Ken Eckert – January 2008
Most instructors believe it is a good thing to treat everyone as individuals, but if we fail to recognize that there are undeniable generalities in how new speakers of English approach writing we won't be as prepared as we might be to help them. Foreign-speaking students from anywhere will have problems with language interference, but I'm writing this on Koreans because I have lived in Korea for several years and hopefully can contribute some advice on what peculiar difficulties Koreans have with English writing. I originally wrote this article for the UNLV Writing Center, which tends to receive large numbers of Korean students for consultations, but I think this page might be useful for any ESL teacher of Koreans.
GrammarThe three aspects of English that give Koreans great difficulty are our system of articles, prepositions, and word order. I have found these problems to be highly consistent from student to student.
Korean does not have an article system; at most, it has demonstratives such as ‘this bus' or ‘that sandwich'. Many languages don't have the, such as Russian and Latin. There is no number agreement in Korean syntax. Just as the der-die-das distinction in German seems superfluous and arbitrary, many speakers of languages with no article system like English's can feel that it is an unnecessary and trivial piece of information. Koreans can understand the dry rules for a / an / the, but they have no intuition for their application in practice, and handling this requires some sensitivity. Visual analogies can often help—I explain that talking about pencils is different from needing a pencil, or describing the individual pencil I am holding—but merely adding in the articles to the student's paper without explaining why we use these articles won't help at all. Number agreement has more concrete rules and can be taught. English's countable / uncountable noun distinctions also may have logical reasons but simply need to be memorized as well.
Korean also usually does not indicate plurals or pronouns— although they are possible in the language, usually the context makes something clear, or a number tells you how many of the noun is indicated (two boxes). As with articles, part of the difficulty is in emphasizing to students that this is important and necessary information. If I ask a female student, "Where is your roommate today?", she might accidently answer "He's sick." If I look confused, the student might correct herself and say, "I mean, she's sick." Yet she might still think me a little dense— "You see my roommate every day and you know very well she's female!" But this is how English minds work, and for better or worse pronouns and plurals need to be correct.
Similarly, the prepositional system that English has built up over the centuries is a mess compared to other languages—I just admit that there is often no concrete reason why we ride on a motorcycle and in a car, and why we go to the nightclub but just go home, apart from tradition or grammatical reasons now obsolete; the bloody things also just have to be memorized. This admission seems to make people feel better if they see that they aren't missing some secret rule! Korean has passive voice, but its rendering in English can be especially problematic, as prepositions can be confused "I was taught from Dr. Brown" or the wrong tense can be used: "I cut my hair"— did you mean, "I had my hair cut?"
Korean word order is synthetic or agglutinative, rather than analytical, as is English. This means that English makes sense only by word order (the dog bit the man) and Korean is more like Latin in that particle endings tell us who does what. Korean would say "geh-ga saram-ul murl-utda": dog-subject man-object bite-past tense; word order is subject-object-verb. The Koreans I've taught have an unnerving habit of trying to show off with complex sentences, or of being lazy and simply translating a Korean sentence literally by computer, and when this happens the teacher is often faced with gobbledygook text where you have no idea on God's green earth who is doing what, as Korean nouns have markers that tell us subject from object and English hasn't since Anglo-Saxon times. All of this will be made even worse if the writer is trying to write in passive voice. I only encourage such students to write simple subject-verb-object statements to get them used to this pattern until they are ready to write more lengthy or sophisticated sentences.
Put together, Korean is a much more high-contextual language than English is; that's not a judgment, just a statement. Articles, numbers, and pronouns are usually unnecessary because the situation or conversation has established something as obvious. English says, "I'm hungry." Korean says, "Stomach empty"—well, of course it's my stomach, how would I know if you're hungry? English says, "We're going to the beach." Korean might not even bother with a continuous tense, saying "Beach-to go"—you can see all of us wearing swimsuits, what more do you need? A conversation or text is needed to make these subsequent things obvious, permitting some indirectness, but at that point an insistence on we (plural) are (plural verb) going (present continuous) to the (direction, individual thing known to the audience) beach isn't necessary, and to a Korean all this redundancy and specificity seems needless. Whether anyone likes it or not, students need to know that these details can't be omitted if the statement is to be meaningful in English.
Minor Problems of Usage
A few other little things may be helpful. Korean has three modal auxiliary verbs, and so they don't always match the wider range of English meanings well; Koreans will often write should in situations where there isn't a moral aspect or choice ("when the sun sets, it should get dark"). On the other hand, Korean has a much richer list of color adjectives than English does and there can be some strange translations.
Korean ㄹcorresponds to both l and r sounds in English, and occasionally words are written as they are heard and are misspelled.
The frame there is / are doesn't exist in Korean, and so you may see "many problems exist" instead, with a verb or verbs at the end of the phrase. While not incorrect, the style can be repetitive.
You may also see an unintentionally humorous sentence such as "I was very boring this weekend." Korean doesn't have gerunds as such and so the language would have a clearer distinction between "the weekend was not fun" and "I was a dull person". The difference between such words as confusing (affecting others) and confused (being affected) is something I describe visually with arrows.
To and -ing verbs. Koreans often have trouble distinguishing "I like to swim" and "I like swimming." There is usually no difference in English. Occasionally the gerund emphasizes the action ("I like eating grapes") and the infinitive is more general or suggests anticipation: "I like to go to the lake." With a conditional, always use to: "I would like to go to France."
Lastly, this is usually a problem only in conversation, but a Korean might answer a negative question tag such as "That's not right, is it?" with "Yes"—meaning, "Yes, I agree; that's not right." Mexicans do this too; it's English that is odd man out here. To avoid such a misunderstanding it might be best to not use tag questions in the session, but be aware of this difference if a tag question is in the student's text. Sometimes English speakers follow an ambiguous tag with a second answer: "No, I agree," or "Yes, it wasn't." This is a technique that should be taught in order to form habits that prevent this confusion.
Semantics and Vocabulary
I don't recommend that you turn your classes into grammar sessions. This is partly because such classes are as boring as they sound, and also partly because Korean students usually are well-grounded in grammar; they are taught English the way westerners used to be taught Latin: an emphasis on formal usage with very little spoken conversation. There are times when students need to understand the nuts and bolts in a practical way as used by a native speaker, but quite often Koreans know the rules but aren't experienced or confident in intuiting their application.
In order to help, I would give students a lot of materials or practice in real-life conversational settings. Because Korean indicates levels of respect grammatically, Koreans need to learn the speech styles and vocabulary distinctions that westerners use to indicate familiarity ("Hey, gimme a burger") and politeness ("I would like a hamburger, please"). As well, Koreans obviously need help in navigating the thicket of idioms and expressions that English is constantly developing. They will not know the latest hip-hop catchphrase, and they need to know that it is not an expression they ought to use when speaking to their grandmother. Lastly, there is not so much sarcasm in Korean speech as there is in the west, and you might find creative ways to teach them to recognize when you are being ironic.
Composition IssuesMy experience is that both Koreans and Japanese are quite good at learning essay structure as this reflects their fact-based educational experience; they will not usually have trouble with formatting their papers into introductory and body sections. It is a culture which tries to avoid confrontation, and so often you will see weak or non-committal thesis statements. You may need to work on students' theses and the tone of their paper generally in order to help them be clearer and more direct without being blunt (even Canadians are accused of this meek ambiguity!) Korean expresses levels of respect through grammatical endings and so Koreans sometimes have difficulty distinguishing a casual from a serious tone in English.
A composition teacher might use a wide variety of assignments, ranging from "My favorite food," to movie reviews, analysis or descriptive essays, all the way up to formal academic essays. I tended to teach only the latter in Korea, and now I wish I had covered other genres such as creative writing or resumes. As well, you might experiment with having students write web pages, which have a different, non-linear approach that some might find easier.
An occasionally humorous habit of Koreans is to attempt to jazz up writing with over-elaborate synonyms using electronic dictionaries. I once had a student write me she was meeting her paramour at a movie theater, and I had to explain that paramour was indeed a substitute for boyfriend, but was a pretentious and archaic word. Electronic dictionaries don't usually explain such nuances, and they may also provide half-synonyms that don't fit the situation.
CultureWhat I'm going to say is a generalization, and not a very politically correct one, but you need to know. Korea, although rapidly Christianizing, is a very hierarchical society due to the traditions of Neo-Confucianism, and young people are partly affected by these influences, even those who have been raised in America.
Korean women will often wait for you to do most of the talking in a one-on-one meeting. In Korean classrooms the teacher is generally never questioned, and in particular, women are expected to defer to men and elders and to shush until spoken to. The typical Korean woman who comes to the writing center or to your office will expect to be corrected and instructed, especially if you are male, and will not ask many questions. You must remember that this silence normally comes from politeness and not lack of interest. Older, married Korean women conversely are often less reserved and their easygoing humor can be fun. Again, these are of course generalizations.
Korean men can also develop a friendly rapport with male tutors, although they can be frustrating in that they come from a culture that sometimes winks at plagiarism. Some will 'get it' that western universities take copying extremely seriously, and others will use the excuse 'but it's okay in Asia' and will be resistant to doing their own work. Some Korean men will be disrespectful to a female consultant, particularly one younger or blonde, and although the younger generation is changing, be prepared for the occasional problem student.
In a peer-review session, I would allow students to form their own small groups. They will probably form single-sex groups, or at least groups in which everyone is about the same age. Otherwise young students will be very reluctant to criticize an older person's paper, particularly if it is a young woman and older man. If you can trust the students to not be abusive you might even try blind peer-reviewing, where the reviewing is anonymous. E-mail reviewing is another possibility.
But I close with an important piece of advice: don't be intimidated by the foreign students, whatever their origin. They are generally much more nervous about meeting with you than you are. Teachers are highly esteemed in most non-western cultures, and students will usually receive tutoring with a lot of gratitude.
