15 Cultural Differences in the Korean Classroom

This article is based on two similar ones I wrote on Japan, and a more general one I wrote on culture in the EFL classroom everywhere. In contrast to Japan, I only stayed in Korea for two years and only taught in two different schools and didn’t learn the language, so although I did teach all ages and try to read a lot to make up for this, the inevitable generalisation of such articles might be even more of a problem in this one. So apologies in advance, but I nonetheless hope that it will at least give teachers things to look out for and make their own conclusions on, or maybe prompt a little debate from the many teachers who know more about the topic than me. Links to my other articles and some books and sites on Korean culture are given at the bottom.

1. Names

More than Japan but less than China, Korean students fairly often give themselves or have been given “English names” such as June or Sarah. Like many Guardian-reading TEFL teachers I am in principle against this practice, but personally not enough to refuse to use the names they have chosen. Instead, I double check “What is your Korean name? But you want me to call you ‘Carmela’, right?” The response is occasionally “What do you prefer?” or an indication that they have chosen the name to make life easier for the teacher, at which point the conversation can get quite involved! This gets more complicated when they use an “English” name with a pronunciation from another language (fairly common with nuns) or if they can’t pronounce their own name (e.g. “Andrew” being “andooroo”). I tend to use their chosen pronunciation in the case of the former and use my own pronunciation in the latter case but not correct them. Rather strangely, I’ve found that my students carry on using their English names even when they switch to Korean at the end of the class.

There are also several issues with using their Korean names. As very few Korean sounds map closely onto English ones, it is virtually inevitable that you will mispronounce some names. Although this is less common than in Chinese where you also have to worry about tones, this might well lead to a pronunciation that is close to another Korean word, with the inevitable potential problems with giggling and teasing from other students etc. In one case, I even had to ask a mother to choose another name to use for her son in class as I got laughs every time I tried to say his Korean one. Perhaps for this reason, some students will ask you to use a nickname or shortened version of their name. Sometimes this is their surname, but it is usually best to use it as a nickname rather than to add Mr or Ms to it, unless they are much older than the other students.

As in many of the points mentioned in this article, Koreans are in an awkward middle position of trying desperately to avoid their own cultural norms and language in the classroom, but not being comfortable with the British or American ones. Two examples here are never using Korean polite titles like –shi in class (unlike the Japanese with –San, the Germans with Herr and the French with Monsieur) and avoiding the Korean respectful word for teacher, but not being entirely happy with using first names. The can lead to even adults calling out “Teacher” and starting emails with “Dear my friend”.

One seemingly minor but important point is that you should avoid writing any names in red, as there is a superstition about this being related to death. Although some students don’t seem to mind, others are absolutely horrified and it is impossible to predict people’s reactions by their age etc.

2. Bullying and behaviour

Unlike the Japanese, Koreans are quite physical, with touching of arms during pairwork speaking fairly common in class and girls walking hand in hand quite common outside. This extends to quite a lot of rough play, especially between boys. Even understanding this, I tend to enforce more British or American standards of basically no physical contact during class, and have usually found students eventually understand and more or less stick to this.

More difficult to deal with, especially if you don’t speak the language like me, is swearing, teasing, and picking on one particular student. Although this is fairly common in Korean schools generally (perhaps due to a lack of tolerance of individualism and continued use of physical punishments), parents of the kids who are the victims are less than shy about complaining or even taking their kids out of the class. Students who are the perpetrator as much as the victim have also been known to use false accusations of bullying to deflect attention from themselves. Some teachers find banning Korean in the classroom is the only solution to this, although I tend to only do this with older and higher level students. Many native speaking teachers in public schools also complain that they get a lot less respect and a lot more discipline problems than their Korean counterparts. There are many possible reasons for this, including students knowing that you can’t understand Korean back-chat, local foreign celebrities usually being a figure of fun on TV, foreign teachers not using physical punishment, an idea that the spoken English taught by native speakers is unimportant for the crucial exams (and a lack of testing by native speaking teachers generally), and the use of games. I personally think that the first and last reasons are the most important, and so have switched to starting classes with worksheets and mini-tests rather than warmers, and highly recommend learning at least common Korean insults that they might be shouting at each other as soon as you can.

Korean young learners respond very well to the taking away of points, especially team points, as punishment for bad behaviour, but this could of course lead to further bullying of students who rarely get points and/ or often lose them.

3. Competition, marks and points

Korean society is very competitive, and cheating, dobbing people in etc to get on top is generally seen as cheeky at worst. As mentioned above, however, love of competition can be a great classroom motivator and way of imposing some discipline. Students will also expect regular testing, but this can lead to too much stress, a further prioritising of less important things (e.g. asking to skip a class to take a test that they missed), and some students dropping out as soon as they fail a test or think they might fail the course. One possible response to this is to give marks for things you want them to focus on, such as spoken tasks or task completion and paragraphing (rather than just accuracy) in written homework.

Koreans are used to a school system where students will pass almost all exams with reasonably high percentage scores and good students will get used to getting As (if not perfect scores) all the time, so they often have problems adjusting to a British system of most people getting around the pass mark of 40 or 50% and As being rare.

A small but important point is that a tick in Korean means something is wrong, with a circle meaning that it is right. Students can therefore get very shocked the first time they see a page covered with ticks!

4. Bags

In common with Spain and most Latin American countries, students seem very reluctant to put their bags on the ground. In Spain I became convinced that it came from a habit of avoiding filthy bar and restaurant floors, whereas in Korea it might be because the only clean floor is by definition one, like inside the home, that never has a shoe touching it. Whatever the reason, I like to put any extra chairs in convenient places to put bags on, or tell young learners to hang all their bags on the hooks to save them getting in the way. If students do put their bags on chairs next to them, you might need to be on the look out to ask them to move them when the inevitable latecomers arrive.

5. Seniority and gender

Korean society is traditionally very stratified, with different vocabulary and grammar needed when speaking to a higher status person such as someone older, a teacher, boss, customer, or a man if you are a woman. The higher status person will also expect to initiate and dominate conversations. Koreans will therefore not be shy about asking each other and you about your ages, as it helps put you all in your place on the social scale. This gets more complicated in the English class, as we have no equivalent language forms to mark out social status, nor even expressions like “He is my senior” or “My juniors at university” that Koreans often try to use to talk about their positions in the scale. The polite forms that we do use are generally used equally by people of both status levels, e.g. customer and server using “Please” equally. Others, such as “Sir” and “Madam”, are almost exclusively used in service situations.

Koreans can actually find the lack of complicated language choices based on status to be a relief, but might have difficulty switching to Korean with each other before and after class as they won’t know which language to use. They might also have to change speaking roles as the younger person who was just speaking as an equal in English will have to now sit down and listen to the other person in Korean. This might explain the tendency of the first four students to arrive at my class to sit at separate tables in silence (along perhaps with an obsession with the L1-free classroom).

The habit of letting the higher status person lead the conversation can also be confusing in the English classroom, as I fairly often get an older student (often male) who dominates the conversation, but that in no way is received well by their partner who is paying an equal amount to be in the classroom, has a focus on speaking skills, and knows that in English they should get a fair say. It must be said, however, that quite a few of the dominating students that I have taught have not had too good social skills, so it might be silly, as with so many other things, to blame this on Confucius.

6. Face

The concept of “face” is also something that has been used to explain a ridiculous range of Asian behaviours. If you teach Koreans straight after Latin students, however, you will certainly notice a lot more embarrassment and discomfort in the English language classroom. This is a lot easier to understand in Japan, where the Japanese often seem embarrassed and uncomfortable in their own language and culture. Koreans seem a lot more uninhibited and natural in the street, and yet even more uncomfortable in the classroom. There are lots of other possible reasons for this, such as being more ambitious and focussed on a native-speaker model of language and even behaviour while speaking L1, but “face” does seem to be the best explanation of some noticeable factors in Korea. One is that students expect a lot of correction but are horribly uncomfortable when they do get it, e.g. often hiding their corrected written work in their folder without even looking at it so that other students can’t get a look. Others include never coming back to class if they have failed a single test, being uncomfortable with a greeting if they arrive late, and freezing up when I step close to them during group speaking.

7. Methodology and the role of the teacher

Koreans spend most of their English language learning classroom hours being taught with grammar translation by Korean teachers with somewhat limited English (especially pronunciation) and dated materials. All that is done in some of the largest and most mixed-level classes in the developed world, where they have little opportunity to talk and students not paying attention are just ignored. There is also a great emphasis on rote memorisation (of vocabulary lists, idioms, proverbs and/ or fixed phrases such as sentence stems). Some of those things can transfer to their expectations in your classroom, but the stronger effect is them expecting exactly the opposite from classes that they chose for themselves.

Things that Koreans might still subconsciously expect from your classes include being able to switch off from time to time (mainly meaning staring into space during grammar presentations in my classes), and a teacher who has all the answers. The opposite things that they might expect from your classes include small class sizes, lots of opportunities to speak, lots of individual attention from the teacher, and a lack of focus on grammar. If you are a non-Korean teacher, they will also expect something from you that they could not get from a Korean teacher, for example cultural tips, lots of pronunciation practice, up-to-date idiomatic language, or improving their understanding of native speakers by listening to you. The last one obviously doesn’t fit in very well with expecting to speak a lot too! You might have also come to the conclusion that most students would be much better just doing one-to-one classes, but high prices, a shortage of native-speaking teachers and visa restrictions that make it hard to work outside schools make this difficult or impossible for most students.

Matters on which there might be wildly varying views depending on age, personality etc include pairwork, correction, language learning games, and testing.

8. Hard work

The Koreans have got themselves where they are today, from sub-Saharan African levels of poverty and post-Korean War devastation to developed country status in record time, and mainly through hard work. For example, the two day weekend is a relatively recent innovation and the government is trying to cut down on cram schools for kids that stay open past midnight. Students therefore enter class with an expectation that they will cover a lot, that they will be given lots of homework, and that the teacher will be strict about completing those things. However, apart from an initial surge of enthusiasm and preparation for tests, the work rate of students is hardly likely to match those expectations. This could be because of tiredness, other demands on their time and energy, not being able to reproduce the family and company pressure that keeps them busy elsewhere, relying on self-study and self-motivation skills that they don’t have, a lack of testing, or a focus on fun and speaking making students not take the classes seriously. The attitude to games can be unfortunate, because their lack of energy and motivation, along with their inefficient study skills, make some fun absolutely essential. I therefore still use a lot of games, but make sure that there is lots of new language involved in them and usually calling them “communicative activities”.

9. Religion

Perhaps because the impressive lack of religious conflict in Korean history, Koreans seem perfectly happy asking “What is your religion?” and talking about it. I tend to tell them this is a question I never heard once in 23 years in the UK, partly because I don’t want to answer it myself. That openness seems to extend to acceptance of almost any answer to that question, and telling them that you are an atheist is unlikely to cause the shock (or even student complaints) that it would in the Middle East. This lack of offending people with religious topics seems to extend to blaspheming, and I’ve had to tell lots of students that “Oh my God!” is not really suitable language for the classroom, nor probably for the host family they will be staying with in America.

Another thing related to religion is that the traditional Korean customs that you read about may be specific to one religion, depend on religion, or at least not be performed by committed Christians. That might also extend to not being familiar with what other people do, leading to less frenzied discussion of the topic that you might have expected or even embarrassment that they don’t know something about their own country.

10. Time keeping

Although it’s not as bad as Spain, my students are often late. With kids it is often due to having their parents pack too much into their days and so finishing a piano class 10 minutes before your class which is a 15 minute walk away. I have a feeling a lack of knowledge of their own limits is also a factor with my adult students, as students demanding more homework in week one have often burnt out by the end of the course and the extra copies of worksheets that they ask for usually go unread. This is also famously how Korean companies operate, by setting impossible targets and almost reaching them through sheer hard work and slog. My students also tell me that Korean time keeping has always been quite bad but is getting better. In a questionnaire on acceptability of certain classroom actions given to advanced level learners of eight different nationalities of student in America (http://w3.coh.arizona.edu/awp/AWP%202003/Beckman.pdf), the Korean student was the only one who said that it was totally acceptable (1 point) to arrive 7 minutes late for a lecture, whereas the other two East Asian students gave it 4 or 5 points (unacceptable and totally unacceptable).

I make my young learners apologise for being late, but they seem shocked to be asked and not even to understand what I am asking them to say, so I have a feeling they would just be expected to sneak in without making a fuss in their school classrooms. Adult students seem to be so uncomfortable coming in late that they cringe at any kind of acknowledgement, so I often ask someone else on their table to explain what we are doing (in English of course) so that they don’t feel like they are getting too much attention from me and so from the rest of the class.

11. Politics and nationalism

Many Korean students, especially higher level ones, often see talking about serious topics and a bit of debate as exactly what they expect of an English class. I’m not so convinced myself that endless practice of agreement and disagreement language is useful and there are always other students in class who have nothing to say, but it does seem to be expected. Topics connected to Korean history and their relationships with their neighbours, however, are likely to be pushing things too far, and I would certainly not play devil’s advocate on touchy topics like this. A particularly dangerous topic is which country owns which particular uninhabited rocks in the region, and what names are to be used for them. This means that maps used in the classroom will need to be limited to ones produced in Korea, especially as a map with Sea of Japan written on it is something students will and do complain about. Telling students that East Sea is not the correct English name and that even the French don’t expect an English language map to say The Sleeve (from the French name for the English Channel) on it is unlikely to lead to productive debate or happy students! Sensitivity with names and borders is by no means limited to Korea, of course, and it’s worth keeping Derry/ Londonderry in mind if searching for a suitable map is starting to get you down.

The history that most Koreans remember from school tends to focus on overwhelmingly positive stories on a few heroes, similar to what most British people remember about Elizabeth I. Trying to extend the discussion into re-examination of those people’s roles or more obscure points of Korean history is unlikely to work well, either because they don’t want to lose a hero or because they will be embarrassed by knowing less than you about something in Korean history. The latter is also true of topics about Korean geography and traditional culture. For example, as in many countries most young people will only be vaguely aware of what public holidays are supposed to be for and won’t appreciate being told by a foreigner.

12. Customer service

If you are working in private language institution like I was, you are in the strange position of being half respected teacher and half someone serving them for money and so right down the bottom of the politeness scale with waiters and shop assistants in convenience stores (who get little more than a grunt from their customers). Many Koreans are not shy about making their views, e.g. complaints, heard, so it is easy to forget the others who are very uncomfortable telling a teacher negative things to their face. To make sure that a few vocal students don’t dominate what you do in the class, you will need to find a way of getting feedback in more indirect ways, for example a questionnaire passed out by a different member of staff. You might also want to tell the students what the feedback said, for example so that they know you aren’t responding to a particular complaint because everyone else has the opposite opinion.

13. Mobile phones and technology

Korean students tend to use a built-in or online dictionary in their mobile phones rather than buying a separate electronic dictionary, with the inevitable problems with the phones being on for distracting arrival of text messages etc. Other students seem to think that it is perfectly okay to answer calls during to class, maybe just to say that they are too busy, but sometimes to go out of the classroom to take the call. This is of course increasingly prevalent everywhere, but as it is perfectly normal to speak at high volume on the train or in a coffee shop (or even watch TV without headphones) and vibrate mode isn’t much used, there might well be a cultural element here. The respect for the teacher’s role and group decision making means that it should be fairly easy to deal with these things if you want a class policy, especially if you provide a paper dictionary. I prefer to approach things more indirectly and just ban all dictionary use, with all vocabulary enquiries coming to me or their classmates instead.

The other major influence of technology on your students is likely to be the huge impact of computer games on Korea, with sleepless nights in PC Bang (smoky internet cafes where almost everyone is playing online games) and two TV channels dedicated to professional computer game players is all part of the culture. To start with, this could explain the glassy eyed tiredness of your students! It also means that young learners will love computer games in class, but be totally dismissive of the basic graphics etc of your average EFL game.

The point above extends more generally to the use of technology in the classroom, which is likely to be popular but produce a very negative reaction if the technology and the teacher’s mastery of it aren’t up to the standard that Koreans expect in this most switched-on of countries. Better perhaps to set webquests etc as homework, as every student will have access to broadband internet one way or another.

14. Instructions

Of all the nationalities I have taught, Koreans are by far the worst at understanding classroom instructions. It could be because they are used to familiar routines or following written instructions at school (they often read the written instructions and follow them after sitting through my long explanation and demonstration of the different thing I want them to do), because they have never had an English-only classroom before, or because of weak micro-listening skills that are usually hidden by good test-taking and listening strategies.

15. Pace and timing

Korean students seem to prefer an activity to stretch on a little until they are comfortable with it, and are happy to chat for a few minutes while other teams finish off. They tend to be much more impatient with long explanations of what they have to do, even when that often means they go and do the wrong thing!