, for some reasons drift between doing missionary work and doing “small business.” Given the said scenario, the recruitment of teachers is left to the hands of the owners who, most often than not, are non-educators or to their representatives who, sadly, obsequiously follow their employer's demands, prerogatives, and sometimes preposterous policies. Some of them include recruitment, tenure, and termination procedures. Since most of the professional language teachers are either employed as high school teachers or university instructors or professors, most of the applicants are from fields other than teaching, and language education. As a result, even those who do not have a formal training or a background in teaching are hired as “teachers just to fill the demand for English teachers” so long as they meet the minimum qualifications, namely: ability to speak English (preferably American English), pleasing personality, and college education. This is where the problem starts and its effects are magnified a hundredfold.

Those who are hired to teach, despite their linguistic and/or pedagogical inadequacies, try their best to bring about meaningful teaching in their respective classrooms. Sometimes, they are given in-house training sessions or mentoring to improve their craft; others conduct research to learn teaching techniques and strategies by reading books, surfing the net, and attending workshops and seminars. All these, admittedly, are vital and should be encouraged. However, with this practice, it appears that students have somehow become their guinea pigs; and teaching has been reduced to trial and error.
With this current state, there is no doubt that mediocrity has been lurking around many language schools in the Philippines. For sure, no one wants to be called mediocre nor anyone would be upfront and say that he or she is part of a mediocre school. For sure, no one will claim that there are language schools that have no problems. For sure, no one can say and boldly tell the whole world that all ESL teachers in Korean language schools in the Philippines can correctly and properly assess their students linguistic needs and empower them to be communicatively competent without them undergoing a rigid and formal training in language teaching. For sure, many are aware of this problem but they have chosen to keep mum about it for reasons beyond their control.

Thus, superficial learning has
“debilitated” many if not all Korean students. As previously espoused, students need to unlearn and relearn and set aside their cultural baggage so that learning can take place minus the hitches and glitches that have been haunting them. Of course, this can only be done with the help of teachers who are linguistically and pedagogically trained. Unfortunately, however, these kinds of teachers are a handful and usually are at loggerheads with the owners of most of these existing English language schools in the Philippines.