Speaking directly to the situation of foreign language instructors in Korea and other nations, there is a dire need for even the most rudimentary training. Instructors who come are almost always untrained teachers with little or no experience teaching any subject or skill, let alone a language in a foreign language. Instructors rely on their own memories of their experiences learning foreign languages, if they did at all, and cobble together ideas of best-practice from the under-qualified instructors in their immediate environment. For teachers who do spend time and money pursing training, trainers are often peers with little experience or training, although some specialists are available. This situation is evident in a visit to the national conference for English teachers here in Korea.
What needs to be done for the field? In many ways, there are problems with motivation and perceived need. For “teachers” and employers alike, there is not a perceived need to actually teach; it is enough to have a visible “native speaker” (as though these people were authorities on their own language and how to learn it, simply because they can communicate in it and may or may not have mastery) in the same room as the learner. To be fair, some teachers take their role seriously and pursue learning at every opportunity. These teachers may at some point work toward certification or higher education in the field, but for too many it is merely enough to get through the 12-month contract, get paid, and get out.
For those who wish to become competent but who are unable or uninterested in pursing official certification, there is little in terms of competent training resources available. Most of what is free is merely anecdotal how-tos by others in the same circumstances, that is, novices evaluating their own performance. A clear need is for easily accessible training for novices interested in developing their skills. Official sources often require time away from work, the classroom, and therefore a source of income, placing a barrier between potential trainee and the training.
When it comes to teaching students, however, resources abound. Korea is interested in moving toward the highest forms of widely available technology for use in the classroom. While the universities are slower to adopt technologies such as interactive white boards (IWB), both public and private schools are quickly adopting IWBs, ebooks and other technologies in the interest of better education for students. The level of training that educators receive, however, on how to use and best implement these new technologies (and even more elementary- are they helpful?) is unclear.
The greatest technology, which is not widely available, is the technology of better pedagogy. Korean instruction is still largely stuck in a DI model, which some claim is a holdover of Confucian authoritarian structures. If this is true, there are core cultural barriers to change. Without cultural changes, or a shift in mindset, the greatest technological advances may be stymied by lagging pedagogy.
In speaking with a professional Korean elementary school teacher, who is currently in a model school for “smart education,” I learned that in her case, she has persued training in technologies as part of her graduate studies, and there are frequent seminars avilable to her throughout the semester. She explain that a lot of the teachers are pursing training of their own accord. From what she told me, there isn’t much in relating the technologies to pedagogy; rather teachers are expeced to know the pedagogies already and find ways to use the techologies within their existing schema.
What this indicates to me is that depending on how abreast of pedagogical shifts teachers are, there may or may not be understanding of current pedagogies and how to best utilize technologies for educational outcomes. This is mere conjecture, however, and does not speak to anything from data. It would be a very interesting area of study.
