Gripes Part One
Posted by Andrew | Filed under Gripes
For quite some time now, this blog has been discussing the wisdom of keeping as positive an attitude as possible towards living as a foreigner in South Korea. But the prime reason for this is that no matter how friendly the locals may be, your attitude and expectations are very different from what you experience here each day. This is precisely because the locals have an outlook which is diametrically opposed to the ruggedly and often fatalistically individualistic viewpoint which characterises the Anglo-Saxon mind.
Naturally, this can make the task of trying to teach English (or, indeed, any other language) here much more difficult than it perhaps needs to be. Here at the pub tonight (I started writing this during an evening session), I was reading an article by Canadian Todd Vercoe in which he discusses the prior publication "The Geography of Thought" by R. Nisbett (2003). Essentially, Nisbett makes the point that since relationships matter to East Asians (i.e. not just those living in Korea) from a very early age, this is necessarily reflected in their native-language publications and in their whole process of learning, including between mother and child. The individualism of the Western way of thinking likewise expresses itself in _their_ learning materials. Knowledge in terms of individual data is relational in the East Asian mind, and East Asian students are taught to function as "receivers" of information rather than "transmitters" of knowledge as per the Western model of data regurgitation.
Maybe it is this "collectivist" model of learning which makes it so difficult for foreigners to learn Korean. I have literally shelves of Korean learning materials, yet despite having been here for over five years, my spoken Korean can only be described as "minimal" because of what seems to be the illogical way most books intended for foreign students of the Korean language seem to be written. And the quality of these materials declines by the year. Clearly, it is not only Koreans trying to learn English who have problems!
Another factor which seems to make Korean a difficult language for the foreigner is the insistence upon beginning with the most polite (i.e. most "honorific") form of verbs, and often only introducing a less honorific (but more conversationally practical) form later in the proceedings. This makes for longer and more confusing verb endings, as well as incredibly tedious and slow learning. I am not suggesting, however, that the most honorific verb forms should not be learned, but merely placed in the correct context. The most honorific form of verbs is generally inappropriate when addressing the kids in the classroom, but not when addressing the Boss, for example.
So we have a fundamental dichotomy of world-views which makes learning the other's language perhaps a lot more difficult for each side than it needs to be. Not only does the Western individualist viewpoint make it difficult for the relativist-collectivist mind to understand properly what they are trying to learn, the Western individualist mind finds East Asian concepts difficult to understand, for example, the fact that the listener is expected to infer a lot more than is actually spoken or written. The relativist-collectivist sees the whole first, and the details later, whereas the Western individualist sees the details first and builds up the picture as more details are understood, a point made by Vercoe:
In a perhaps telling example of the processes in the Asian compared to the Western mind, subjects were presented with an underwater scene involving fish, plant life, rocks etc., and were asked to describe what they see. Most Western subjects would begin their description by identifying a large individual fish and orienting their description around the fish (viewing the world from an individual perspective) whereas most Asian subjects would begin their descriptions by declaring "It's a river (or pond etc.)". They view the collective whole as a starting point.
Vercoe also points to the difficulty Asians have with trying to remember words when they are grouped into categories (he quotes colours as an example) – a classification which seems logical to the Western mind. When words like "red" and "green" are placed into some kind of context, they become easier for East Asian students to remember (because of the relationships involved). My own experience trying to learn Korean demonstrates that the Korean relational way of teaching strikes a Western-oriented mind (and in my case, a scientific mind for which the categorisation of data is deeply ingrained) as illogical and even "nebulous". However, the Western habit of categorising components of spoken Korean also does not make the language any easier to learn.
In my own mind, all of this merely reinforces my existing opinion of textbook writers – by not taking into account the differences between Western and East Asian outlooks, they create learning materials which can be very difficult to use, because they are not structured so that the students, with a very different mindset, can understand them easily. This results in an unsettling and often narcissistic teaching experience. The opposite is probably the "culture-neutral" approach, which I am sure pleases no-one apart from the terminally politically-correct among us (and I am not, nor do I desire to be, one of those. And who can say what is genuinely "culture-neutral", in any case? Isn't it more than a little fascistic to assert that one has greater wisdom in this regard than others? Assertion of one's own cultural viewpoint has to be tempered with a little humility).
Teaching the kids to write a Western-style essay, in which an opinion is elaborated and points are discussed, is very difficult because it is not considered good rhetorical style in East Asia to be gladiatorial and to defend a possibly contentious viewpoint, but rather to lead the reader through the various points and let them draw their own conclusions. Even trying to get them to write a single contrastive paragraph to explain with whom or what they agree (and why) is often incredibly difficult; they just don't understand the rhetorical style required. When asked to give reasons which justify their written opinion, many will do little more than rephrase expressions like: "I think it's good and nice. So it's good. etc."
We could say that in my experience, one size doesn't fit all: textbooks written with European or North American learners in mind (or at any rate, with the idea in mind that the learning process is taking place in a European or North American context) do seem to be very inappropriate in East Asia, because the cultural assumptions the authors make regarding students are just . . . plain wrong. Because the peoples and cultures of the world are diverse and as I myself discovered when I first came out here, a culturally ignorant and inept foreigner is literally thrashing around like a bull in a China shop. Not recommended!
What I will be honest about is that it remains difficult for me to make any constructive suggestions. I may be pretty expert at writing but being so good at that doesn't necessarily translate into an ability to teach it well to people. What I think I can say is that this is one area in which plentiful examples and lots of practice are essential – it is not enough to just learn patterns, students must get a proper "feel" for what they are learning because in a typical East Asian peer pressure classroom, it's just as easy to persuade them to give up! (Which is, of course, pretty bad when you depend upon them paying for it).
. . . to which should be added the point that in any situation in which a Korean student is asked to offer an opinion, it rapidly becomes clear that they have no opinion . . . but then, if you had to be at day school and perhaps three or four hagwons thereafter followed by homework and other study into the wee hours of up to six days a week, how much time would you have to form any kind of opinion about anything???
To return to Vercoe, however, confusion in the minds of East Asian students arises precisely because of the Western habit of "taxonomy" – the pseudo-scientific grouping of objects (in this case, nouns) which prevents the East Asian relativist-collectivist mind from seeing them as part of a defining relationship. We confuse them by insisting that because it's our language, only our way of thinking is any good for them in the learning process. This is wrong. If we want to be successful in teaching English to East Asian students, we must make it more accessible by emulating their relativist-collectivist viewpoint. Is it really so difficult to accept that by opening up a little, we might learn much that is valuable? Or is ingrained arrogance more important to us?
If a young student is learning about colours (to take Vercoe's example), they already know which objects are characterised by having which colours – frogs and trees are green, the sky is blue, roses are red, and so on. By using materials which emulate their existing "schemas", we can make sure they retain this kind of basic information simply because they are then just taking what they already know and translating it; the language is new, but the basic information is not. The same students would have difficulty with the Western pseudo-scientific-individualist habit of collecting and grouping "colours" as a category because this grouping naturally contains little relational information bearing upon objects outside of itself where these latter are defining (or otherwise typical) characteristics by which the object is normally recognised.
Recognition of this viewpoint changes entirely the way we perceive the usefulness (or otherwise) of the materials we are often forced to use. Texts and other stuff based upon essentially "Western" notions of learning clearly have limited usefulness in the East Asian context and should perhaps be discarded – or, at least, used only very carefully and selectively. But here, time is against us . . . we do not always (in the hagwon environment, at least) have sufficient temporal or physical resources to perform at our best, no matter how much is expected of us, and this is something that the bosses in particular don't seem to appreciate. Lack of proper orientation, lack of Korean language and cultural tuition, all take their toll on the effectiveness of people whom, it must be stated, cost Korea an arm and a leg to procure.
Again, this brings us to a difficult question. If it is considered necessary to bring in foreigners, and knowing that it is definitely a very expensive process, how would Korea ensure that the process was as efficient and cost-effective as possible? There needs to be a proper plan for this, not just for the public schools but also for the private, which after all soak up huge amounts of the disposable income of many families; and it needs to be a valuable encounter at the cultural level, also, for both sides. If the goal of the English-teaching community is to assist the Koreans to communicate better using an international lingua franca, then the goal of the Koreans themselves should – in part – correspondingly be to enable those of us who commit large chunks of our lives to live among their people to communicate better. How is it that here in Changwon, you can walk around the town and look up and see at least two hagwons for learning Japanese, yet none dedicated specifically to helping foreigners learn Korean? This is a problem you would NEVER have in places like Hong Kong and Taiwan, for example.
In my time here there have been ups and downs, but one of the thorniest issues remains that of generally below-par textbooks and other materials. It helps not a bit that the whole process is surprisingly nebulous and unplanned (surprising to the foreigner, that is), that there is no definitively-stated goal towards which both the educational institution and the students themselves work together; or that many of the materials available off-the-shelf were designed with students from quite different cultures in mind, the products of an unnecessarily narcissistic mind-set. I myself do not yet have a substantive answer, but I do know this: that in the face of so great a combination of problems, you must have the will to change, and to acquire that will, you must first acknowledge that there is a problem. And this is why there is no change . . . an issue which I will address at a later date.
Andrew ^_^
