Hello Cryptoworld!
Today is Sunday 9 February 2025.
Recently I found an essay I had prepare for a Congress more than 10 years ago:
The Teaching of Spanish as a Foreign Language and Cultural or Intercultural Contrasts?
This essay was prepared to participate in an international conference in 2009 in Mexico. Due to obvious reasons of unemployment, it was not possible to attend, even if it was in my country. Later I retook it as part of Book plan which I organised but I did arrived to publish. I posted the complete essay in Spanish yesterday La enseñanza del español como Lengua Extranjera y los contrastes culturales ¿o interculturales?. It looks like it was not a good idea, I think the blogg space should be shorter than a long essay. So, I decided to retake fragments of the essay to do the English versión. In this post I am sharing my Arrival to Korea in my first experience teach my mother tongue out of my country.
Arrival in Korea, My First Impressions
My stay in Korea was about confronting an unimaginable cultural dimension. Not because we know nothing about the East, but because one thing is what we learn about the East in general, primarily China and Japan, and another is facing the reality of taking a plane to teach my mother tongue, Mexican Spanish, without knowing any Korean and very little about Korea.
While I was traveling on Korean Air, on 21 August 2002, I could read on the screens placed on the seats a message inviting me to enjoy the flight with the slogan "Korean Air beyond your imagination"; and that flight was indeed taking me beyond my imagination.
And indeed, the place was alien to my existence. When I arrived and looked around the streets of Seoul, it was strange to read the advertisements, the Korean letters, symbols that were unintelligible to me at that moment. Listening to television and radio was like hearing the murmur of a language I could not understand. Thus, I began to live this other dimension that lasted three years.
Facing the Korean students also turned out to be suddenly silencing as I encountered so much silence; where little by little, I found myself listening to only me speaking in the middle of the classroom.
In my first class at HUFS, when I was trying to get them to at least say their names with the respective ‘My name is...’, it turned out to be strangely difficult.
In the course of the first few minutes, the classroom filled with a strange silence. I could hear myself, and it felt odd to be in front of an audience that did not speak my language. But it was also strangely silent ('Why don’t they ask me something, anything?' I wondered, while thinking about what to do). I started to feel nervous about such a strange situation...
Suddenly, at that moment, the presentation I usually do in my first French class in Mexico came to my mind: the group in a circle, introducing themselves one by one after I introduce myself. That’s how I got them to participate in the first class. And I lost my fear of that very quiet, silent environment.
I learned to have a lot of patience with them during the first semester. A patience I had not previously considered to experience.
Later, I realized that their extreme silence was due to the great importance of respect in Korean culture, and I believe in Eastern culture as well.
On the other hand, I noticed that Korean students don’t like to ‘make mistakes’. Errors are practically indispensable in learning a foreign language. The vast majority of students hardly participate. And it is because they know they won’t ‘pronounce’ well.
And if that weren't enough, the entire teaching-learning culture is practically based on memorizing and memorizing since basic education.
Then one can believe in the extraordinary memorization skills of Koreans and that they can memorize a lot about Spanish: grammar, vocabulary, etc.
But how do you convince them that learning a language necessarily requires errors if they are used to memorizing everything from their early days of basic education? And as Paul S. Crane mentions, this practice of memorization "sacrifices the development of the ability to reason, to solve problems, to make evaluations, and to think originally or independently for themselves. This poses serious problems in life, especially in the field of science; many students have never been trained to seek information, to synthesize it, and to come up with answers based on inductive reasoning."
Fortunately, the brain always manages to accommodate new information and looks for ways to be creative. And I could appreciate how those students most interested in learning this language so distant from their lives made an effort when participating in class in developing small dialogues.
Over time, one realizes that being a teacher at an university in Korea is a privilege. First, due to the respect that perhaps seems excessive to us, making it difficult for them to ask questions in class. On the other hand, this respect is reflected everywhere and increases when you formally or informally introduce yourself as a teacher.
On the other hand, the Korean colleague is as respectful as the others. But nothing more. If there is any welcome dinner, it will be after a few weeks. And isolated introductions from the heads of the foreign language department. However, the foreigner will always be a foreigner.
It happened to me that, naively, after introducing myself to the coordinator, he told me there would be a meeting with the Spanish department teachers. Which instantly made me think of a meeting that included me. But when he repeated, ‘we’re going to be busy, we have a meeting,’ I understood that it did not include foreign teachers. I said goodbye and turned at the door a bit confused.
That's all for this post.
My next post related to this essay would be about my new students in a moment of
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