The Narcissism of English Teaching
Posted by Andrew | Filed under Commentary, Living in Korea
If we stand back for a moment and ask ourselves why it is that people have trouble learning English – and by this, I mean people who are not born as "native speakers" – what would the answer be?
I can only think of one possible response: an overbearing sense of the desirability of native-speaker narcissism.
Trying to teach serious English to the kids in Korea is a pain. Why? Firstly, the type of institute I work in is strictly "after-school", i.e. the kids finish day school before they come to our school and are therefore, both physically and psychologically, drained after a day of having their heads stuffed full of facts which will almost certainly be completely useless in their adult lives. Again, almost certainly, and especially later in the evening, this is probably not the only such institution they attend on a daily basis. They are then subjected to a dull routine of brain-numbing exercises designed by people who are not themselves native speakers, so that the errors are propagated at the expense of learning the correct language. Add to this the fact that the parents who can afford to send their kids to a succession of such institutions on a daily basis have probably indulged them over much in terms of boredom-relieving devices such as computer games and TV, and you have a perfect recipe for constant dullness. They are not interested in the idea that what they are supposed to be learning may actually be useful (one day . . .).
Secondly, even the "native speaker"-written texts themselves leave so much to be desired in terms of useability. There is a common disease rampant in the world of English language teaching that the learner's first language must be rigorously excluded from the process in order to force them to become more self-reliant in their adaptation to the new language. The immediate consequence of this is that learners cannot understand their textbooks; they are all written in English with no guide or gloss in their language to make them easier to understand.
This second factor is very serious. Part and parcel of the modern way of learning English is that the foreigner coming here to teach is somehow "magically" supposed to be able to explain to non-English-native learners how to speak the target language; yet it is commonly acknowledged that this cannot work simply because there will always be a minority of items – some 3% or more of the total – which can only be communicated in the learner's language.
Imagine for a moment what is really happening here. Foreigners with undergraduate Degrees – the minimal qualificational requirement for teaching in any East Asian country – are invited, often by employment agencies rather than by official bodies or even the schools themselves, to come to Korea and there is no mention of having (or desiring to acquire) any Korean linguistic ability of their own. So these people – often, perhaps, not even having known beforehand that Korea so much as exists, what a great sense of geopolitics they must have! – are brought here with no clue as to what they are supposed to be doing. The materials themselves are a mess and the totality of the whole even more so. The foreigners themselves probably have only some rudimentary notion of how to do grammar even in their own language. Result: chaos.
There is no denying that from the foreigner's point of view, the desire – genuine or implanted – on the part of people like the Koreans to learn English fosters a sense of laziness. The Koreans want to learn our language, and we apply no desire on our own part to reciprocate substantially despite the clear benefits of doing so, because this would subvert the notion that exclusion of the mother-tongue enforces independent thinking. But it is not only teaching in Korea which is affected by this. English teaching is infected by a deep sense of narcissism. The foreigners, we tell ourselves, are learning our language because they want to be like us. But this is not the case: usually they have a strong sense of their own ethnocentrism, and learning English is really just an accessory for them to be what they are somewhere within the English-speaking world. So, in their minds, there is something unhelpful and unwholesome in all of this because it implies that somehow, their own language or culture is not deemed worthy of joining the ranks of those considered to have the greatest cultural or economic significance. And they necessarily resent this.
They can see the inherent narcissism of the foreigner all the time. And not only can they see it, they have to suffer it as part of their educational system, too. They can't understand their textbooks because they are written entirely in the target language, and the authors' collective notion of good performance in the target language seems to demand not only the avoidance of useful first-language glossing, but also the introduction of polysyllabic words which the learner finds not only difficult to pronounce but to understand too. I have personally lost count of the number of times, during actual lessons, when the absurdity of the situation has just slapped me in the face like a wet flannel. These people who write the textbooks are just talking to themselves! It's like the politician who never answers questions, but just makes absurd political statements and speeches all the time. We wouldn't respect this in our politicians and young Koreans certainly don't respect this in the resident ET (English Teacher, but you get the implication . . .).
Sadly, when it comes to the foreigner having any reasonable desire to learn Korean, the same applies. The Korean educational system has traditionally been like the Chinese – based essentially upon memorisation and repetition. Only very low-level effectiveness would be expected from trying to learn a foreign language like that. Consequently, it is difficult for the foreigner to get to grips with Korean seriously because – paradoxically – some of the best materials for learning to speak Korean are actually written by foreigners rather than by the Koreans themselves. Books written by Koreans often seem illogically laid-out and the different social levels of speech, a feature apparently absent from modern English, are seldom explained adequately. Add to this the fact that most hagwons (and other institutions) seem not to place any importance upon actually teaching Korean to their resident foreigners, and you end up with the situation we have now.
The hagwons are unfortunately not the only way in which students are supposedly introduced to the English language. Their parents are often tempted to send them away to residential "camps" where it seems they do little more than play games. This is another little "syndrome" within the English teaching community – provide the student with an "immersion" environment and lower their affective filter by forever playing games. The kids then come back to the hagwon, but when they write in their diaries about what they did, there seems to be no evidence of having learned anything, or at least anything which would have helped their English written skills. It all just makes money, and that's the bottom line. The kids are easily bored, and learning any language demands concentration and application; the games relieve their boredom, and there are people out there who are happy to relieve parents of their hard-earned dosh by doing this under the pretence of teaching the language. It's a growth area, and an infallible way of making money in Korea.
The final part of the puzzle, as to why it becomes progressively more difficult for a foreigner resident in Korea to learn to speak Korean, is simple: no spare time. In my own case, when I first came here, I had plenty of time. I could go to the hagwon where I was working and could spend literally hours listening to my tapes, reading and writing, before even having to set out my timesheet for the day's lessons. Nowadays I get out of bed later (in order to avoid the absurd and constant yawning which results otherwise) and when I go to work, there is a pile of paper waiting for me, including badly-written diaries which take ages to correct. Indeed, during the recent schools' winter vacation, I had an extra speaking and writing class (in fact, during that period I acquired six extra classes), and the only way I could do my lessons, make the minimal number of telephone consultations and get the diaries marked was to take them home – often keeping me awake until three or four a.m. No wonder I couldn't get enough sleep! 😛
To this, perhaps, should be added the fact that it often seems difficult to emulate a good learning environment. The hagwon, paradoxically, is supposed to be a place of learning but the foreigner never seems to have sufficient space for such things, and this is very telling. I have found it similarly difficult to rearrange things at home to the same end. Everywhere, space is at a premium and this affects the learning process, at least in my own experience, since the number of errors in East Asian language learning materials requires me to have a range of them open before me simultaneously so that I can detect the errors and correct them by cross-checking.
It's not difficult to see where the real problem lies. At the Korea Herald web site a while back was a telling commentary in which the editor bemoaned the glacially slow rate of educational change within South Korea. The reason being to do with the idea that educationalists – and educational institutions – were afraid of deviating in any way away from the consensus norm of education in Korea. They were afraid of trying something new and being seen to fail. And it is this which keeps the regrettable status quo within more educational systems than just the Korean.
