Twisty turny story

sunnypine Tue May 27 2008, 08:02

From One Future Student…

Yoo-jin Jung, Yujin Lee, Kyeong-im Lee, JeongA Ryu,

DeukJu Jang, and Bong-kyung Park

Hi! It's the year 2015. I am a Korean student and I have just graduated from high school. I really have to say that I feel very proud of and confident in my English proficiency! I am not a special student. I'm average. But almost all "average" students in Korea these days like English and can use it well. That's because English education in Korean public schools is very different now compared to 10 years ago...

First, English teachers speak English in English class all the time, which was impossible in 2005 in Korea. Teachers teach English conversation skills, vocabulary, and grammar and so on. At the first time, it was very weird to us, but it became used to it. Teacher explains lots of times when se don’t understand something. Using gestures, using pictures and explaining in easy words, we come to understand in English. Through teaching English in English, the more we can be exposed to English, the more we can be familiar with English.

Every vacation, my school sends us to English speaking countries, such as America, England, Australia, and New Zealand etc for free!! We can experience real culture of English. For example, last summer, we went to Australia and studied in the Australian school. We made a lot of foreign friends whom actually we’ve still been making a contact with. From these experiences, we learned English is not something we should study hard but something we need to communicate with people.

So many foreign schools exist in Korea. So we don’t need to go abroad. We can choose which school we want to go either Korean school or foreign school. There’s no discrimination between them. The principal of foreign schools is a foreigner. So without going to another country we can experience another education system. I’m a student of this kind of foreign school. My homeroom teacher is also a foreigner, “American.” What a wonderful situation to learn English!

Furthermore, in my classroom, half of the students came from different countries. Through their mother tongues are different; we can communicate each other with ease. By what? Of course, in English which has become the world language since 2009. It’s really that easy to speak in English, sometimes using body languages. So, we can share the various cultures of other fellow students.

Classroom objectives have focused on genuine and practical language. These days, not only we teach and learn language itself, but also we focused on how to teach one self. Ultimately, whether or not, there in big change, someone does well and others do not. So, we do not blame teacher alone or learning system that much. We students are educated that it is up to us, especially when it comes to L2 learning.

We have more number of English classes and they are classified into four subpart: speaking, listening, reading and writing. Compared to a decade ago, we take more balance English lessons. For instance, I have a speaking and listening class and on Tuesdays, Speaking, writing and reading, etc. Therefore, we have a chance to speak or write what we have learned in listening and reading part. Like this, every part of English helps each other to build up student’s English ability; speaking motivates writing, writing leads to reading and listening; a total bless.