Week 1: Reflection Mr. Han

Reflections of my learning Korean and English reading and writing

 

 

Han Seok Hee

 

 

1. Actually, I can’t exactly remember how and when I started to learn reading and writing Korean except I really liked playing outside with my friends and was a little troublemaker. According to my slight memories, I entered the world of reading and writing when I was 7

years old in a public kindergarten with all of my friends in our village.

At that time, in the early 1970s, Korean government was struggling against poverty and trying to build industrial infrastructure. In this atmosphere, my parents had to work all day outside having no chance to think about our education. As one of the development policies, the government built a public kindergarten at each village with a roving teacher who took care of us and taught us basic numbers, arithmetic, Korean alphabet, games, songs and social

etiquette.

Even though it was a large class of nearly 50 students in one class and a half-a-day’s program for another class, I was very happy to get a chance to learn with my friends and it was very fun for me to learn reading and writing Korean every day. After that, I entered an elementary school in which I started formal education regularly.

 

 

2. I started learning English in middle school with memorizing the alphabet and basic phonics.

Everything about my school work in middle and high school in retrospect seems to be concentrated on the college entrance exam. In that situation, both teachers and students’ main goal is winning the competition and getting the letter of acceptance from the top universities they’ve wanted to attend, not just for academic works but for more stabilized jobs, success and money.

 

All our classes were filled with numerous simple solving problems by reading, analyzing patterns, memorizing vocabularies and grammar without having one chance of writing my own essay. At that time, not practical but academic listening and reading was exclusively included in the exam, so there was no need to study speaking and writing. I think this is the main problems of Korean students who get good points at TOEIC or TOEFLE but have lots of problems with communication in face to face situations and creative writing.

 

I started a writing class preparing for the IBT TOEFLE in a private academy where the teaching method was how to get us to produce a conventional piece of writing. We were given topics for writing, and expected to complete the writing in a limited time using simple and regular forms rather than creative writing considered as ineffective useless ways for the exam.

 

As a teacher, I always try to get my students to read many books and write retellings as much as possible. It seems the best way to achieve the higher level of writing and problem solving for their lives as a means of lifelong education especially in the elementary school where the burden of exams does not exist.

 

I think that we need to provide lots of fun stories and blown-up books to our kids through bedtime stories and shared reading at an early age of their childhood, so that they can enjoy them without any burden or stress and learn them naturally having good control of the grammar and vocabularies of the language and knowledge about many stories and books.