(Virtual) Native Speakers
Will video conferencing technology replace foreign English teachers in South Korea?
UISEONG, South Korea — Last week Uiseong Middle School announced the opening of its new “Media Space,” a multimedia room with 31 brand new computers equipped with webcams and headsets.
The Media Space will allow students to enroll in special online programs that supplement the school’s core curriculum. Students can take online classes in a range of subjects, including science, civics, math, English, and Korean language.
The English Network Opportunity Zone (ENOZ), a private Korean company, runs the English classes. ENOZ provides its own set of English language textbooks and lets students video chat one-on-one with native English speakers in the Philippines.
While it may seem like just another English program in an already oversaturated industry, I would argue that video chatting programs like ENOZ offer a surprisingly fresh take on learning English in South Korea.
Giving students access to native speakers of English is nothing new in South Korea. Many public schools in South Korea hire native English speakers from abroad. ENOZ has piggybacked on the native speaker trend, billing its service as a “remote native speaker” program.
While the native English speaker program aspires to stimulate cross-cultural interaction and improve conversational speaking ability, in my experience it often falls short of those goals. I am required, for example, to teach out of the textbook, foregoing improving my students’ speaking abilities and instead teaching almost exclusively grammar points and vocabulary.
While my students learn relatively advanced grammatical constructions in class, outside of class they can barely do more than say hello.
If in-house native speakers are constrained by public school curriculum and Korean-style teaching pedagogy, private contractors like ENOZ have their own curriculum that’s specifically designed to improve speaking skills.
The one-on-one video chatting component is the strongest selling point for ENOZ. Each student gets 20 minutes of personalized attention from an ENOZ instructor as they chat and review the material for that day.
One-on-one time is effective for three reasons. One, the students must speak. They can’t just sit passively and listen (or sleep). Two, they must speak in English. There’s no Korean teacher there to translate for them. The only common language students have with their Filipino instructors is English. Lastly, the instructor can give students immediate feedback.
If the student makes a mistake, they will be corrected right away; if they do something particularly well, praised right away. In a large classroom setting, the teacher may not notice a small error, or may not have time to go around correcting individual students’ speech.
I got a chance to watch an ENOZ class last Friday, and I was very impressed at seeing my normally-quiet students get put on the spot to speak English — and keeping it up for their allotted 20 minutes of video chatting time.
ENOZ splits the 45 minutes of class time into 20 minutes of one-on-one video chatting and 25 minutes of watching a pre-recorded lecture. Students can follow along in their workbooks.
One of my students even went outside the script and asked his instructor if she had a boyfriend. She said yes, and I smiled hearing my 7th grade student try to articulate his disappointment in English.
Right now 15 Uiseong Middle School students are enrolled in the ENOZ course. Nine 9th graders take it on Wednesdays after school, and fifteen students from all grades (7th, 8th, 9th) take it on Fridays.
The principal plans to aggressively expand the number of students enrolled, but for now it’s still being tested out. To the principal, whose political leverage helped bring in the funding for the Media Space, ENOZ is “much more effective” than a regular native English teacher.
I asked one student why he signed up for the ENOZ course, and he gave a general answer about wanting to improve his “knowledge and experience.” He added that maybe, sometime in the future, he could go to the US if he got good enough at English.
Another student walking by the Media Space told me he hadn’t signed up for the special English program. When I asked why, he said that since it’s only offered after school, he had to choose between ENOZ and his private academy (hagwon). He chose hagwon.
Some in the school administration have expressed concerns about the cost of online courses. Funding for the Media Space itself, which cost ₩39,000,000 (roughly $39,000 USD), came from the Uiseong county government office and the Uiseong county educational board. Its unclear where the funding for programs like ENOZ will come in the future.
An administrator told me ENOZ costs ₩10,000 ($10 USD) per person per class. She did a quick back of the envelope calculation to show how that adds up. Assuming 10 students take the class twice a week, similar to the situation now, that’s ₩200,000 ($200 USD) a week, or ₩800,000 ($800 USD) a month. That’s expensive when scaled to 300 students.
An in-house native English speaker costs about ₩2,000,000 ($2,000 USD) a month. They are able to teach hundreds of students, though, not just 10.
There’s a perceived quality difference, too. There is a general perception in South Korea that learning English from a Filipino is of subpar quality.
An English teacher told me, half-jokingly, that the Filipino instructors are not really native English teachers: “We call them ‘semi-native’ in Korean.”
The Korean government’s list of countries eligible to send native English teachers to the country, for reference, includes the US, Canada, the UK, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa.
There are pros and cons to ENOZ’s video chatting program, just like there are pros and cons to having a real native English speaker teaching at Korean public schools. That’s how one English teacher at Uiseong Middle School put it to me when I asked if he foresaw remote video chatting replacing in-house foreign teachers. It’s not about choosing one or the other — they’re complementary.
I agree that there’s not really a tradeoff between a video chatting program and an in-house foreign teacher. They’re both just two choices in a suite of options for learning English in South Korea.
There are many distinct advantages of a video chatting service like ENOZ, but the irony is that learning to speak English has no place in the Korean education system at the moment.
Speaking English well doesn’t necessarily benefit Korean students. Memorizing grammar and vocabulary, on the other hand, has a specific utility in a system that asks students to decipher overly complex reading passages, and not much else.
Until the Korean education system begins rewarding students who can speak English well, innovative technology like video chatting with native speakers will only ever exist on the fringe.
