ABSTRACT
Joung Won is returning to South Korea after completing a four-year undergraduate degree at an American university. Despite typical student struggles, she has enjoyed the experience. However, a growing wave of apprehension has begun to sweep over her. She knows that her next challenge will be to find quality employment in a weakened South Korean economy, the type of employment that would justify the significant financial sacrifices her family has made to support her during her U.S. education. But of more concern is the worry that she will fail her family’s expectations in her primary rationale for coming to the U.S., namely the acquisition of high-proficiency English to a level that will open significant career-path doors in Korea. In her own slightly edited words, she tells of:
[her] grandfather who told me a true story before he died about the necessity of language. In the Korean colonial period when the Japanese ruled [1910–1945], my grandfather lived in a small village. There was one bridge that connected to the place where people could earn money. But several Japanese police officers always stood there and let Koreans pass by the bridge only when they could speak Japanese. My grandfather, who has seven children, learned Japanese so he could earn enough money and have a high status. He later became the principal of the major high school in the city. There was a language battlefield which required the survival of the fittest. These days in Korea, English is my grandfather’s Japanese, although not as intense. There is an English bridge in Korea, and to pass over it, we need good English.
It was her grandfather’s post-colonial, English-as-success orientation, an orientation shared by most Koreans (see Dudden, 2005; Lee, Min & McKerrow, 2010), that led her family to decide to send Joung to the U.S. even though she could have studied at many top-tier Korean universities. In the beginning of her U.S. experience, Joung applied herself to English acquisition as well as to the content of her major. But she became consumed by struggles to understand her textbooks, the lectures, and the study necessary to pass examinations, most of which came in multiple-choice format with very little demand to write extended English prose. Corrective feedback on writing assignments that she did submit was minimal.