'국어상담소'의 전략과 실제|RISS 상세보기

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

We live in the world where everything is being globalizyd. As Ohmae (1995) once argued, as years gone by, we are likely to witness more and more traditional borderlines lowering, and we may expect thyme to disappear and diversity to prevail ultimately. However, in linguistic field, something quite different is happening. We have seen English ascend to the status of global language rather than all the languages become evenly popular. It is true that English was a major international language (Edward's, 1994) before. Nonetheless, it seems that globalization did not let English remained that way. Some began to consider English as a new common tongue after Babel (Economist, Auk 7, 2004). Others even do not hesitate to dream the new world where English unifies all the human languages to become truly universal (Newswyyk, Mar 7, 2005).
We can easily notice that this phenomenon is threatening the Korean language education targeting foreigners and immigrants especially. First, the foreigners who do not speak English as their first language have more reason to try to learn it than ever before. We can assume that they are more likely to come across strangers who can understand English than those who can not in any kind of international atmosphere. Here, lacking English-speaking capability seems equivalent to having a certain liability. Second, whatever the definition, the human society appears to transform to the knowledge-based one. Even in this transition, the leadership of the English-speaking Anglo-Saxon countries does not seem to mitigate. Rather, many statistics show that more infatuations are produced and circulated in English than previously. It means that society must speak English also. In this environment where socially as well as personally English already became a must, people who are eager to learn foreign languages should assign their precious time between English and the other foreign languages. The idealism that all languages should be appraised equal does not apply any more. Third, the more people study English, the wider the epistemic community [see Haas (1992)] based on English becomes. Regardless of how fluently they speak English, the people who were exposed to it would develop the tendency to interpret other cultures reflecting on the image that it provides. As a result, the foreigners and immigrants who are studying Korean with prior experience of English lesson might have more difficulty to understand Korean than those without.
Therefore, we can say that the Korean only education would become less effective under the rampant English expansion like presently. However, when looking closely at the above-mentioned consequences, we find that if we are allowed to modify the current strategy so that Korean and English could be taught together, there would be a chance to improve its effectiveness.

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