The lost opportunity of Korean language teaching

The Korea Times

The Korea Times

Opinion

Mark Peterson

The lost opportunity of Korean language teaching

Posted : 2023-05-07 16:30

Updated : 2023-05-07 16:30

By Mark Peterson

On my recent trip to Korea, I had the privilege of sitting down with an old friend and "hubae," Ross King, Ph.D. in linguistics from Harvard and professor at the University of British Columbia. We talked about the dismal standing of Korean Language Education (KLE) in North America.

On the one hand, KLE in universities and high schools across the United States and Canada is booming, but on the other hand, we are light years behind our competitors, Japanese and Chinese language education.

So, on the one hand, we've made great progress, but on the other hand, it's like we're proud to be running in the Boston Marathon with the big boys and we think we're doing great on the long stretch into Framingham ― doing great ― but then we find out Japanese and Chinese education are already in downtown Boston. They are at kilometer 38, and we are at kilometer 10. If that!

Without more investments now, we ― and especially Korea ― are way behind and missing precious opportunities to create lifelong learners of Korean.

Another way to gauge the situation is to look at two statistics, pointed out by King. Our total enrollment at North American universities is about 15,000. This is huge growth, but still barely 1 percent of all language enrollments. To get a sense of the magnitude of the opportunities being missed, look at Duolingo, the app for language learning on the smartphone. Korean has 11 million users. That gap between 15K and 11M is the opportunity gap that we are unable to take advantage of. Our universities don't have the classes or the teachers, and there are no scholarships for North American students to incentivize investing long-term in Korean.

Why? At this point in human progress, K-pop and K-culture are lighting up the world. At my university, 20 years ago we had to beg the dean to allow us to carry a class of Korean 101 with less than 15 students, the minimum. We'd argue that if we can't carry a 101 class, we'll never carry a 102, and 201, etc. So the dean would let us carry the class with 12, or 10 or eight! Now we have five or six sections of Korean 101 and waiting lists to start Korean in the next semester. In fact, nationally, Korean is the only language ― the only language ― showing a growth trend. Japanese, Chinese, Spanish, French and others are leveled off or dropping.

So we've come a long way, quickly, and yes, we can thank the K-wave for the increased enrollments, but we are falling far short of our potential. We have students at universities that can take a first-year course, and maybe a second-year course, but that's the end of the line. No advanced language learning in Korean in many, many universities. No scholarships to study in Korea on exchange. And minimal progress in high schools.

The difference is infrastructure and support from Korea. Not just from the Korea Foundation ― which is doing the best it can with a puny budget but falling short by a factor of 10. Korean corporations and private foundations are nowhere to be seen. This is quite unlike Japan, where the Japan Foundation has given huge support to Japanese studies in America since the 1970s, but also Japanese corporations have contributed to university chairs and endowments. Not "soft money" but "hard money" endowments. Thus, although the Japanese economy is in the tank, the infrastructure is in place such that it dwarfs what the Korea Foundation alone has done.

This has a dramatic impact beyond language learning. Look at the recent brouhaha over the Harvard Law School professor who wrote an article stating that comfort women were all contracted, volunteer laborers. The article was completely debunked in America and Korea and around the world ― he showed not one contract as proof, and he did not recognize that most of the women were functionally illiterate. But in Japan, the article took hold, and now the latest iteration of textbooks has accepted that point of view. Who wrote the article? A professor sitting in the Mitsubishi Chair of Japanese Legal Studies at Harvard. Japan's investment 32 years ago is paying dividends now.

So far, Korean support for Korean Studies infrastructure in North America has been funneled through the Korea Foundation. And they have been more than generous, but they are scooping porridge from the pot with a cup, while Japan and China have for a longer time been using a gallon jug.

We are missing a golden moment. While K-pop and K-movies and all the rest are "hot," we should be doing all we can to sink deep roots. Popularity is fleeting. Now is the time to seize the moment and invest in long-term infrastructure by funding Korean language programs and Korean Studies programs in North America.

Mark Peterson (markpeterson@byu.edu) is a professor emeritus of Korean, Asian and Near Eastern languages at Brigham Young University in Utah.