The questions raised by Ngugi's article reinforced how important teacher education and awareness is.
To use a personal example that I feel relates to this issue:
In my first job in Korea, I was at an English Village, a mandated 'English Only' environment. Students were not allowed to speak Korean, and at that time I was unable to understand or speak Korean. In the activities, the focus was often on minute grammar points that had to be produced completely accurately. It was oppressive for students as very little true communication occurred. It was oppressive for teachers as the culture of this environment isolated us from understanding the workings of a Korean workplace and their educational system. It kept students and teachers divided. Teachers possessed the knowledge and students were required to perform in a certain way in order to interact with us.
Since this time, my experience and knowledge of Korean society has increased dramatically. I have also come to value the importance of Konglish and Korean in the classroom to aid understanding. While I am still unable to speak Korean to any great degree, I can understand quite a lot of regular classroom questions, vocabulary and body language. I encourage students to communicate as best they can and that often involves using Konglish, dropped articles or grammatical errors.
I won't follow the English Village way. I won't put up barriers by demanding that I be addressed only in English or only in grammatically accurate utterances. I won't admonish students for communicating in the only way they know how. There is no value in that, it's building walls between me and my students and does little to promote good feelings about English.
I won't go so far as to compare it to the oppression of Japanese colonialism but it does illustrate a sense of arrogance that exists with English Only education.
Cala it was fantastic experience to getting conversation with you last class. i was so surprised that you had so deep insightful point of view for teaching english in korea. as you mentioned, english teachers could ,also, subconciously affect students with some absolute rules, i mean that sometimes teachers only lead students to fit their own knowledge, which happened in the age of japanese colony.
ReplyDeleteto solve this problem, we should be more awaken as you said. Thay is why we take this class^^
thanks again.
My experience of teaching English in Korea had a similiar evolution like you. At first, everything had to be picture perfect; correct grammar, pronunciation, vocabulary, etc. Then I started to evolve outside of that mindframe. The reason was simple, I taught the way I learned Korean. As rigged as I was inside the classroom, outside, I had to communicate with Korean society in order for me to survive. I had problems with my sentence structure, pronunciation, vocabulary, etc. I realized that perfect Korean was not necessary for my survival. I just had to learn to communicate. As I started to communicate with Korean society, my Korean language abilities became better. With this realization, I took it in my classroom and started to teach with the idea of communication rather than perfect English. Did this make me a better teacher? Personally I would say 'yes' yet my coteachers did not. They wanted me to teach them perfect English. This led me into another problem. Do I teach English my way or the way my employers wanted me to? I had to compromise my ways of teaching to keep my job. To this day, I still compromise my own teaching ideas to make my employers happy. I think teachers will have to compromise their own pedegogies whenever they are part of a formal organization.
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