::A Geek in Korea::

Way back in 2001 when I came to Korea, I was teaching pre-phonics ABC stuff for a year. This is the very beginnings of learning English with kids that just get dumped at an English academy and don’t know anything beyond the “ABC song”…if you are lucky. This early stuff isn’t really well served by having a native speaker in the classroom. It is overkill. It’s all memorization and “crunch”. Either students remember it or they don’t. The repeated exposure to the material is all that really matters. The past few schools I worked at had Korean teachers working at this level and it was fine until blending and sentences were introduced. Once students are putting together words and making a few simple sentences, we can work on pronunciation to “take the Konglish out”.

You can spend months just getting students to recognize and remember the letters and their associated sounds, begin the process of sounding out words, and work on reading extremely simple words. Most students, even kindergarten students, can pick this up through repeated exposure naturally. If students get no exposure to English at home, and only the mandatory classes at school they should know all the letters (at least), and be able to read, albeit poorly. While this mandatory English exposure might be poor or dysfunctional, it is enough to build on. These students don’t even have that for the most part. It’s rare that you meet a 6th grade student that doesn’t know the letters of the English alphabet in my part of town.

Since I’m a high and mighty University professor, when would I ever need to go back to basics of a pre-phonics class? Well I got placed in the underprivileged children’s English class this winter. I’m handling this particular program totally on my own. No book. No syllabus. Nothing but what I want to do to help the students learn. This would have been nerve wracking to me when I first arrived in Korea. I used a phonics book and tried to get the students to follow complicated lessons. I didn’t know what the hell I was doing, and neither did the students. There is a reason why I taught those first few classes for months and never saw them improve. I’ve got less time these days for this sort of class, but I think I can get a few basics accomplished.

I’ve very comfortable in front of a dozen students that can’t understand a word I say now. I’ve got a linguistic advantage in being able to understand everything they say, while they have no clue I speak or understand them. It’s great to have upper hand. They can act as confused or as hostile as they want, but I know what they are saying. If they try to pull one over on me, I won’t give them anything to work with. I don’t expect any problems with them.

From what I was told, these students are bused in from far across town from a less privileged neighborhood. They are enrolled through a government program, possibly a latchkey program for people that want to learn English but don’t have the means to pay for an expensive English education. These kids are the students that get left behind as the rest of the country mandates English education as a necessity for University entrance exams. I’ll see them twice a week for the rest of the winter break, and it’s up to me to find a way to fill up the time.

I went in today not knowing their level, and came out humbled. I assumed that the students would know the letters, but even that was giving them too much credit. Most of them knew some of the letters. That’s about as basic as it can get. I don’t actually need to do much in the way of actual hard lesson planning, because anything they pick up from me is exponential improvement. I’ll do my standard phonics lessons, back it up with English only classroom environments, and work on a few simple games. That’s about all I can do till they know the alphabet and sounds. They don’t have the class long enough, or often enough, to expect any real progress.

They aren’t dumb. They just don’t get any exposure to the material to have the chance to pick it up. If I can accelerate this language acquisition in the slightest, I’ll have done my part. Students at my other schools studied two hours a day every weekday to master these skills. That’s just not available at this program. It sucks that students with less money fall so far behind so quickly, but that’s how the Korean education system, and every other system, operates.

These classes are  just like the old days, except I’m way more experienced and I know how to handle a class now. While a class of twelve would have driven me crazy back then, these students weren’t all that bad. They don’t know a lick of English, and they can’t do even the simplest things without asking each other in Korean, but it was a refreshing change of pace from my normal classes. I can remember when I had an entire year with students of this low ability every day for hours. That is when things get bleak. You have to handle the classes completely differently because it will make you crazy. No adult can handle phonics and repetition like that every day for a year without snapping.

The fact that this class ends in a month’s time, and I only seem them twice a week means I’m not really worried about it.