Here’s some good discussion fodder with ESL classes. A coed high school in Daegu returns back to its all-male roots, which exposes debate over which format is better. Other schools are expected to follow suit.
SNSD is a popular Korean girl band that has been frequently searched on Naver of late, and is oft considered to be the girl version of Super Junior. But underneath all the feelgood hype is a ferociously intense world of fan clubs, rivals, and sniping. Some members of SNSD have put their feet in their mouth and dissed other, more senior music groups over the past year and have brewed up an anti-SNSD storm, only to be passionately defended by manic SNSD fanboys. Rivaling fan bases of SNSD, SuperJunior, DBSK, get so worked up over each other in online and offline fights, that it transcends the real artists. Yesterday, SNSD released a formal appeal/apology to its fan base on its site, hoping to stem the tide of hate and fighting.
Some ESL springboard questions for discussing the topic with your students:
-What bands are you a fan of?
-Which fan base do you think is the most fanatical?
-Who is more at fault? The bands or the fans?
New York Times has a really good article on the state of the education exodus that is going in Korea, involving tens of thousands of Koreans being sent abroad to learn English, while the father stays at home and works to foot the bills. It’s 3 pages long, so I’ll filter out the stuff worth chewing on for those of us more familiar with the ESL industry in Korea.
known in South Korea as “wild geese,” families living separately, sometimes for years, to school their children in English-speaking countries like New Zealand and the United States. The mothers and children live overseas while the fathers live and work in South Korea, flying over to visit a couple of times a year.
More than 40,000 South Korean schoolchildren are believed to be living outside South Korea with their mothers in what experts say is an outgrowth of a new era of globalized education.
In 2006, 29,511 children from elementary through high school level left South Korea, nearly double the number in 2004 and almost seven times the figure in 2000, according to the Korean Educational Development Institute, a research group that tracks the figures for the Ministry of Education.
South Koreans now make up the largest group of foreign students in the United States (more than 103,000) and the second largest in New Zealand after Chinese students, according to American and New Zealand government statistics.
Wild geese fathers were initially relatively wealthy and tended to send their families to the United States. But in the last few years, more middle-class families have been heading to less expensive destinations like Canada, Australia and New Zealand.
Now, there are also “eagle fathers,” who visit their families several times a year because they have the time and money. Those with neither, who are stuck in South Korea, are known as “penguin fathers.”
The national experience is considered enough of a social problem that an aide to South Korea’s president recently singled out the plight of the penguin fathers.
President Lee Myung-bak said he would start to address the problem by hiring 10,000 English teachers. “This is unprecedented,” he said. “Korea is actually the only country in the world undergoing such a phenomenon, which is very unfortunate.”
Even so, the sons were not making sufficient progress in English, the parents said. They hired a private English tutor to supplement the supplementary cram schools. “We didn’t think the cram schools were doing any good, but we were too insecure to stop sending them, because the other parents were sending their children,” Ms. Kim said.
Conservatives have criticized the wild geese mothers for being obsessed about their children’s education at the risk of destroying their marriages. The women’s real intention, they say, is to get as far away as possible from their mothers-in-law.
The mothers say they are the modern-day successors to one of the most famous mothers in East Asia: the mother of Mencius, the fourth-century Chinese Confucian philosopher. In a story known in South Korea, as well as China and Japan, Mencius’s mother moved to three neighborhoods before finding the environment most favorable to her son’s education.
“I don’t know why Mencius’s mother is so revered and why we wild geese mothers are so criticized,” said Chang Soo-jin, 37, who moved here with her two children nearly two years ago. “Our coming out here is exactly the same as what she did.”
Interesting. I’ve never heard this phenomenon put into historical reference before. Maybe Korean mothers are not as fanatical as people let on. Well, I know a few who break the Mencius mold of sanity into a million bits, but perhaps the fable has some legs.
Police in west Daegu have issued an arrest warrant for an individual under suspicion of making a bomb threat to a local nightclub.
According to the police, around 1 a.m. on April 16, the suspect used a public telephone in west Daegu and contacted Seoul Metropolitan Police’s 112 help line (911 in the west) and informed them that a specific nightclub in Daegu will be bombed in 2 hours.
As a result, Daegu police immediately sent 50 anti-terrorism commandos to the scene and began conducting a search to no avail.
Subsequently, the police began to analyze the recording of the call and compared with other similar calls. They eventually pinpointed the culprit who has had a past history of phoning in bomb threats.
Daegu is no stranger to random wackjobs and bombs, as anyone who was around in the spring of 2003 will attest to.
Which brings us to some talking points for your ESL classes on the subject matter:
Nathan at Korea Beat has translated a great article that reveals a barrage of opinions from Korean youth, regarding the US beef dispute. Definitely fodder for conversation/debate use in your classrooms.
There are not many greater influences that can shape the whole English Education industry in Korea, more than Samsung HR. Some may claim that Lee Myung Park’s English policies set the tone and/or the Ministry of Education. Some foreign teachers look to Immigration as being the tail that wags the dog in their aspect of the industry. And many Koreans point to the competitive nature of Korean mothers for being the catalyst that drives the ESL bus in Korea. All of those, however, are largely shaped by the two larger influences:
.
With respect to the hiring aspect, the workplace in Korea has largely relied on TOEIC and TOEFL scores to be the barometer for English proficiency. But Korean employers are becoming progressively frustrated with the Korean applicant pool who have high TOEIC scores (ie., mass memorization of useless vocab), but piss-poor ability to actually communicate. A few years back, the trend began for employers to slowly move away from TOEIC being the standard. And this past week, Chosun Ilbo had an interview with Samsung HR who signaled that TOEIC and TOEFL requirements are being phased out over the forthcoming years, and instead using the OPlc (Oral Proficiency Interview Computer system), to zero in on speaking skills, moreso than the writing and grammar skills that students glean from TOEIC cramming.
However, based on a January press release from ETS, the developers of the TOEIC and TOEFL tests, they seem to indicate that Samsung HR will beginning to use TOEIC Speaking tests to aid in their hiring efforts, which leads one to believe that they haven’t overly turned their nose up on throwing out the whole former process.
But this certainly influences the ESL industry down to its roots. Big names like Samsung set the tone and other large to mid-size companies dealing in international trade, soon follow. And then speculation lingers on how long it will take for university entrance requirements to operate in synch with corporate hiring requirements, as mothers and media begin to gripe about the two different qualification systems. The hardest hit will eventually be the insanely lucrative TOEFL prep schools in hotbeds like Jongno and Gangnam, where classes are packed wall-to-wall, with as many as 100 students and celebrity teachers who have a great rep for prepping for TOEFL success, are able to bring in excesses of $10-15,000/month.
What does all this mean to foreign teachers? TOEIC and TOEFL falling to the wayside in favor of a speaking-centric testing system will simply bolster any aspect of the industry involving us white barbarians esteemed educators. And most certainly a more strengthening demand for native teachers and the ensuing speaking-focused enterprises like hagwons, English villages, etc…And of course, privates out the ying yang.
Edit:The impact of Korea tossing out the TOEIC and TOEFL in favor of speaking-centric tests might be a good talking point with students in your classes, as lord knows they’ll have opinions on this.
Popseoul reports that Rain has had a stalker following him around for the past 5 years. She’s now on medication, thankfully.
Conversation springboards
-Create two teams for debate over the price of fame. One team arguing all the pros of being famous and the other team arguing for the value of keeping out of the public eye.
Taxi drivers idling away at taxi stands are feeling the pinch at the pumps and have started taking conservation measures, such as pushing their cars while waiting in line, as in this photo taken at Daegu Airport.
Conversation springboards
1. What do you think is the root cause of the oil crisis?
2. What conservation decisions can you and your family make to reduce oil use?
3. What alternative forms of energy do you think are viable for Korea?
I’m going to try doing this one a little differently. This article can have dual use as either an ESL topic for your students, or for self-study to improve your Korean. Make no mistake, I’m no wiz compared to others when it comes to Korean, so this is a self-study exercise for me. I encourage anyone and everyone to point and laugh at my mistakes and/or offer constructive criticism.
—————————
대구 북부경찰서는 2일 하굣길 중학생을 상대로 상습적으로 금품을 빼앗은 혐의로 S(14)군 등 10대 청소년 2명을 불구속 입건했다.
On June 2nd, police in northern Daegu charged two teen boys suspected of habitually robbing middle school students coming home from school.
경찰에 따르면 S군 등은 지난달 11일 오후 8시20분께 대구시 북구 침산동 한 편의점 앞에서 귀가하던 L(13)군을 편의점 건물 1층 화장실로 끌고가 현금 1만원을 빼앗는 등 지난 4월초부터 최근까지 11차례에 걸쳐 10여만원 상당의 금품을 빼앗은 혐의를 받고 있다.
According to the police, at 8:20pm on May 11, the young teenagers were hanging out in front of a convenience store in Chimsan-dong, when they grabbed a passing middle school student who was on his way home from school. They then dragged the boy into a washroom of the adjacent building and stole 10,000 won from him. They are also suspected for hauling in over 100,000 won in as many as 11 such incidents.
경찰 조사결과 S군 등은 지난 4월초 각각 가출한 뒤 목욕탕 등에서 함께 생활해왔으며, PC방 이용료 등을 마련하기 위해 이같은 범행을 저지른 것으로 드러났다.
The police investigation revealed that the two teenagers had since ran away from home in April and had been living in a mogyoktang and were robbing students, so they can have money to go to PC bangs.
—————————————-
Some conversation springboards for ESL classes:
1. Have you ever heard of any students dropping out of school?
2. Do you know of any students who have dropped out of school so they can play PC games, all the time?
3. What do you think should be done to help prevent students from dropping out?
4. Who do you think is truly at fault in this case? The teenagers? Their parents? PC bangs?
This is an issue that’s been intense for awhile, which most students will have some form of opinion on.
To familiarize yourself with the history, here’s a useful article that shows the chronology of the dispute.
Your students might also find it interesting to read a US-based article on how US media is covering the issue. Anyways, a glut of conversation topics can come from this. Mad cow. Asian flu panics. Free-trade disputes.
