What Is a Native English Speaker?

What Is a Native English Speaker?

[Opinion] Korean perception key to better English

When I feel a bit nostalgic about my time as a professor in Korea and I want to take a stroll down memory lane. I don't use the thousands of pictures I took, or films I made with my camera. I use the radio. 

Nothing brings me more intimately closer to the past than hearing English Korean radio stations. I guess it's the presenters' distinctive and mellifluous American mid-west accent fused with the Korean. That sounds so warm and soulful. Even simple things like a weather or traffic report. Takes me back to my days in Korea and feels me with a pleasurable pathos. A strange pathos, as it is mixed with happiness too. The type of feeling you have when you remember a lost love or an old dear friend. As I write this I shed inner-tears. I yearn to be back in Korea. I digress.

Midweek I tuned in halfway through a program that was about helping children to learn English. A professor whose name I cannot remember spoke of a new pedagogic style using popular and current pop music to not only help children acquire English, but also to have a correct pronunciation of it. This caused me to think about the main hurdles and stumbling blocks in learning English for Korean students. I concluded that it is not so much pedagogy that has to change, rather Korean perceptions stops students from reaching their considerable potential in speaking English. Let me explain.

What is a native English speaker? A person who was born and brought up in a native English-speaking country I hear you reply. For many Koreans, whatever their education, this is not such a simple question it has many racial aspects attached to it. For many Koreans a native English speaker is a white person from the many English-speaking countries. Even though many Koreans have family in Western nations, visited Western nations and know a lot about Western nations they still have a mono-racial view of them. It's as if non-white people are sort of fake Westerners. It always fascinated me when my Canadian girlfriend, whose parents are Korean, told people she was Canadian was often ask the ludicrous question "but you look Korean." Unbelievable.

As a black professor some of my students seemed to have great difficulty accepting that I was British. It seemed to them a contradiction in terms that someone who is black is British. When they got over this I noticed their learning drastically improved, it seemed to me that perception was the major hindrance in enabling Korean students of whatever age to learn English.

I was one of the fortunate teachers to have a director who employed professors not according to skin colour, rather according to qualification and experience. I heard of first-hand accounts of black teachers and Korean teachers born in English-speaking countries being refused employment because they were non-white. I equally heard of teachers who were hired quite simply because they were white. As a white Canadian friend of mine put it "there's a lot of love for us here." For many Koreans a white English teacher equals a good teacher. This even applies to unqualified white teachers. The logic being, if you can call it logic, that a Korean student's close proximity to a white teacher though unqualified would improve the English of students.

The educational dream of the government is a plural linguistic society, where Koreans can speak English just as fluently as Korean. If this is to be realised which I believe it can, many countries are bi-lingual. The Korean perception of what a native English speaker looks like has to change.

출처 : 오마이 뉴스(영문판)