Education in South Korea - English Education

English Education

English is taught as a required subject from the third year of elementary school up to high school, as well as in most universities, with the goal of performing well on the TEPS, TOEIC and TOEFL, which are tests of reading, listening and grammar-based English. For students who achieve high scores, there is also a speaking evaluation.

Because of large class sizes and other factors in public schools, many parents pay to send their children to private English-language schools in the afternoon or evening. Usually different private English-language schools specialize in teaching elementary school students or in middle and high school students. The most ambitious parents send their children to kindergartens that utilize English exclusively in the classroom. Many children also live abroad for anywhere from a few months to several years to learn English. Sometimes, a Korean mother and her children will move to an English-speaking country for an extended period of time to enhance the children's English ability. In these cases, the father left in Korea is known as a gireogi appa (Korean: 기러기 아빠), literally a "goose dad" who must migrate to see his family.

There are more than 100,000 Korean students in the U.S. The increase of 10 percent every year helped Korea remain the top student-sending country in the U.S. for a second year, ahead of India and China. Korean students at Harvard University are the third most after Canadian and Chinese.

Due to recent curriculum changes, the education system in Korea is now placing a greater emphasis on English verbal abilities rather than grammatical skills. Universities require all first year students to take an English conversation class in their first year and some universities require students to take conversational English classes throughout the entirety of their university life. According to a 2003 survey conducted by the Hong Kong-based Political and Economic Risk Consultancy, despite being one of the countries in Asia that spends the most money on English-language education, South Korea ranks the lowest among 12 Asian countries in English ability.

English as a subject discipline, that is, the study of linguistics, literature, composition/rhetoric, or pedagogy is uncommon except in top-tier or graduate programs in Korea. As a result, despite efforts to recruit foreign faculty in Korean universities, opportunities for tenure are fewer and professorial privileges and salaries are lower than for foreigners contracted to teach major disciplinary courses in English (content-based instruction).