Language Learning Acquisition: The Case Study Of ESL In South Korea

The Issue and Context (500 Words)

Language is one of many symbols that is used to represent the existence of one social group, society, and on a larger scale, nation. It is uttered into oral or written form to express human emotion, feeling, affection, and many more. It expresses ideas, opinions, thoughts, and all other things through every word. Then, the combination of the words will create several sentences and each of the sentences has its different meanings. After that, this product of language is used as a communication tool in society. It helps people to interact easily with the interlocutor or the partner in the conversation. As we can see, there are various languages in the world and each country has its language to express its identity to the world. It is called the mother tongue, the first language which will be acquired by the people of a certain society or nation since they were a child.

Since language is a very significant communicative tool used in the world and because there’s a wide range of language types in the world, the English language is chosen as the bridge for communication, or lingua franca. In another word, English is an international language that is used to communicate in every part of the whole world. It is the very first reason why all people around the world should learn English as an addition to their language. Based on the difference in how the language is used, English is divided into three different types. English as a Native Language (ENL) means that English is the first language or mother tongue for people in a certain country such as the United States of America, the United Kingdom, Australia, etc. They learned English since they were children. Next, English as a Second Language (ESL) means English is the second or next language they acquire after their first language. Countries like India, the Philippines, and South Africa are examples. The last type is English as a Foreign Language (EFL) that refers to how English is known or used by people who are unfamiliar with the language because it is a foreign language for them. Furthermore, some obstacles occur in several countries in which English is not their first language. The challenges that occur to the ESL and EFL learners can come from extrinsic or intrinsic challenges. ESL and EFL learners are known as individuals with different personalities, attitudes, and characters, and the problem of learning the English language is usually caused by the learners’ inconveniences towards the language. They can easily get stressed about the language since they find it is unfamiliar and difficult for them to understand, yet to adapt to their daily lives. The lack of motivation from the learners inhibits them to learn the language since they don’t have a thought that it is necessary to learn the new language. In the other hand, some learners are struggling to learn the new language, but when they heard negative comments about their not-yet-perfect development, suddenly the desire in learning the English decreases. They are afraid to express the language again.

The other challenge for ESL and EFL learners is the strong influence of the mother tongue in their daily life. They feel it is easier to communicate by using their mother tongue instead of the target language, and in fact, they tend to fail using the target language in the conversation even as a practice. When they started trying to do a conversation in English, they are most likely to feel confused because of having minimal knowledge of vocabulary and grammar and end up having nothing to say. The lack of teaching approaches and learning strategies could be a great factor that produces these challenges.

The Relevant Research Evidence (700 Words)

In South Korea, English is a foreign language in the country. There’s a very broad generalization that many South Koreans cannot speak English, and if they can, they commonly can’t manage to perform it well. If you run to a South Korean who speaks English well, it is most likely that they had a competent English conversation teacher, or be having a high class in society which allows them to study in good schools or work in good companies that provide access to the international world especially English language so that they’ll be able to familiarize towards the language easier to learn and master it properly. But other than that, there’s a real struggle in finding South Koreans with fluent English in communication aspects. There are strong believes in South Korean society that as long as they had Korean, they will not find the concrete need in having good competence in English communications. Besides, it is hard enough for them to be able to be good at it even though they have studied hard at a particular time being.

Some South Korean may be able to write and read in English supported by the fact of they still attend English language education classes in their schools, but still, they find it difficult in listening, speaking, and processing English into their native language. This leads them to not have good communication competencies in the English language. Even looking at the fact that they weren’t able to speak in English, it has been common knowledge that their pronunciations are still far from the way it should be.

In 2010, an article in the Korea Times mentioned that the country ranked first in the world on spending money on English Language Education, but placed 121st in English language speaking ability. An estimation of the education costs around 17% of the nation’s GNP or Gross National Product, and 1.9% from that total, or around KR‎₩ 15 trillion (US$ 15.8 billion) spent on foreign languages education such as English. Despite the extremely large investment and educational enthusiasm, the English language skills of Koreans still have not improved and remained at the same average level over the past few years (Korea Herald). The reason for people’s English is still not improving is that they don’t practice to make it better. About 98% of interactions in extracurricular linguistics in schools are in Korean. In many cases, South Koreans with developing communicative competencies are the ones who are on the higher level of living, for example, the richest ones, or the ones who are in the environment that obliged them to have excellent skills in English languages, such as certain work fields and students who went exchange to other countries. While the rest are still stuck with the same situations and abilities for years. Some even got worse and lose their previous abilities, in the worst cases.

For the most of students in Korea, the English language majorly remains just as an academic exercise or practices with so little encouragement to learn more than what has been required to pass in tests such as Suneung, or the College Scholastic Ability Test, and company entrance exams. For his research, Kang (2000) interviewed around 200 Korean 9th-grade students about their motivations in learning English, which gave him the results of the major motivations and reasons were all classified as extrinsic instead of intrinsic ones. The motivation for many South Korean people to study and have good communicative competence in English is caused by the desire of travelling and or studying abroad. While the motivations of adults in South Korea to be involved in English classes covers a large variety of the longing for emigration or even simply wanting to meet and have conversations with foreigners without experiencing any significant hardship. Unless so, they still have not found the ‘concrete’ need for learning English. There is a great challenge in trying to convince students about the importance of improving English language skills, and the same goes for all the other groups in society.

In the other hand, most of Korean children study English in both public and private schools from third grade forward, but English is only taught majorly by Korean-born teachers or instructors, and they are most likely to teach simple vocabularies only. This means there are only little chances for the students to use English in actual conversations, and whenever they do, they are not properly guided to perform well as how they are supposed to be.

Using the Evidence in Relation to the Issue (1000 Words)

The evidence explained above are most likely to be caused by ‘Linguistic Aspects of Interlanguage’. Linguistic facts have been able to be used in explaining and predicting acquisition. One good example of how linguistic inquisition can give a reason for interlanguage improvement could be found by studying relative clauses. It can be stated that linguistic elements and its regulations can easily give influence to language acquisition.

English language learners in South Korea face various challenges in acquiring the language on a high level of proficiency, even though English has been introduced to children at a considerably young age. Since around the 1950s, English language education has been included in the curriculum since the fourth age of the primary school, thus far only a small part of an outnumbered group has become proficient in the terms of communicative competence. It is a shame to admit that the reason to this matter has derived from the social and cultural dissimilarity, the Korean Educational System, and also a big factor contributed by the noteworthy contrast between the two languages of Korean and English.

Issue Correlating to Social and Cultural Dissimilarity

Since the beginning, both social and cultural differences appear to be the centre of all reasons why South Koreans feel challenged to become proficient in English. First of all, South Korea is a country with a stratiform society. There is evidence in their social habitual actions, human communications, and language. Their language varies when it comes to the different people they are communicating with, such as a close friend versus a higher rank official. Those kinds of differentiation do not appear in the English language. Even though the level and attitude of courtesy may not be the same, the language used among children and parents, students and teachers, or friends to strangers stays the same. The use of language or the language structure in English does not vary when it comes to social ranks and the use of the language remains constant in social situations. On the other hand, there are seven different levels of speech in South Korea, all composed for particular social hierarchy and situation circumstances. Therefore, communities are used to be taught to speak appropriately ‘up or down’ and as they could not find these kinds of difference in the English language, not infrequently they find it intimidating to address someone in English with the ‘uneducated’ way of speaking which is considered to be impolite and certain to be having an issue in building up their social norms and familiarised social behaviour.

Other cultural factors include the way people in South Korea has always been taught to voice themselves in mostly indirect manners, in the ways that they are taught to think comprehensively and used to be trained to express themselves not immediately so that their actions would not be found offensive to others. While in speaking English we express ourselves clearly and directly for most parts. Each time South Koreans try expressing themselves in English, this deep-seated frame of mind addends the inadequacy of structural difference in the English language can easily cause an immense obstacle in exchanging information related to their thoughts and or emotions.

Issue Caused by the English Education set by the Korean School Systems

The next obstacle to be in the way of South Korean learners can be seen in the ways English education is administered in the school systems in the country. Studying English is considered to be very important to South Korean people and in fact, primary school students have been introduced to the language since the fourth age forward in the way that English is included in their primary school curriculums. Besides that, students are used to be offered to two 40 minutes classes each week to encourage their interests in the English language using various approaches such as games, music, and movies.

Class sizes in South Korea are majorly large with more or less 40 students in each class which leaves them and the teacher quite difficult situation to interact well. In junior high school, students of South Korea learn English as one of the major subjects and focused hard on the learning process as those are the times which is considered as a preparative level for higher education and for that reason, the focus converted to grammar and all the textbook knowledge. Both the middle school students and teachers for the most part concentrate on skills, grammar, reading, writing, and exam questions. Along these lines, conversation sessions have no longer exist. Even though students may have acknowledged vocabularies and have a strong understanding of grammar, their ability has only grown from textbooks and carries a minimal resemblance to communicated or spoken English by native speakers in general.

Issue Correlating to the Dissimilar Linguistic Aspects

Another consequential obstacle South Korean learners have been facing is the dissimilarity that lays between their first language, Korean, and the targeted language, English. There are so many important linguistic aspects they have to understand and apply to have perfect communication competence. Starting from the phonetic and phonology systems of both languages which are all immensely different. There are so many sounds in the English language that does not appear in the Korean language, and this alone has caused a large group of difficulties for South Korean learners in the terms of English pronunciation. For example, sounds including ‘f’, hard ‘r’, ‘v’, and ‘x’ sounds, and also the combined sounds such as ‘urt’ in the word ‘fourteenth’. It is even more complicated in the use of the phonetic spellings of words in English using Hangeul, the Korean characters, and in addition to applying Korean language rules to words in English.

South Korean learners feel very difficulty in comprehending the different spellings and sounds in the English language in the terms of phonetic and phonology systems because, in Korean, every letter (consonant) harmonises to a sound (vowel). What is more, there are consonants and vowel of the English language that does not subsist between the rows of Korean letters, such as f, l, hard r, v, or some exact sounds like ‘a’ for ‘apple’ or ‘i’ for ‘mine’. It is also difficult for them to pronounce words with sound structure and combinations that demands particular movements in speech organs such as lips, teeth, tongue, throat, etc – which is not in their native languages, and this caused incorrect pronunciation in sounds like “th” that is impossible without particular training, practices, and so on.

The main thing to be blamed for this struggle in pronunciation is teaching the children from a very young age on using Hangeul in spelling and pronouncing the English words phonetically. Generally known examples for this case are ‘heart’ becoming ‘harteu’, ‘forever’ becoming ‘borebeo’, ‘catch’ becoming ‘kaetchi’, and so on. Dunsmore (2018) mentioned that she often witnessed students take around 5 minutes in ‘translating’ the English words to phonetic spellings that they find easier than take almost the same amount of time in reading and sounding out the words they saw before them. She also witnessed how every time a student finds it difficult and stuck in trying to read and or take time longer than the teacher wanted to see, the teacher will slowly approach the student to spell each letter and word on the page phonetically for them. As this continues, the student will surely never learn pronunciation properly.

In the other hand when it comes to terms of grammatical structure, the main difference sits in how the words are ordered. General word orders in Korean is ‘SOV’, subject-object-verb, while in English, words are generally ordered in ‘SVO’, subject-verb-object. For an example, ‘I eat bread’ in English sentence will be ‘나 빵을 먹어’ (na bbang-eul meog-eo) in Korean, which literally means ‘I bread eat’. This is why a watchful effort is needed by a South Korean speaker to convert the word orders when communicating using the English language, which addends the challenges of pronunciation can be especially difficult.

Lesson Learned (500 Words)

English language education has been in both South Korean private and public school curriculums since around the 1950s and has emphasized grammatical accuracy in theoretical skills, more than the development of English language communicative competency. They learned writing and reading English, but are not taught to have conversations actively using the English language in every day. This caused a great issue for the learners in improving themselves into having proficient communicative competence in the English language. This nescience and impurity generate through the linguistic aspects of interlanguage in the English language. In 2014, Tim Hunter mentioned the linguistic components in this language, they are phonology (the study of language sound systems), phonetics (the study of speech sounds), morphosyntax (word constructions), syntax (larger units than word construction), and semantics – pragmatics (the study of meaning). Each language has its linguistic components, making it quite difficult for individuals who learned new languages to understand the language completely in the beginning. So do South Koreans. In this case, the difficulties they are facing were not just in facing one or two aspects, but in every aspect of English language linguistics. It is undoubtedly the major factor of their failure towards English proficiency is the different linguistic aspects that they understand in their languages than in English. The biggest struggle to face is in the pronunciation and grammatical structures of English, which hits them with every aspect of the target language. Besides that, their social and cultural systems, which are found in daily life, and the education systems in South Korean schools addends the issue of improving their proficiency in the English language.

Learners should always be under the proper guidance to develop their motivation in learning new languages, especially English. They also have to try to adapt to the language they are learning. They should always practice themselves in communicating with others by applying the target language in everyday practices to achieve the purpose of the learning. Then, the schools must also conduct proper approaches, methods, strategies towards the learners based on their needs so that the learners will be kept motivated in learning English. The teacher must also provide opportunities for the learners to practice and perform the target language in a communicative way so the targeted goal of having communicative competence will not be separated from the grip. This method will make language learning more meaningful because interactive communication will get the learners accustomed and build confidence in the right way of applying the language. Learners should also balance their language learning skills and should improve them as time goes by. Also, giving feedback or peer-review will enhance the learners’ spirit in learning the language.