Writing Feedback / To Make Public Education Better in S.Korea [2]

South Korean Education Reforms

This year, I went practicum and it took about a month. The time was short but impactful enough for me to find problems of education in South Korea that need to be fixed. To begin with, current education policy of Korea is based on the 2015 Revised National Curriculum(1). This revised curriculum is overly complicated and evokes two main problems. For a start, the curriculum has too many specific subjects; schools have a superfluity of class subjects, while rooms and materials for the class are in shortage. The other matter is that teachers get numerous jobs assigned which are not related to teaching. To remedy these problems, I suggest changing the homeroom system to non-homeroom and hiring more teachers with a division of labor. By these two ways, the students will learn with rich materials, including the individual classrooms for each subject, while the teachers finally will focus on teaching.

Before 2015 revision, 10th-grade students had ten compulsory subjects and ten elective courses(2), but now the division of subjects got more complex. Under one subject, for example, Korean has seven additional courses(3). Since adolescents get to choose their class course by their own decision, it is hard to predict the number of subjects that school shall provie for each semester. Thus, preparing enough materials and rooms in short time, like winter vacation, is almost impossible. This is because Korean schools have homeroom system and not many subject-specialized rooms for education. To wrap up, physical preparation of the school is a mess.

The joke I said the most during and after the practicum was "Teachers do their 365 different works first and then teach kids when they have time left". The meaning of this gag is that the teachers have too many works to do that they have no time to teach. For instance, my mentor teacher had to do administrative work, teach the unofficial afterschool lesson, direct English-related contests, take care of her homeroom students, and then teach her lesson. Next year, due to the revised curriculum, she gets more subjects to teach with tasks standing in line, waiting for her. One teacher serves too many works, even though they are not directly related to teaching.

To compensate for the first defect, I acclaim to abolish the homeroom system. When students stay in homeroom and teachers move from class to class, the teacher has to bring all the materials to the class. However, there is a realistic limit to bring every materials needed. If the students move around for each subject's classroom, the school and the teacher would be easier to prepare the materials and make the environment in each classroom. Much less, since freshmen population is decreasing, the number of homerooms will too. Instead of pouring money to sustain empty homerooms, developing subject rooms will be more beneficial to students.

Further, school needs to hire more teachers, not just for teaching subjects, but for different types of work. The task of teachers must be separated by different sorts and the works that are not related to teaching should be assigned to the school staffs. In other words, school needs to hire each teacher for student care, school event administration, and teaching subjects. Recruiting teachers for each of the work type will raise specialty and the school will be ran successfully.

As a final point, the 2015 Revised National Curriculum of Korea is extremely complicated that it is necessary for the school to resolve its side effects. Right now, the school system and materials cannot fully cover what the students need. Moreover, far away from teaching, the teachers drive themselves relentlessly because of non-teaching tasks. The solutions to these problems are simple. The school should apply a new classroom system that makes the students move and hire different kinds of teachers to separate work burden. Consequently, the classroom for each subject filled with various materials will facilitate the students' education and the teachers inside each room will not be interrupted by any other works, thus be pleased to teach adolescents. The goal of Korean education is to raise kids into fine educated people and this goal will be achieved when the school and the teacher are ready for the latest curriculum.

(1) english.moe.go.kr/sub/info.do?m=040101&s=english
(2) wenr.wes.org/2013/06/wenr-june-2013-an-overview-of-education-in-south-korea
(3) Proclamation+of+the+Ministry+of+Education%2529.pdf

Writing Feedback / Similarity and Difference between Child and Adult Language Acquisition [2]

How Children and Adults learn language differently

Before we get into this essay, I want to make sure that 'child' I am referring to is about five to eight years old, who may or may not receive academic service on language. 'Adult', on the other side, means a classroom learner who is a teenager or a grown-up, taking a language course.

Often, Youtube commercials by English academies say people need special ways of learning for each age. About this opinion, many language experts published theories and formalized research results. Consequently, we agree that there are similarities and differences between the way a child acquires a language and the way a classroom learner does. The First similarity is that the physical environment is important for both child and adult when learning a language. Secondly, language learning process sequence is all the same, regardless of age and environment. Lastly, young and old are alike when language is related to thinking process and ego. On the other hand, child have better background environment to learn a language naturally. The curricula for the adult and the child acquiring a language are dissimilar too, through explicit and implicit studies. Final point of differences is that the defensive mechanism is quite leaned especially to the adult, when developing a language ego. Let us take a look on similarities in advance.

Obviously, a basic environment is one of the most momentous factors of learning a language, whether the age of a learner is young or old. If the physical environment is not fundamentally settled enough to help one study and the limits of resources matter, surely the learner would not be able to acquire anything well. For example, 'Mencius's mother moving three times' is a proverb throughout the North East Asia. The saying means that Mencius was affected by each place's environment he stayed. Learning materials and supplements, even simple as a piece of paper and a pen, are necessary. An education is not possible without environment physically and economically ready. In short, environment influences the learners in ways of language learning.

Moreover, both a child and an adult have a same sequence when learning a language. This is a view of Krashen and his Natural Order Hypothesis states that all learners acquire a language in roughly the same order. This applies to both first and second language acquisition(1). Simply, for instance, we can see that kids under the age of five speak words first. Like them, classroom learners first concentrate on memorizing new vocabularies. Some rules and elements of grammar are acquired early and others late, no matter the age and environment. In sum, the stages of learning a language are all the same.

Further, a language is always related to a speaker's thought and ego. For every language learned, one builds a new identity. A language as a system of signs and symbols plays a determinative role in ego formation: the ego is developed through the entry into linguistic symbolization(2). Whether learning a first language or second, language users display their identities within. A research done by the University of Iowa is an excellent example of building the identity. There, English and Russian speaking university students including the monolinguals and the bilinguals were in an online language exchange experiment. The speakers shifting between English and Russian enable the traditional L2 learners to negotiate their online identities at the critical moments of the exchange(3). These similarities are very general aspects of learning.

Conversely, differences between a child and an adult are found in detail. We all know the mother tongue is easier to learn. This is because the native speakers are around when a child takes his or her first step. The native speakers including caregivers provide rich languages in various situations. In contrast, the classroom learners do not get input as much as the children. They also have less opportunity to practice language than the children. In particular, even my father had less chance than my sister, when my family lived in New Zealand. She practiced her first language with family and second language with the native speakers freely whenever she went to shops, restaurants, and playgrounds. However, my father did not communicate with the native speakers naturally when his academy class was dismissed. Consequently, the children are surrounded by the language-friendly situation while the adults are not.

Also, the child's curricula are quite different from those of the older classroom learner. Even though the language learning stage is same to everyone, adult's curricula are much more complicated. An adult is capable of understanding complex ideas of language with schema. A kid, on the other hand, learns the first or the second language focused on basic competences. For these reasons, the adult's curricula are explicit and complexed while the child's curricula are implicit and simple. The 2007 official kindergarten curriculum of the Republic of Korea from government works well as an illustration. Rather than teachers teach kids about alphabets systematically, children get to write each other's name, first to take an interest in the letters of one's name(4). The difference in each curriculum's focus brings the difference in a way acquiring a language.

To all ages and circumstances, constructing a language ego is important. However, the adults are more careful than the children. The language ego contributes to inhibition, which impacts adults much more than children(5). Inhibition is a self-defensive mechanism that makes the adult hesitates on using a language. The adults build walls to protect themselves from being discouraged by making errors in language performance. On the contrary, children do not have this mind walls because they have strong egocentricity, therefore the kids are better at the performance. As a result, inhibition blocks adults to perform a language when it's a required key to acquire a language. Hence, the way of adult minds others and is more sensitive than the child, when learning a new language.

In conclusion, the similarities and differences in between child and adult acquiring a language are certain and clear. Both child and adult need solid environment. Their process of language learning stages is the same. Finally, language learning involves in building ego and identity despite age difference. Meanwhile, the child learns a language more naturally. The adult have more explicit and complicated curricula. The adult also has inhibition on the language performance. To sum up, the similarities can be analyzed macroscopically while the differences can be understood microscopically. In other words, a learning method for people should be different throughout detail circumstances like age, just like what the commercial says, yet general way is quite same overall.