LANGUAGES. A HUNGER FOR ENGLISH LESSONS

A hunger for English lessons

By Choe Sang-Hun

Published: Friday, March 24, 2006

PAJU, South Korea — Kim Hyo Jin, a timid junior high school student, stood before her American teacher fidgeting. The smiling teacher held up a green pepper and asked in clear, enunciated English: "What is this?"

"Peemang!" the South Korean teenager blurted out, then covered her mouth with a hand as if to stop - too late - the Korean word that had left her mouth.

Mortified, she tried again. Without looking the teacher in the eye, she held both her hands out and asked, this time in English: "May I have green pepper?"

Kim took the vegetable with a bow, and darted back to her giggling classmates - beaming and feeling relieved that she had successfully taken a small first step toward demolishing what South Koreans consider one of their biggest weaknesses in global competitiveness: the fear of speaking in English to Westerners.

Kim was among 300 junior high school students going through a week long training in this new "English Village." Built a few kilometers from the western border with North Korea, the government-subsidized language camp is, at 280,000 square meters, or 3 million square feet, the largest of its kind in the world, officials say.

The complex - where the motto is, "We produce global Koreans!" - looks like a mini town scooped up from a European country and transplanted into this South Korean countryside dotted with pine groves, rice paddies and military barbed-wire fences. It has its own immigration office, city hall, bookstore, cafeteria, gym, a main street with Western storefronts, police officers and a live-in population of 160 native English speakers. All signs are in English, the only language allowed.

Here, on a six-day immersion course that charges students 80,000 won, or $82, apiece, pupils check in to a hotel, shop, take cooking lessons and make music videos - all in English. There are language cops around, punishing students speaking Korean with a fine in the village currency or red dots on their village passports. To relieve the stress, the authorities do permit students to speak their native tongue a few times during their stay, usually at mealtimes.

Across South Korea, the English Villages are sprouting up. Ten are already operating, with more on the way. They represent the latest big push in South Korean parents' multi billion-dollar-a- year campaign to give their children a leg up in conquering English skills.

With few natural resources, South Korea realized early on that it must push exports and produce high-quality work forces. Education is an obsession. Mastering English is a nationwide quest from kids to office minions in corporate giants like Samsung and Hyundai.

"It's funny because Koreans know English," said Jeffrey Jones, former president of the American Chamber of Commerce in Korea who heads the Paju complex. "They spend a lot of time learning English. They can read, probably better than I can. But they have trouble speaking."

Jones, a longtime resident of South Korea, says that when many Koreans see a Westerner coming their way on the street, they detour or run away.

"They are afraid that they might have to speak English," Jones said. "So one of the things we do here is to break the wall of fear. And students come away not being afraid of foreigners and Westerners particularly."

South Korea has become one of the most aggressive countries in Asia at teaching English to its citizens. The language is taught from the third year of school; beginning in 2008 it will begin in the first year. Outside the school system, parents are paying an estimated 10 trillion won a year to help their children learn English at home or abroad.

Yet many college graduates falter in chats with native speakers. South Korean officials are often accused of grouping together in international conferences, afraid to mix with native English speakers. That, linguists say, is a result of a national school system that traditionally stresses reading and rote memorization of English grammar and vocabulary at the expense of conversation.

The public sector in this highly competitive society is racing to address the problem. The country is building a $15 billion international economic free zone on the coast west of Seoul, where English will be a common language. The southern port city of Busan is planning a town where English is an official language.

In Korea University of Seoul, 30 percent of all classes are now in English.

There is also growing pressure at home. South Korean mothers have been instrumental in sending their children to language classes or international schools in the United States and, when immigration rules there tightened, in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Malaysia, the Philippines and even Fiji and Togo. The mothers often go with them, while the fathers stay home to finance a phenomenon known as an "overseas expedition to master English."

Speaking English with a native accent has become such a status symbol that some parents reportedly put their children through the clinically questionable surgery of snipping the thin tissue under the tongue to make it longer and supposedly nimbler, helping the children to pronounce the R sound better.