OP4 : What do you think needs to be done to improve English education in your country?

Life of people has changed and advanced a lot with the help of highly developed information technology. People can access to enormous range of information and resources such as news, articles, stories, poems, music, image ,video and so on with a few mouse clicking. Many teenagers play the game downloading the file from internet with MP3 player. Also they enjoy uploading pictures of their family and friends on their own webpage called Cyworld. For this generation who get used to diverse and changeable environment, teaching methods such as complex and boring grammatical analysis, translation of dialogue in textbook into Korean and reading comprehension exercises don't seem to evoke student's motivation and interests. Thus I suggest more use of multimedia facilities which enable students to get more chances to meet real English triggering their interests .



First, students can engage in authentic real-life use of language gaining understanding of cultural awareness. They may feel interested in making new friends in other countries through English and get to know different school lifes in foreign countries from theirs by watching movie. Moreover students may hear English from songs and be encountered frequently used expressions from sitcom. 00As those resources are appealing enough to attract student's attention, they can acquire language in a relaxed and natural way rather than feeling burden to memorize. Also As the activities they can experience via the multimedia relate with real life, students can continue their study at home achieving the task given by the teachers. By going beyond the confine of class, they can lead to meaningful communicative purposes which are practical part of learning language.



Next, Korean teachers of English can overcome the limitation of offering real English compared with native speaker teachers . Many people think that Korean teachers are not qualified to teach English because their English are not perfect like native speaker. However, Korean teachers who share similar cultural backgrounds and thinking with students may understand students' difficulties, errors and patterns of thinking better. Considering this point, Both students and teachers can benefit from more use of multimedia facilities. For example , students can hear sound, intonation, stress, rhythm and so on from internet and compare it with their's responding to well-planing tasks by teachers.



Last but not least, it can also overcome the limitations of big-sized class ,various English proficiecy level and lack of interation. In Korean school, there are so many students in a classroom that it is hard for teachers to judge proper English proficiency level of students to teach. Because of that teachers can not help but give lecture putting focus on middle level of all .So there can be some students who feel the class is too easy or too difficult.However as the class with multimedia is accomplished by self-study or collaborative group working,teachers can design the task carefully containing a variety range of level. For example, if the task to practice listening and dictation is given to each student, the student whose listening skill is low can repeat listening until he or she understand full meaning while advanced student proceed to other ones. Also with the group working, students can get opportunities to share their thoughts and opinions with peers , which leads to creative thinking and use of English .



Using of materials from multimedia will help students develop their English ability. However the effectiveness of doing so will depend on teacher's competence for organizing and selecting useful information for students as the variety of resources is so great and rich . Keeping teacher's role in mind, all we need to try to change Korean education better.

Before reading your essay, I was expecting to see examples of multimedia facilities that I haven't encountered so far. Since you are so much younger than me, I assumed that you might have different experiences in studying English with multimedia. It seems to me that you put more focus on the benefits of using facilities as teaching tools, which is, however, quite reasonable. By the way I am actually very impressed by your effort not only for this one but others too to make the essays look professional. Since I know it from my own experience that making three paragraphs for all the topics is never considered to be easy task.

Good luck and hope to see your next essay

Inkab