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I have just returned from the U.S. after finishing a one-year observation and training program there. I took my son to the U.S. around this time last year when he was a second grader. He studied English very hard. A year on, he was able to watch films such as the "Harry Potter" series without subtitles and chat with American kids over the phone for 20 to 30 minutes.
After we returned to Seoul, I took my son to a private tutoring institute with a relatively good reputation in the neighborhood. A kind female teacher brought a test sheet and an optical mark read (OMR) sheet to test his proficiency. Questions required him to match pictures with the right explanations or choose "correct" or "incorrect" answers after listening to recorded English sentences. The questions on the test sheet looked similar to those of a TOEIC test.
It was the first time he had ever seen an OMR card. He didn't understand what the instruction "Choose incorrect answers" meant. The teacher turned on a record player and left the room. She allowed me to stay with him, so I watched him fill out the OMR card clumsily. He looked embarrassed and started marking wrong answers from Question 2. Unable to bear it, I corrected him.
After he finished filling out the OMR card, I asked him if he understood well what the recorded voice instructed. He said, "Yes, I could understand almost everything. But I don't think I marked the blanks as well as I should." He got about 60 points out of a possible 100 ? but if I hadn¡¯t intervened he would probably have gotten zero.
The teacher said he ¡°needs a different kind of study." She said, "If you want to learn English in Korea, you have to take this kind of level test at any private tutoring institute. With his current level of English proficiency, he will be placed in low-level classes at any institute." She meant that the technique for filling out OMR cards correctly and quickly and the ability to find catch questions about grammar fast are very important yardsticks for evaluating children's English skill. It struck me then that what Korean children need is not English but "Konglish", or a Korean-style English for various tests.
In the U.S., the English teacher in a private institute asked my son questions such as "What's your name?" and "Do you like your school?" to test his proficiency. The only test the American teacher gave my child was to count one through 20. I asked him why he conducted the test that way, and he said, "A child at this age is normally supposed to learn language on his own through listening and speaking in a natural way. He can learn grammar and writing after learning how to listen and speak first."
So many people in Korea get high marks on the TOEIC or TOEFL tests even though they can barely make themselves understood in English. Corporate executives have often complained to me, saying they felt cheated by recruits in their companies. They explained that some brand-new employees don't seem to understand a word when handling telephone calls from foreign countries, even though they had gotten top marks on the TOEIC. There are so many Konglish prodigies who can solve English grammar questions with ease but can¡¯t make themselves understood in the language.
Before the experience with my son, I believed that the prevalence of Konglish was the fault of outdated classroom education but that contemporary Korean children were learning "real English." But I realized I had misunderstood the reality. Korean children must first of all, learn Konglish techniques of choosing the right answer on tests to survive an educational environment where everybody feels relieved when all abilities are converted into points or marks. I became worried wondering how children who get such training will react when they have to speak real English. And I wondered whether they will be as unsure how to speak English properly as our own generation is today.
The column was contributed Kim Dong-seok from the Chosun Ilbo¡¯s Sports Desk.
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