Korean Students' English Ability

Korea (along with Japan) invests a LOT in English education. Everyone spends a lot of time and money to go to "Hagwon" to learn, learn, learn English aside from the one they learn in school. But they're just poor in English. (Korea, yes along with Japan, score worst in global TOEFL score, especially in speaking section.)

Why this result? Because English education in Korea is sadly distorted. (I think this has started from Japan colonization period, bad for Korea) Focus so much on reading and grammar. A teacher reads the whole paragraph, they ask you to underline certain lines, and they tell you what grammar's used and what vocabulary's important, that kinds of stuff, and the students take note of them. You can see how BORING it would be to do this the whole year. So they don't get to speak or write anything.

Some people insists Korean students are good at reading at least, because that's all they do during their three years of high school. But I think, well, no. Okay it seems, but they get stuck with reading again when they're given the type of text they haven't "practiced." I say "practice" because they in fact practice for the college test. English isn't the foreign language you want to be fluent at----it's just a "means" to go to college for them.

At least they study a lot of vocabularies, so that might help them with their speaking later on!---Well, I doubt it. I think there's three types of vocabs, it's like the vocab pyramid and the ones on the bottom(the basic words, you know like boys, girls, tree). I know most of them and it's not hard to speak those words when I talk. And on the top are the "big" words, the ones you write in your essay or formal writing. And what's between them are the words that's "not" the basic words but the words people speak pretty much in their dialogues. (Maybe colloquial belongs to this category) I'm supposed to learn this vocabs from the bottom but Korean education forces us to take a English test to go to college so they make the students learn just the "big" words to read difficult texts which are on the test. It's funny that Korean students know the word "amalgamate" and don't know what "hang out" means. This is why Korean students are just afraid of speaking English! (And yes, they actually are really bad about speaking.)

Good news is, things are beginning to change. From this year, freshmen take a test something like TOEFL, which evaluates them with speaking and writing too! It's time that it should change---after all, it has been "wrong" for such a long time.