Find out more about these and other fascinating aspects of English in Korea in this episode of the Language on the Move Podcast. Brynn Quick speaks with Dr. Jinhyun Cho about her 2017 book entitled English Language Ideologies in Korea.

English Language Ideologies in Korea critically examines the phenomenon of “English fever” in South Korea from both micro- and macro-perspectives. Drawing on original research and rich illustrative examples, the book investigates two key questions: why is English so popular in Korea, and why is there such a gap between the ‘dreams’ and ‘realities’ associated with English in Korea?

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Transcript (added 09/09/2024)

Brynn: Welcome to the Language on the Move Podcast, a channel on the New Books Network. My name is Brynn Quick, and I’m a PhD candidate in Linguistics at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. My guest today is Dr. Jinhyun Cho.

Jinhyun is a Senior Lecturer in the Translation and Interpreting Program of the Department of Linguistics at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. Her research interests are primarily in the field of sociolinguistics and sociolinguistics of translation and interpreting. Jinhyun’s research focuses on intersections between gender, language ideologies, neoliberalism, and intercultural communication across diverse social contexts, including Korea and Australia.

Jinhyun is the author of the 2021 book Intercultural Communication in Interpreting, Power and Choices, and she has authored numerous other publications for international journals. Today, we will be discussing her 2017 book English Language Ideologies in Korea. This book critically examines the phenomenon of English fever in South Korea from both micro and macro perspectives.

Drawing on original research and rich illustrative examples, the book investigates two key questions. Why is English so popular in Korea, and why is there such a gap between the dreams and realities associated with English in Korea? Jinhyun, welcome to the show, and thank you so much for joining us today.

Dr Cho: Oh, thank you for having me.

Brynn: To start us off, can you tell us a bit about yourself and how you became a linguist, as well as what led you to studying how people think about and view the English language within Korea?

Dr Cho: Sure. I was born in Korea and grew up there, and I spent almost 30 years of my life in Korea before moving to Australia. And I worked as an interpreter between English and Korean in Korea.

And I have to tell you this, and that I didn’t speak English at all until I finished university.

Brynn: I cannot believe that. When I read that in your book, that was an incredible revelation to me.

Dr Cho: It might sound interesting to you and to the listeners, but back then, and I know that was many years ago, the Korean education on English, it focused on grammar and reading. And there was no speaking element at all.

So, I never had a chance to learn how to speak English until I finished university. And I got my first job at a small company after university, which I didn’t enjoy at all. And I started wondering what else I could do.

And I knew that there was such a job as a translator and interpreter, because one of my friends at university, her brother was an English-Korean interpreter. And that looked so cool, instantly switching between English and Korean, and he was working for an established broadcasting company in Korea. So, I thought that, oh, that sounds so cool, and I want to be one of those people.

So, I enrolled in a coaching school designed to train people who wanted to be a translator and interpreter. And that, to provide more details on this, because it doesn’t exist outside Korea, I know that there’s some in Japan. So coaching schools, these schools train people to sit for exams to enter a graduate school that specializes in translation and interpreting.

So that’s how it works, because it’s so competitive to get into a graduate school, graduate schools for translation and interpreting. So, I enrolled in one of those coaching schools and studied English for 14, up to 16 hours a day, and for two years. And that’s how I successfully got into this best graduate school in Korea.

And so, I took it for granted, right? Because everybody in Korea wanted to be good at English and they wanted to learn English. So, I thought that I never questioned why I wanted to learn English so much.

And then revelation came to me when I moved to Australia. And here, English is so natural, right? And everybody is expected to speak English.

And if you don’t speak English, then there’s something wrong with you. Whereas in Korea, if you speak English well, then you’ll be instantly admired. So, I thought that the gap was so interesting and started wondering why I wanted to learn English so much.

And then that led to this research question, as you said, right? So why do people in Korea pursue English so feverishly? You know, so much so that there is this social phenomenon of English fever.

And that’s how I got into this research.

Brynn: And just you saying that you studied English for like 14 to 16 hours a day, I cannot imagine doing that in another language. That had to be exhausting. It does feel like almost feverish study.

Is it exhausting to do that?

Dr Cho: Feverish study, I think it’s a perfect description of how I studied. Oh, it was exhausting. A session at the coaching school, it started at 7 a.m. So, I got up at 5 a.m. You know, because it was very far from, you know, where I lived.

So, I took about more than an hour. So, I got there and then took the three-hour session. And after that, me and then other students in the class, we created a study group.

So, we studied there until like 5 p.m. And after that, I came home and did some exercise and had dinner and studied more English until I went to bed.

Brynn: Collapsed. Collapsed.

Dr Cho: Collapsed. That’s right. And I think I was so consumed with that.

And sometimes I went to bed with CNN on, and I’m hoping that I could, you know, soak in more English in sleep. So that’s how I studied then come to think of it, yes.

Brynn: Well, and that’s what’s so interesting about the book is that you introduce us to this idea of this English fever, but also just this huge drive to study English.

But what’s so interesting is that then you take us back in time and you show in one of the first chapters of the book, it talks about the history of the English language in Korea. And what I find so interesting about that is that there’s this very real beginning point of when English literally made landfall in Korea. And this was in 1882.

Take us through that history a little bit, just in brief, from the arrival of English through to the Korea that we know today from a global perspective.

Dr Cho: Yes, I mean, this was so fascinating. So, this is a discovery that I made during my PhD, at the beginning of my PhD. So, I didn’t plan to examine this from a historical perspective.

But while, you know, just like any other research, you make a discovery by accident. So, while I was collecting data, I found out that the beginning of translation and interpreting in Korea, it coincided with the arrival of English in Korea. And to provide you more background on this, so you said back in 1882, Korea, so Korea’s predecessor, the Joseon dynasty, the last dynasty of Korea, it was under precarious geopolitical situations.

So, it was surrounded by strong and ambitious neighbours, which included Japan, Russia and China, which had acted as Korea’s elder brother traditionally. So, China was like a protector of Korea. And Japan in particular was the most ambitious because Japan was the first country in Asia that introduced modern technologies and civilizations from the West, primarily from the UK.

So, you know, the geographical situation of Korea is a peninsula. And Japan wanted to occupy Korea so that it could advance into the mainland China and into the bigger continent. So, in order to curb Japanese ambition, China joined forces with the US.

And then that led to this first international treaty in Korea, Korea-U.S. Treaty. And back then, there was nobody who could speak English in Korea.

And naturally, that led to the establishment of the English-Korean Translation, sorry, English-Korean Translation and Interpreting School, which is Dongmunhag. So now, what is interesting here is that the beginning of English fever in Korea, it happened at both top government and grass roots levels. And then top government level, that means that the king of the dynasty, King Gojong, had absolute trust in the US.

Why? It’s because of this Good Offices Treaty that was established between the US and Korea. And let me read you the clause of the treaty.

“The Good Offices on being informed of the case, to bring about an amicable agreement, thus showing their friendly feelings between the two countries.” So, this is a mere legal requirement. It meant nothing to then U.S. President Roosevelt.

However, King Gojong of Korea, he interpreted this as unflinching commitment from the US to protect Korea. So, the king relied on the US literally like a child does for his father.

So that was the beginning of English Fever. And also, the beginning of the US as the most powerful and generous country in the world. So that was the perception of the US at that government level.

But at the grassroots level, Translation and Interpreting. So even before this first English Korean Translation and Interpreting School was established, translators and interpreters, there was such a job in Korea because Korea had a lot of trade and business relationships with China. So, translators and interpreters, although they belong to the middle class, they were very wealthy because by using their bilingual skills, they made a lot of money out of trade.

So, becoming a translator and interpreter in Korea, there was an opportunity to climb up the cost system. The cost system in Korea back then, it was so rigid. So, there was no way that you could transcend the class barriers.

So, for people who were at the lowest class, becoming a translator and interpreter, that was the only opportunity to transcend the class barriers. And now what’s really interesting about this government established translation and interpreting school is that students were accepted regardless of class backgrounds. As long as you are linguistically talented, everybody was accepted, right?

So that opened the door for people, commoners in Korea, to become, to belong to a higher class. And then there was more American missionaries in Korea.

There were a lot of American missionaries who arrived in Korea in the 19th century, and they established the schools to teach English. This is what I found so fascinating that the English simultaneously became the language of the US and the language of power, and also the tool for class mobility for commoners. And that’s how English gathered forces and became the language of mobility and the power in Korea.

So, from a global perspective, I think in contemporary Korea, of course, you would say that there’s no such thing as a caste system, but there’s no society that is classless. Right?

Brynn: Exactly.

Dr Cho: Yeah, we all pretend that there’s no class, but there is.

Brynn: Of course there is.

Dr Cho: Yes, that’s right. So, in Korea, the reason why people pursue English so much is the amount of capital that’s attached to English. So English, this is the key findings from my research, that the English constitutes all four capitals and identified by Bourdieu.

So, it’s an economic capital and a cultural capital, social capital and also symbolic capital.

Brynn: Which is amazing. And I think for people who maybe aren’t familiar with English in Korea, or even just the concept of how very powerful English is in the world right now, to think that just having a language gives you that much capital, that much power, that much social mobility. I think especially to monolingual English speakers, it’s kind of like, what? What do you mean? It’s just my language. It’s just English.

But it really is. And in your book, you also go through the wartime era, like with the American occupation in Korea, and how that then influenced English as well. Can you tell me about that a little bit?

Dr Cho: Yes, that’s when there was a watershed in the popularity of English, and more importantly, the images of the US in Korea. So, as you know, Korea was colonized by Japan, and Japan pulled out of Korea when the Second World War ended, the US-led bombing of Hiroshima. And then when Japan left, the US came in.

And so that was to help Korea to manage the transition, right, from the colonized country to become an independent country. And to Koreans, the fact that the colonization was ended by the US, right? And then that made them believe that the US was the most generous benefactor.

And so, US basically freed up Korea. And then people had this fantastic image about the US, and coincidentally, the meaning of the US in Korean. In Korean, the US is called Mi-guk, which is based on the Chinese name of the US, Maegaw, and that means beautiful country.

Brynn: What!? Oh, my goodness. Amazing. I’m going to refer to it as beautiful country from now on. (laughs)

Dr Cho: Yes, you are from the beautiful country. (laughs)

Brynn: The beautiful country, yeah. Oh, that’s amazing.

Dr Cho: Yes. So then, and then the US was established as the most beautiful and wonderful country in the world. And as the language of the US, you know, English represented the power.

And then I wrote in the book that the very first president of the US, you know, Seungman Lee, he was baptized by the US because he was anti-communist. And then, and then he himself studied English at an American missionary school in Korea and went to the US to study. And he was the first Korean who finished a PhD.

And then spent most of his life, you know, in the US. So, Seungman Lee identified himself as American with the US. So, in his book, Autobiography, you know, it reveals his identification of himself and with the US, the freedom, the spirit of freedom and democracy.

So, you know, that kind of ideology view, idealised view of a country, and if that image of the country and then associated images of the language have been accumulated throughout history, then it’s only natural for people to believe that that is true, right? So, the whole point here is that English fever in Korea is not a contemporary phenomenon. It has always existed throughout history, but not many people know about this historical background about English in the US.

Brynn: That is so interesting how just idealizing a certain country or a certain culture can have that knock-on effect to the language of that country or culture. And on that, you discuss in your book, these two groups of English speakers in Korea. And in Korean, they actually have their own terms in the Korean language.

So, we’ve got haewepa, and those are people who learned English while living or visiting abroad in English-dominant countries. And guknaepa, people who learn English as a foreign language within Korea. And the fact that these specific terms even exist might be surprising to people, because it was to me when I first read it, who aren’t familiar with English ideologies in Korea.

So, tell us about what these terms say about the socially constructed nature of linguistic insecurity and neo-liberal ideologies in Korea.

Dr Cho: Yes, again, I didn’t think that this is specific to Korea, right? And because it was natural that people refer to each other that all you are haewepa, because you learned English abroad. And then we are guknaepa, because we have never had a chance to go abroad to learn English.

But it was only after I came here, again, when I was discussing my research and when I told this to people and people were surprised, like you, what? Oh, is there such a term?

Brynn: There’s actual words.

Dr Cho: Yeah. It’s an actual word that is popular, you know, in Korea. So, I thought, oh, that’s so interesting.

And then I started wondering, maybe the fact that such a term exists, you know, that reveals that it works as distinction, you know, between those people who learned English abroad and then people who learned English within Korea. So, it’s not, it’s much more than the fact that, you know, certain people had a chance to learn abroad and the certain people didn’t. It really is about class distinction, that because in Korea and also in many countries, in many non-English speaking countries, having an opportunity to go to an advanced country, and a lot of advanced countries are English speaking, right?

And then go to those advanced countries to study, that itself works as a class marker, right? That your family has enough resources to support you. And also, back then in Korea, going abroad, it was not allowed, right?

Except that you are from certain classes such as diplomats, or from those top class, from the top class. So, I started wondering maybe being a heawepa itself, and overseas learners of English itself, it works as a marker of class. And then that naturally, the other group who never had a chance to learn English abroad, they feel inferior, right?

And then they are not confident about the English, which I observed at the graduate school. Because at the graduate school, and I was one of those guknaepa students, because I learned English at home, right? And whereas there were a lot of students who learned English as a child because of their father’s job, you know, as a diplomat or posting, the father was posted to an English-speaking country, you know, from this company.

And then I observed that this underlying feeling of inferiority among guknaepa students, domestic learners of English and including myself.

Brynn: Yeah. Did you feel that you had to work harder as a guknaepa than the other people?

Dr Cho: Yes. Yes. We often, you know, say some things like, oh, yeah, such and such, you know, a person, their pronunciation is excellent.

Okay. She sounds like British, or he sounds like American, or he sounds like a New Yorker, right? And because they learned English, you know, in those places, yeah, in the US, whereas we, there was no term that could define us.

And the thing about language learning is that, okay, you can learn grammar. I can’t generalize, but in general, right? And people who learn the foreign language as a child, then they tend to acquire better pronunciation.

And then those students who learned English at home, and in general, our pronunciation wasn’t as good as that of, you know, overseas learners of English. I think in itself was a significant source of insecurity for us, you know, who wanted to become top interpreters in Korea. And people do get impressed by good pronunciation.

Brynn: Oh, of course. Yes, absolutely.

Dr Cho: Yes. So that was a significant factor. And then that led us to study harder and harder.

Brynn: For 14 to 16 hours a day.

Dr Cho: And then of course, I didn’t know that it was part of neoliberal ideology. So, I worked under those dominant ideologies without knowing that I was influenced by the historical factors of Korea, as well as the contemporary ideology of neoliberalism.

Brynn: Exactly. And I can absolutely see how that would happen, where, like you said, just the fact that these names exist for these two people does signify sort of this larger story that’s going on, where we’re putting more power and emphasis into the people who do get that chance to go abroad, and who do get to go study, you know, because they do maybe have more money, they have more power already. So, they’re kind of already starting with that leg up, and that’s going to make the guknaepa people feel like they have to go even harder, and even higher.

And not only do we have these two groups of people kind of vying for power, there’s also an incredible part in your book that talks specifically about sort of these gender roles in translating and interpreting. So, there’s a part that talks specifically about Korean women who go into translating and interpreting work, and the factors that are related to gender that influence this. Can you tell us more about how these women view English and English related work, and how their language journeys construct gender norms and expectations?

Dr Cho: Sure. In Korea, back then – I mean, things have changed so much.

Brynn: Sure.

Dr Cho: So, these days, a lot of young Koreans, they don’t want to marry. And if they marry, they don’t want to have a child. And I’m not sure if you know this, but Korea has the lowest birthrate in the world.

Brynn: Does it?

Dr Cho: Yes, it’s less than 0.7%. That means only one out of three women has a child. That’s rock bottom.

Brynn: Wow, that’s amazing.

Dr Cho: Yes. However, there is still this social expectation that you have to marry, and then you have to have a child. And that completes your female biography.

If you are a single woman and a childless, then, well, you might be successful in terms of career, but the people, especially from older generations, they will say something about it.

Brynn: Sure. They’ll say, but you haven’t really lived up to the cultural expectations of what womanhood is.

Dr Cho: That’s right, exactly. So, when I conducted this research, that was in 2012. Right?

So, it was 12 years ago. And a lot of my participants, so there was a single participant, they were living under the marital pressure. You have to get married.

Brynn: You need to find a man. Go find a husband. (laughs)

Dr Cho: Yeah, go find a husband. And at the same time, these women, they wanted to have their own career. And some of them, they worked for companies like I did, and they realized there was a glass ceiling.

And there was only so much that women could do in a corporate setting, which is still true in contemporary Korea, because Korea has one of the lowest levels of female executives among the OECD countries. And so, the glass ceiling is so strong there. So as a woman, there’s a limit to how far you can go.

So, I think to these women, becoming a translator and interpreter, there was an opportunity for them to build their own career, free from corporate structures and gender biases and gender norms, and especially jobs relating to Korea. They have this international image, becoming a translator and interpreter. Oh, there are open-up opportunities to work for international companies, or like the UNESCO or the UN, or you can work for an international company based overseas, or you can do some job relating to language.

So, I think they saw learning English as an avenue to lead their own independent female biography. And that’s how they expressed their beliefs in English, you know, as a language that could change their life and free from the gender norms.

Brynn: And that echoes what we saw before with in, you know, the late 1800s and the early 1900s when Korean, I’m assuming more men at that point, were using English as their sort of ticket out and their ticket up that social ladder. And it’s amazing that you then see that happening over 100 years later, but with women this time.

Dr Cho: Oh, yes, oh, that’s a very good point, Brynn. So back then, and of course I, you know, don’t have time to explain everything, right? That is just to relating to that.

So, one of the distinctive points of the history of English in Korea is this phenomenon called New Women’s Movement. And that’s during the Japanese colonization. So, the New Women’s Movement that was inspired by burgeoning feminism in Japan first, and then that influenced Korea.

So those Korean women who were educated overseas in Japan, you know, primarily because Korea was a Japanese colony, and then they learned advanced concept of feminism and women’s rights. So when they went back to Korea, they lead this movement, New Women, literally. So new women, they distinguish themselves from old women, you know, which was, you know, typically a good wife and a wise mother.

Again, there is this Korean expression, “hyunmoo yangcheo”. Literally, again, that means good wife and wise mother. So, there was the female, there was a gender expectation.

And they rejected the old gender norm to establish themselves as a model, like a new model for Korean women. And they, they consumed English and also Western civilization, right, to import Western ideologies and also to become Westernized. So, when the movement first started, it received a lot of support, including people, the Korean male intellectuals, because of the Korean male intellectuals, educating the populace, you know, under the colonisation.

It was one way to achieve independence. However, as the New Women’s Movement gathered forces, the new intellectuals, they started, they turned their back against them, because they didn’t want women to be too strong.

Brynn: You can get powerful, but only to a certain point, and then we’re going to stop you, right?

Dr Cho: Yes, exactly. That’s what happened. And I mean, also those new women, the leaders, and there was, you know, Korea was an extremely conservative country, and it still is, you know, to some extent, but they, you know, believed in free love and free sex, right?

And that didn’t go down well.

Brynn: That wouldn’t have gone down well with the powerful men. No, no, no. And obviously, we cannot talk about gender roles, especially of women, without talking about beauty standards.

And something that many women all over the world can relate to is the idea of unrealistic beauty standards that society sets on us. And your book discusses how these female interpreters and translators actually have to perform what you call aesthetic labour because they’re under pressure to not only be amazing in English, but also to look beautiful in order to compete with others in the translating and interpreting market. Tell us about that.

Dr Cho: Yes. It was a very interesting discovery. At the end of my research, I observed this phenomenon in Korea, which was called good-looking interpreter.

It was a social phenomenon and frequently featured in Korea that they had this capture of a good-looking female interpreter in action. And they said, Oh, such a such person, she’s one of those good-looking interpreters. And I was thinking, this is very interesting.

Why suddenly good-looking interpreters? And if you are familiar with Korea, you would know that there’s social pressure on good looks. And it’s not just for women, for men too.

Korea, it has obsession with beauty. And at first, I thought that maybe it’s part of that. And then as I had conversations, with the participants, I realised that the interpreting market in Korea, it was becoming saturated.

And because the number of schools specialising in translation and interpreting, it increased and that there were more graduates who specialised in English translation and interpreting. And then more and more people had opportunities to go abroad. After the Korean government lifted the ban on going abroad, and more and more people went abroad to learn English and study it.

And so, there were more English speakers in Korea. So, one way to distinguish language professionals from those people who could speak English, but not to the extent that they could translate and interpret. For female interpreters, I found out that it was beauty.

And the more beautiful you are, then the better chances you might get, especially if you are a freelance interpreter. Why? Because a lot of interpreters in Korea, they work for males.

So, the market itself, it gives an illusion that it’s a female dominant profession, because a lot of language workers are females. However, who do they work for? The males.

Brynn: The men.

Dr Cho: Yeah, the men. They are the top executives of companies, and they have important positions in industries. Therefore, it’s the men who hire female interpreters.

And very interestingly, a look was an important factor. And one of those ads that I collected as part of the data, it specifically said that a woman of a certain height, it said that it has to be over a certain height of 163cm or 165cm. And what’s the height to do with the language work?

So that itself, it demonstrates the male expectations of language work and language workers. And hence the term aesthetic labour is not just about language, but it’s also about how you look.

Brynn: Which is just mind-boggling to me to think that somebody could, like you had to, study for 14 to 16 hours a day for years to do all of this really difficult mental and intellectual work. And then to get to a point where someone then says to you, but you also have to conform to beauty standards, that just feels galling, you know? But you don’t see that happening with men at the same rate in Korea, or do you? What do you think?

Well, there was only one male participant. So, and then that person, he had a different motivation to learn English. So, I haven’t had an opportunity, you know, to observe if the same rule applies to men.

But, you know, if you just look at the gender dynamics of the industry, then it speaks itself, right? And it’s a male-dominated, it’s a female, yes, it is a female-dominated profession. However, the industry itself is controlled by men.

Brynn: That’s what’s so interesting.

Dr Cho: Yes.

Brynn: And something that you talk about is, yes, it’s female-dominated, but that also means that because they are freelance workers, they don’t always have consistent work. Can you tell us a little bit about that?

Dr Cho: Oh, yes, sure. In Korea, the interpreting industry is very different, you know, from, we are in Australia, right, in Australia, and in English-speaking countries, because in English-speaking countries, community interpreting is the mainstream interpreting. So, community interpreting, it refers to the type of interpreting that helps migrants who are not fluent in the societal language, right?

So non-English-speaking migrants who have trouble accessing health care, education, or government assistance, then they need language support. So, translators and interpreters in Australia and in other migrant-receiving countries, they are community interpreters, because they serve communities. Whereas in Korea, Korea is becoming multicultural, because there are a lot more migrants, especially from Southeast Asia.

However, traditionally, Korea is ethnically, it has this belief that Korea is an ethnically homogeneous country. Therefore, the type of interpreting there is not community interpreting. There is community interpreting, but it’s not the mainstream interpreting.

So, the mainstream interpreting is simultaneous interpreting. If you are not familiar with interpreting, you might have seen the image of interpreters working in booths, right? And then speaking into the microphone, interpreting the speech of this prominent political figure, President Obama, giving a speech at the United Nations, or interpreters working for companies.

And because there are a lot of big companies in Korea, like Samsung and Hyundai, and those companies, they have trade relations with businesses overseas. So to deal with the business transactions in English, because English is a global language, then they need a translator and interpreter. So therefore, a lot of interpreters in Korea, they work for businesses or for governments, and either they work for companies on a fixed-term contract or they freelance.

So, when they freelance, again, their clients, they are coming from those industries, government officials or they are top-ranking businessmen. So when you work for these people who have power, then what are the criteria that they are looking at when they hire an interpreter? So again, it’s a gendered question.

Brynn: Yeah, absolutely. And that means that even though this profession of interpreting is so glamorized and, you know, these, especially the women, study for so long, they might have to perform this aesthetic labour, but they might get hired and not have this work all the time. It’s just sort of when these companies need it.

And that means that their own financial income is not going to be consistent, which is just so fascinating to think how glamorized the profession is, but then the reality is, but we’re not always going to have a consistent good income.

Dr Cho: I think that’s the illusion about freelancing jobs. People think that they can be free to build their own career, but when you’re in the industry, you are not controlled. You don’t understand, right?

And then you are literally working for these people at the top. So, therefore, being a freelancer comes with a significant amount of insecurity, feelings of insecurity, financial, and also its feelings, because you don’t know when your next job will be. You might be unemployed for how long or how many months, and that’s why they keep pushing themselves to accept more jobs and to enhance individual competitiveness.

Brynn: Yes, that’s exactly it. It’s that always enhance that competitiveness, look better than anyone else just to try to get those jobs.

Dr Cho: Yes, yes.

Brynn: And this book was published in 2017, and you said that a lot of your work came from 2012. It’s now 2024. Where do you see the future of English language translating and interpreting going in Korea?

Is the profession still ultra-competitive and wrapped up in language ideologies, or do you see it changing in any way?

Dr Cho: I think the profession itself is still very competitive. And then it’s regarded as one of those highly professional jobs. However, because of AI, it’s a very big question.

You know, it’s sometimes said in media that it’s one of the first jobs that might be replaced by AI. Yes, but I don’t see it coming yet because, you know, myself, I have done a lot of experiment with the AI translation and I’m not interpreting. But yes, AI works well for certain type of translation such as legal documents, because the legal documents, there is a template, right?

Brynn: It’s like a formula.

Dr Cho: Yeah, that’s right. So, if you have, if AI has a lot of databases to work out the structure, then it does quite a good job. However, for other types of jobs, and as you know, in language, the hidden meanings of language in humans do a far better job at capturing those meanings. Capturing the nuance of human communication and emotion.

And then, so the AI is still, I think there is still a lot of room for improvement in terms of AI. But it’ll be interesting to see how things will change, because the profession itself, especially translation, there has been this prediction that a lot of translators will become post-editors. That means that the AI will do draft translation, and the human translators will review the draft translation done by AI.

And that is already happening in Korea. For example, Netflix, I understand that it does a lot of translation. It’s done by AI, machine translation.

But for interpreting, I think people still feel uncomfortable, right? It’s not natural, speaking to a machine, maybe young generation might not. But people, they prefer to have face to face conversation.

So, for interpreting, I think there is a long way to go.

Brynn: And that is interesting that maybe for, and we should specify for maybe people who don’t know, translating means the written language, literally translating from one language to another, whereas interpreting is for spoken or signed languages. And like you said, that’s often in person. It can be simultaneous or it can be consecutive.

And what about for you? What’s next for you and your work and teaching at Macquarie and research? What do you have coming up?

Dr Cho: Oh, well, in line with this conversation, so I’m working on my third monograph, and it’s about healthcare interpreting in Australia.

Brynn: Which I’m extremely excited about.

Dr Cho: Yes, yes, I can see that. So, I’m approaching healthcare interpreting in Australia again, from a historical and a contemporary perspective, and from a critical social linguistic perspective. Because the contrast in terms of English between Australia and Korea, and that always made me wonder, that why is English so natural in Australia?

I’m asking the question, and people might find that, you know, what a pointless question, because Australia is an English-speaking country. But we know that it’s a multilingual country, and over 300 languages are spoken in Australia. But the English has become so dominant, and then again, so how the historical dominance of English, how has it shaped people’s perspectives on other languages, represented by translation and interpreting, and also their perspectives on other language speakers, represented by interpreters, and how English monolingualism, so how does that impact interpreting?

So, from a historical perspective, again, again, in any societies, and it’s not just Korea and Australia, but in any societies, the very first foreign encounter, it generates interpreting, right? Therefore, interpreting is a birthplace of foreign intercultural communication. So that’s how I see it.

Brynn: That’s going to be fascinating. I cannot wait to read that, because as you know, that’s a lot very similar to research that I am conducting. So, we’re going to have to have another chat sometime soon after that’s done and do another episode.

Well, thank you so much, Jinhyun, for coming on and for talking to me today.

Dr Cho: No worries, I really enjoyed it. I hope that the listeners will enjoy it too.

Brynn: I think they absolutely will. And thank you for listening, everyone. If you enjoyed the show, please subscribe to our channel, leave a five-star review on your podcast app of choice, and recommend the Language on the Move podcast and our partner, the New Books Network, to your students, colleagues and friends.

Till next time.

Brynn and Michael speak in general about an area of study in linguistics known as the linguistic landscape, and in particular about a 2022 paper that Michael co-authored with Nate Ming Curran and Sungwoo Kim entitled From garbage to COVID-19: theorizing ‘Multilingual Commanding Urgency’ in the linguistic landscape. The paper examines two examples of multilingualism in directive signs within Seoul, South Korea, in order to theorize what gives rise to multilingualism in directive signage while other signage remains monolingual.

Some papers and posts that are referenced in this episode include Cuteness and Fear in the COVID-19 Linguistic Landscape of South Korea, Toiletology and the study of language ideologies, so if you liked this episode be sure to check those out!

Enjoy the show!

This is early days for the Language on the Move Podcast, so please support us by subscribing to our channel on your podcast app of choice, leaving a 5-star review, and recommending the Language on the Move Podcast and our partner the New Books Network to your students, colleagues, and friends.

Transcript (added 30/04/2024)

(Image credit: Dr Michael Chesnut)

Brynn: Welcome to the Language on the Move Podcast, a channel on the New Books Network. My name is Brynn Quick, and I’m a PhD candidate in Linguistics at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia.

My guest today is Dr Michael Chesnut. Michael is a Professor in the Department of English for International Conferences and Communication at Hanguk University of Foreign Studies in Seoul, Korea. His work includes researching second language writing, TESOL teacher development, curriculum theory, linguistic landscape research, and translingual academic publishing practices.

Today we are going to talk in general about an area of study in linguistics known as the linguistic landscape, and in particular about a 2022 paper that Michael co-authored with Nate Ming Curran and Sunwgoo Kim entitled From garbage to COVID-19: theorizing ‘Multilingual Commanding Urgency’ in the linguistic landscape.

Michael, welcome to the show, and thank you so much for joining us today.

Dr Chesnut: I’m so happy to be here and thank you for having me on today. It’s so exciting to get a chance to actually talk about a paper. This is such a rare opportunity. I’m just delighted to be here and share my thoughts.

Brynn: Wonderful! To start off, can you tell us a bit about yourself and how you became a linguist as well as what led you to living and working in Korea?

Dr Chesnut: Sure! Well, I’ll start with the last question there. About 20 years ago, as a young person having graduated university and not too sure what I was going to do for a career or with the rest of my life, I decided to go abroad. I wanted to get out of Canada where I’m from. At the time, a lot of young people in Canada, especially new university graduates, were going to Korea for a year to teach English, come back with a little bit of money, pay off student loans and then carrying on with the rest of their lives.

So basically, I did that, and I had no interest in Korea. I had done a little bit of teaching and I liked it, so I also thought it would be a good opportunity to play with teaching and get some more experience. I applied all over the world, but I applied a lot in Korea because that’s where a lot of people were going. I didn’t get many job offers because I wasn’t particularly qualified, and then I got one offer in a small town in Korea. A few weeks later I got an offer from Siberia in Russia, but they were too late. So off to Korea I went, and it was interesting. It was really interesting to be in a new country, be immersed in a new language, have no idea what was going on. Teaching was quite interesting and challenging, and I really enjoyed that first year so I stayed in that same small town for a second year. After two years I was starting to get more interested in teaching and wanted to become better at what I was doing. I wanted to remain in Korea and better understand the world I found myself in.

So, I was very lucky and I found a position at a small university, and what was so wonderful was they had an MA TESOL program. So, I could teach there, doing all sorts of different classes, and pursue an MA in TESOL to actually learn better how to teach English. And what was really remarkable was that this particular program had a focus on critical pedagogy. Teaching not just as a replication of existing knowledge, not just sort of helping you know more so you could do a job, but teaching as a means to kind of give more power to students, let them make more informed choices, help them better understand why we’re learning something in particular, why we don’t look at certain other issues. And so that was a really wonderful two years. I enjoyed it. I did a small thesis on language learner identity, and I was really interested in continuing this journey, and that program was founded, or at least developed heavily, by a professor who had studied at Penn State. So really, through him, I had an opportunity to apply to Penn State in their College of Education doing a PhD in curriculum and instruction. The professors there mentored him, and some of the professors that he had mentored had come back to Korea too, so I was able to pursue further education through a PhD at Penn State. I went there and took a lot of classes in the Applied Linguistics Department, really found a second home there alongside curriculum and instruction in the College of Education. My goal was to always come back to Korea as quick as possible to do fieldwork.

So, my PhD dissertation was on foreign language teacher identity. The Americans, Canadians and others who come to Korea and teach English. It’s still a major area of research for me, and so all of that let me to come to Hanguk University of Foreign Studies in my department here, the Department of English for International Conferences and Communication, which is essentially an English interpretation and translation department going English and Korean. Here, I teach English and I do research as part of the university’s responsibilities as well, and so that’s my journey to being here now where I teach a lot of different classes. Some are language classes, some are world Englishes or digital media classes, all with this language focus. And I do research on different issues as well. So that’s kind of my story and who I am as a teacher and a researcher. So again, thanks so much for having me on to talk about all of this. It really is such a privilege to get a chance to talk about a paper. I’m so happy to be here!

Brynn: Oh, that’s excellent, I’m so glad. I’m so glad to be talking to you too, and that’s really interesting to think how differently your life might have gone if Siberia had answered just a couple weeks earlier and not been late.

Dr Chesnut: Oh absolutely, if it had just been slightly reversed – off to northern Russia in the early 2000s.

Brynn: A little colder.

Dr Chesnut: A little colder, different environment. Who knows how life could have turned out then, you know?

Brynn: Yeah, so let’s talk a bit about your work. Quite a bit of your work has to do with something called the linguistic landscape. Not everyone listening to us right now is a linguist, so can you explain what that term means and why it’s something that linguists study?

Dr Chesnut: Sure, so even if you’re not a linguist or don’t have a particular interest in language, you encounter the linguistic landscape all the time. The linguistic landscape is essentially all the publicly displayed language or text you see around you. So, walking down the street you see street signs, shop fronts, billboards, movie posters – all of that is the linguistic landscape. All the different text and language you see around you. And that includes graffiti, those stickers you see stuck on telephone poles, or maybe on a utility panel on a back alley. It’s menus posted on restaurant walls.

But when people talk about the linguistic landscape there’s often a real emphasis on multilingualism, on things that have more than one language. There are actually many different researchers who look at movie posters or different types of signs. People who study marketing, for example. But people who talk about the linguistic landscape are usually talking about text with more than one language. That’s where a lot of the focus, not all, but a lot of the focus is.

So, one reason to study this is just the general benefit of understanding something better. These signs are important. They’re an important means of communication, so it’s better to have a deeper understanding of how this communication works. Over the years I’ve heard some people, some linguists, say, “This is actually not real research. This is a hobby. This is someone going on holiday, taking a bunch of photographs, enjoying themselves, coming back and sharing these pictures.” But I’d push back on that and say there’s actually a lot of important communication occurring through multilingual signs. An emergency exit sign in multiple languages can be very important. Looking at movie posters and how they use different scripts or different fonts to mimic other languages or play with what they’re writing – that’s an interesting linguistic phenomenon. So, I think it’s worthwhile. And society does value better understanding this communication.

So that’s one general reason, but there’s a lot of specific reasons to examine the language on signs. Some involve determining the vitality or strength of a language in a particular place. So, walking down the street in a French speaking community in Canada – are there a lot of signs in French? That’s a quick and rough way to determine how strong a language is in a place, although there are very serious limits to examining language in that way because often language doesn’t come into signs. There can be a language spoken in a region, but for various reasons it doesn’t appear on signs. Likewise, there can be a place where a language is no longer spoken very much but it often appears on signs. So, people examine that.

People examine issues of language ideology, or the assumptions we make about language, the values we give to language. And then ask how those values and assumptions shape the language on signs. Maybe there are different varieties of a language, but only one appears on signs. So, then we can go in and look at how these assumptions and values are shaping the use of language on signs.

There are studies involving English as a lingua franca, where English sort of has this role as a general and shared means of communication among people who don’t speak English as a first language where the rules of English are determined by what is effective communication, rather than a standard that comes from the United States or the UK – so how does English work in a tourist destination where people are visiting from all over the world? People examine context like that.

There are a lot of different studies out there. English is a major topic in linguistic landscape research. Some people examine how English can be a symbol of cosmopolitanism, sophistication, style and a means of attracting consumers. People examine skinscapes, so multilingual tattoos and everything that happens when people get a tattoo that involves different languages or multiple languages. How languages are involved in the construction of public space. There’s been some great research on Israel and the use of Hebrew, Arabic and English to construct a particular place through those signs.

Studies on commodification – we can examine Little Italy or Chinatown and look at how language is deployed there, not necessarily reflecting how people speak in that place anymore, but as a means of commodifying and selling that place.

There are studies on how problems are addressed, maybe littering, garbage, public intoxication through multiple languages on signs addressing those problems.

There are questions about signs that come from authorities that seem to go down to the people – top-down signs – and the languages used in those signs, and languages that come from regular people. Signs posted by people about problems in their neighbourhood or a lost dog, and the languages used on those signs, and maybe the differences between those top-down/bottom-up signs.

There are studies on how the linguistic landscape can be used in teaching, and I’ve investigated this and used this in a lot of my classes. We can take pictures of signs into classrooms, into educational contexts, and use that to help people develop their language skills.

But ultimately, we’re looking at a lot of issues of what languages are present on signs. How are those languages being used? What shapes the presence and absence of different languages on signs? What larger issues in society impact and are impacted by the use of language on signs? Even now, maybe how the use of language on signs can challenge existing assumptions in society regarding language and more.

There are some really exciting developments occurring in different places in the world. There are some massive indigenous construction developments, housing developments in Canada. I’ve seen some pictures of those developments where they are using the language of that community on those signs. That’s really interesting. I’d love to read more about that.

Brynn: That sounds fascinating, and also excuse me now while I go google “linguistic skinscapes”. That sounds so cool! I’ve never heard of that as an area of study before. That’s awesome!

Dr Chesnut: It’s really fascinating. It’s not my area. I did a little research because I encountered one paper years ago, and then I did some more research and there have been some interesting developments in that area. So, there are people doing all sorts of interesting research in different areas, very exciting developments. And some of it is, I think, quite important. It could contribute to creating more productive communication in different ways.

Brynn:  I agree, and that’s a great explanation. And I think that in your explanation, you’re doing a great job of pushing back against those people who would say that this is maybe just a hobby or something just a tourist would do. And you’re right, it’s a really important part of the world that we all live in. So, on that, let’s talk about your 2022 paper From garbage to COVID-19: theorizing ‘Multilingual Commanding Urgency’ in the linguistic landscape. In the paper, you develop the concept of “multilingual commanding urgency”. What does “multilingual commanding urgency” mean, and how might it appear in the linguistic landscape?

Dr Chesnut: Sure. Well, why don’t I take us through a little example, something that occurred to me, and then we can explore it together and think about how multilingual commanding urgency kind of helps us understand what’s happening around us with some of the signs we see.

So, we can imagine that we’re at a ski resort in north America, and walking through this ski resort we see lots of different signs. A big welcome sign in English. Maybe a giant sign with the name of the place positioned so we can all take photographs with it, post them on Instagram. And lots of signs that are important – rest area here, ski hills that way. Maybe a sign, all in English, that says, “Only qualified skiers should go down these particular hills” – kind of a warning and informational sign to direct people how they should go depending on their level of skill.

As we walk around this ski resort, we see something different. We see a sign that says, “Do not feed the wildlife,” but this sign is also in Korean and Chinese. Looking around, we see that is the only sign that is in English, Korean and Chinese. So, we might start to wonder, “Why is this sign and this sign alone the only sign that is trilingual, incorporating Korean and Chinese, while all these other signs, some quite important, feature only English?” And multilingual commanding urgency is our attempt to conceptualise an answer to that question.

What we argue is that, often in the world, sign makers will, rightly or wrongly, have an idea about who is likely to violate the regulation posted on a sign. There are certain language communities believed to be potential violators of these particular regulations. And there’s a belief that, if this regulation is posted in the language of that community, it will reduce the enforcement burden of those authorities. And when those two conditions are met, there seems to be a greater urgency or effort or impetus to make that sign multilingual.

So, I would explain this imagined “Do not feed wildlife” sign as occurring because some sign maker, some authority within this resort, for some reason believes Korean-speaking guests and Chinese-speaking guests may be more likely to violate this regulation, and that if they post this message in those languages, it will resolve the situation, reduce the enforcement burden of the authorities.

Now that may be completely incorrect, but that may be the authorities’ belief. And this is an imagined scenario, but it is based on something I actually saw in North America at one point.

And we can see this in other places too. You can imagine walking through an airport, maybe an airport in Germany, and this one did happen to me very recently, and see many signs in German and English – “baggage claim area”, “gates 1-10” – all these different signs in English and German. But then you see a door, and it’s an emergency exit and it’s alarmed. If a member of the public opens the door, the alarm goes off, authorities have to rush in, people have to investigate and a lot of things occur. And that door sign has a warning, but not just in German and English, but also Arabic, Russian and Chinese. And this I saw in an airport in Germany. So, that would be explained, I believe, likely by this multilingual commanding urgency. Authorities have identified certain communities as likely to violate this regulation. They believe that if they put the sign in those languages, it will reduce their enforcement burden. The fewer times they have to rush to that emergency door, the better for them. And this creates an urgency, an impetus, to make signs multilingual.

So that’s multilingual commanding urgency. That’s what we conceptualised as the genesis of multilingualism in many of these signs. And there are a lot of examples in literature that don’t talk about multilingual commanding urgency that come from earlier studies but that were foundational. Examples of a “do not spit” sign in an airport in New Zealand – that sign was only in Chinese and Korean, not in English, and actually seemed to create a bit of a furor on social media. Signs in Hong Kong which include Tagalog prohibiting hawking. Signs in Hungarian in Toronto, Canada about a code of conduct requiring some behaviour for young people. So, we do see across literature lots of examples of this. So, this paper and this concept of multilingual commanding urgency are our attempt to explain and discuss this sort of pretty broad phenomena. Does that provide an explanation of this phenomenon?

Brynn: That’s a great answer, and it also makes me think of another space where I’ve seen these types of signs before here in Australia, and that’s in public restrooms. Public toilets. I do believe I’ve seen papers before and even on our research blog, the Language on the Move research blog, we’ve featured these stories before, where on the backs of the stalls, at least in the women’s toilets, there will be these signs about toilet etiquette, and it will only be in certain languages. So again, to your point, of these potential violators of these rules being identified, rightly or wrongly, by the higher up authorities, and then that being targeted through these specific languages.

And your paper looks at cases of multilingual commanding urgency in Seoul, Korea, and specifically two types of directive signs that you and your colleagues found during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic: first, COVID-19-related “masks required” signs in subway stations, and second, signs prohibiting illegal garbage disposal in side streets. These might sound like totally unrelated signs at first, but your paper found a fascinating connection between them. Can you tell us what you discovered about which languages were used for these different types of signs?

Dr Chesnut: Sure, so I’ll start by describing these two signs in detail a little bit. The first set of COVID-19 “masks required” signs were posted because, prior to their posting, there had been strong encouragement to wear masks on subways and public transportation, but as the pandemic developed, there was a regulation developed that required masks to be worn by everyone in subways and the subway station, on public transportation. So, suddenly there was this new regulation. On this day, everyone has to wear a mask, and all these signs appeared.

Now, these signs were very large. They covered pillars in subway stations. You could sit at the entrance of the subway station and see half a dozen to a dozen of them, just from one spot. And they were monolingual Korean, and they were large, multicoloured and everywhere.

But, shortly thereafter, in a matter of days, appeared much smaller signs, A4-sized. And these signs had the same general message. Not as much detail. The larger Korean-language signs had details about where to buy masks. Each sign at each station had a little additional information about the nearby convenience store or location about where you could buy masks. These were absent in the other signs, and these other signs, much smaller, a little bit less well-produced, had the same general message in English, Chinese and Japanese. So, they appeared after. And this was quite interesting to us. These two signs appearing together. That’s one set of signs that were really important to us.

The other set of signs – we actually didn’t collect these signs entirely during the pandemic. Images of these signs were collected earlier. These were signs prohibiting the disposal of garbage, basically “don’t letter”. And there’s kind of a sophisticated system in Korea for the disposal of household garbage. A lot of apartment complexes will have a recycling system. Individuals can go buy garbage bags. Payment goes into funding the trash disposal system. So, some people litter to avoid this or because it can be inconvenient or whatever. So, this is a major issue. A lot of people get upset by trash. You don’t want trash in front of your house, and so there’s a lot of district-level government signs about prohibiting the disposal of garbage.

And what we found was that, in certain districts, these signs included Arabic, Vietnamese, Chinese, English and certain signs only had Korean, Vietnamese and Chinese. No English. So that was quite interesting. And what’s also critical here is that Korean government signage rarely features Arabic and Vietnamese. Some English, some Chinese, but very rarely Arabic and Vietnamese. And very, very rarely on district-level signage. These are neighbourhood-level government signs. So, these were very unusual signs to see Vietnamese and Arabic being used in these ways.

And so, what happened was me and my co-authors – and my apologies for not mentioning Nate Ming Curran and Sungwoo Kim earlier, they are absolutely foundational to this whole project and they are continuing work on COVID-19 signs – but we decided to collect data from our daily routines during the COVID-19 pandemic, just to better understand how signs were being used regarding COVID-19. And as we collected data, we examined it and looked at it in different ways. We were really struck by these “masks required” signs and these additional small multilingual signs. And what was really striking was there were other mask signs, signs that were encouraging mask use more generally and often quite powerfully using fear or sometimes cuteness to encourage mask wearing. But they were monolingual Korean. So, we were trying to understand what led to the additional signs requiring people to wear masks in English, Chinese and Japanese.

So, we were viewing literature and we started to look deeper into the context of signage in Korea, and we found the examples in our already-collected data of these garbage signs. And we really thought this might be the same phenomenon in two different ways – in the COVID-19 “masks required” signs we’re finding English, Chinese and Japanese as the languages to speak to the general non-Korean foreign public. And in the signs about garbage using Vietnamese and Arabic, we have the language used to speak to the Arabic and Vietnamese-speaking communities in these districts. So, we found different examples that were both the result of what we believed to be the same phenomenon.

So, our analysis of the COVID-19 linguistic landscape is ongoing, but we found these examples and decided to share sort of a conceptual paper that used these two examples to really look deeply at what we termed “multilingual commanding urgency”, and what we were finding being discussed in the literature. We wanted to bring that all together in one paper, use these different examples to really understand this phenomenon, discuss it and expand on it. That’s what came together in our paper. So, we argue that these two very different signs are ultimately the product of a belief that certain language communities are likely to be violators of a certain regulation, and a belief that by sharing the sign, making the sign in a certain language, you can reach that community and lower the enforcement burden for the authorities. So that’s how this paper came about.

Brynn: And that’s so interesting because, like we said, we all, as just people who are walking around in the world, are going to see these signs, could potentially read these signs. But a really interesting point that you make in your paper is that, exactly this, that these types of signs have the potential to be “overread by passersby”. You point out that these people might not actually be able to read the languages on these signs, so maybe if there’s a monolingual French speaker walking around in that context, they might not be able to read the languages, but they may know what languages they are. They might be able to say, “Oh I can tell that’s Arabic” or “I can tell that’s Vietnamese”. So, what inferences and assumptions might these passersby, who have nothing to do with the government, then make about the communities that are being addressed through these very specific language choices with these directive signs?

Dr Chesnut: So, this concept of “overreading signs” we borrowed from Philipp Angermeyer who has an amazing paper looking at Roma youth from Hungary in Toronto, Canada. Some youth centres and certain places started putting up signs in Hungarian, sort of codes of behaviour, to try and regulate what was perceived to be kind of inappropriate behaviour by these youth. He interviewed youth and authorities there. It’s an absolutely phenomenal paper. What he also pointed out was that these signs can be wrong. They used Google Translate to create the Hungarian, so in some cases it was really nonsensical. So, for these youth it was somewhat offensive, disheartening, disappointing to see not just signs about poor behaviour in a language directed to them, but also poor translations, signs they don’t even care enough to translate.

So, we’re discussing how, in general, these multilingual directive signs about bad behaviour can be overread potentially by anyone, sometimes even mistakenly, in a way that suggest certain communities might be responsible for this bad behaviour, engaging in this inappropriate behaviour or violating these regulations. So, if anyone is walking down the street and maybe you can read one language, maybe the dominant language is there, and you can read a sign saying something about disposal of pet waste, or smoking in an area you’re not supposed to smoke, and then you see it in certain languages that are very rarely used by authorities. It’s very easy to link those language speaking communities with this inappropriate behaviour, this aberrant behaviour.

So, that’s the concern, that these signs might reinforce larger public beliefs that certain communities are engaging in so-called bad behaviour, linking communities with problematic practices, and so really this could be having a negative effect on society, especially when languages are very rarely used in more general government or authoritative signage, or even more generally, and only used in these signs linked with bad behaviour. That’s the really problematic element.

Brynn: Yeah, it’s that perpetuation of a potential stereotype that exists within a community and, like you said, especially if it does come from that more governmental/district level position of power. Then that might perpetuate the stereotype even further.

You mentioned earlier that these particular trash signs came from a little earlier, but the paper was published in 2022. It’s now 2024 – have you seen any change in these types of signs in the intervening years? Are there still these “problem communities” that are being targeted through specific multilingual commanding urgency signs around Seoul?

Dr Chesnut: Well, there are certainly signs like this still about. There was an absolutely fantastic paper about a district with a large Chinese community in Seoul, and that paper had amazing examples, and kind of heartbreaking examples of signs only in Korean that request people to report others for bad behaviour, and then signs only in Chinese saying, “Don’t engage in problematic behaviour like public drunkenness and other inappropriate acts.” So certainly, this still exists now. That paper is from a little while ago too, so some of these signs might have changed.

And certainly, a lot of COVID signs have been taken down. Some remain. But I suspect these are long-enduring signs, metal signs posted on walls, so I suspect many of them are still up. I’ve seen signs that are ten years old. They remain for a long time. And I do want to point out that I think this is a kind of global phenomenon. I think signs like this can be found all over the world, so I wouldn’t single out any city or particular region, but I haven’t seen any major changes that way.

What I have seen that’s encouraging is that I’ve started to see some emergency signage that’s being made more multilingual, so we have a lot of emergency shelter signs and emergency shelters in Seoul. A lot of the time I’ve seen them in Korean, sometimes Korean-English and sometimes Korean-English-Chinese. But I recently saw one that had Korean, and that was the largest language by far. English was the second largest. Beneath that was Vietnamese, Thai, Japanese and Chinese. So, that I would not consider multilingual commanding urgency. That’s maybe a different type of language phenomenon, a different type of sign, and so there might be a move towards more multilingualism in general. That would certainly potentially lessen the potential for overreading certain directive signs. So, that would also be the policy I would advocate.

There is a need for signs directing people not to dispose of trash illegally, and if you want to reach out to a community then reach out in many ways. Not just through this directive signage but include that language on many different signs so it becomes less significant with this problematic directive. So, I do see some positive developments in more general multilingualism, but I think these signs do remain and I think they do have a purpose, so I hope there are some positive developments.

Since COVID I’ve also been out a lot less and I have family responsibilities these days that are new, so I’m collecting less general data and I don’t quite observe as much as I used to. So, I hope that’s a reasonable answer.

Brynn: It is, and what I love too about your paper and about this type of work into the linguistic landscape is that any person walking around in their own community, whether they’re here in Australia, whether they’re in Korea or Canada, they can pay attention to this, you know? You don’t have to be a scientist; you don’t have to be a linguist. Just notice. What do you see? Do you see multilingualism, kind of like you were saying in the context of everyone can read an emergency sign or subway rules, things like that? Or do you only see only very particular languages and therefore language communities being targeted with the signs? So, they are two quite different things.

And I love that it’s something where, once you’re aware of it, you can’t stop seeing. Ever since I read your paper, I now do that, where I just walk around and observe that in my own community.

And you said that you don’t maybe necessarily get to collect this type of data as much these days, but what is next for you and your work? What other research are you working on now?

Dr Chesnut: Our team, Sungwoo Kim and Nate Ming Curran and myself, we’re all still working on our COVID-19 linguistic landscape data, and this potentially could be lifetime work. There’s a lot there, and a lot more that can be done still.

So, right now we have a draft of a paper looking at English usage on authoritative government COVID-19 signage. What we’re looking at is how English is used in at least two very different ways. It’s used in one way for signs intended for a domestic Korean audience, and that’s very interesting to see English used for a Korean domestic audience for non-commercial purposes. It’s not marketing, it’s not cool English necessarily. It’s not trying to create a sense of cosmopolitanism. It’s trying to reinforce good public health behaviour, and we find English being used where the English text itself conveys information. The English has a meaning-making purpose. Not as a symbol, but information is bound into the text.

But it’s also being used as a symbol or a design feature or an emblematic element. It’s being used for Korean-English punning. It’s being used with Korean-English blends where there’s one message that switches between English and Korean to convey a particular message to the public, the Korean public. So, we’re very interested in how English is being used for public health messaging to a Korean audience.

And we’re also seeing English being used for a foreign non-Korean audience of visitors or residents. And what’s interesting there is that very often English is being used alongside Chinese or Japanese as a part of this broad multilingual communication strategy, and that kind of challenges the idea that English is this ultimate language, this lingua franca. That, in fact, it’s being used alongside other languages as part of this broad multilingual strategy except for particular foreign places where we do see monolingual English language signage in this Korean bilingual signage.

And sometimes, multilingualism that goes beyond Korean-English-Japanese-Chinese where there are six languages or eight languages in a particular foreign place. And we do find a few examples, especially early in the pandemic, where there is English that is difficult to understand, and we do want to address that too, and the Korean was actually a little bit odd too. So, it may be a result more of confusion earlier in the pandemic. The messages were unclear both in Korean and English, and that’s something that should be addressed too.

So, we’re looking at that, and we’ll continue looking at the linguistic landscape. We have a beginning of a paper looking at Chinese signage with the heavy concern of overreading, of how Chinese signage may have been overread during the COVID-19 pandemic in Korea. And we want to address how there was private sector signage that was very explicit. Basically, Chinese guests were not welcome. They were told not to enter certain restaurants or institutions. So, we want to address, or bring into academic discussion, the fact that these signs exist and that they were done bilingually in Korean and Chinese and that there are big issues there. That’s another project that’s probably further in the future.

We’ve already published another paper, it’s actually a blog that’s open access. Anyone can read it. It’s quite short. It looks at cuteness and fear in the COVID-19 linguistic landscape. What we saw was a lot of signage, a little bit from authoritative signage, but a lot of private sector signage. So, cafes and restaurants that had signs saying “please wear a mask” but they used a lot of cuteness. Little anime-like figures asking you, “please wear a mask for me”, or cartoon figures with their masks saying, “be like me”, that type of thing. So, there was a lot of cuteness deployed in the COVID-19 linguistic landscape, and we went to an online symposium for that, and then we shared it in a blog as part of that, so “Cuteness and Fear in the COVID-19 Linguistic Landscape”. Google and you can find the blog and find all the entries there. It’s quite interesting.

And we also, in that piece, talked about fear. There were a few government posters that really strongly attempted to invoke fear. “Wear your proper COVID-19 mask, or you’ll end up wearing a respirator mask in the hospital.” Really strong invoking of fear there. And there were other messages as well, using fear this way.

And in the conference, it was quite interesting. There was a public health expert who joined the conference, and it was quite wonderful he was there. But he was surprised. He was from South Africa, and he said, “We could never use signs like this in our context. They’d be inappropriate. No one would respond to them positively.” But he was very eager to learn what could be done, how we can use signs to successfully promote good public health practices.

Unfortunately, this type of research doesn’t give an easy answer besides, I think, an answer saying that communicating in more languages in general, not specifically with a punitive message, is probably a good productive practice. But ultimately going deeper into that question would be an interesting long-term goal but would require very different research methods. So, maybe that’s something to think about in the future. There’s a lot to be done.

It would be wonderful to better understand communication through signs and other means of course, but I’m doing more research in signs, involving public health and emergencies and disasters and how those signs can be made in a way that is more productive and helpful, less damaging, less concerning in other ways, and better understand all these issues.

Unfortunately, the world remains a very dangerous place. Other events will occur, not exactly the same as the COVID-19 pandemic, but conflict, war, tsunamis, earthquakes – all these things can occur. All may require changing our behaviour as members of the public, and that can be shaped to some extent by these publicly displayed signs. Huge posters in the subway. Things on the bus. All manner of signs in an airport or any public institution. Private businesses, restaurants, cafes and more, all sharing signs that can inform the public about what to do in case of some unfortunate event, can maybe have a role in creating a better society to some extent.

So, we’re going to keep working on this, I think. There’s a lot more that could be done.

Brynn: It sounds like you said, it could be a lifetime worth of research. That’s so much to draw from. And like you said, it is something that I think we all have to take away from the COVID-19 pandemic, to kind of look back and say, “Alright, what did we not anticipate? What did we get wrong, and how can we better prepare in the future so that we can communicate better so that we can make sure that people from any language background can receive the information that they need in that type of a crisis?” So that sounds absolutely fascinating, and on that, thank you so much for being with us today. I really appreciate it.

Dr Chesnut: Oh, thank you so much for having me. It’s been an absolute delight. As I mentioned earlier, it is rare to get an opportunity to talk about a research paper, not a big book, not a big project, but just one paper. And this is a paper I’m quite fond of and a research project I find interesting. So, it has been a delight to get to talk with you. Thank you so much for all the wonderful and engaging questions. They really helped direct me and hopefully keep me on task. I really appreciate your guidance there.

And yes, hopefully this encourages more members of the public to keep an eye out for signs and look for those directive signs that are made multilingual in unusual ways. And for researchers out there, this is an exciting area to research. Don’t be afraid, I don’t think researchers are afraid, but this is a productive place to do research, and the more people examining this topic, the richer the discussions become. So, I’m always eager to find new people entering the field and discussing these topics.

Brynn: Excellent, so get out there and go look at some signs!

And thanks for listening, everyone! If you enjoyed the show, please subscribe to our channel, leave a 5-star review on your podcast app of choice, and recommend the Language on the Move podcast and our partner the New Books Network to your students, colleagues, and friends.

Till next time!

***

‘The Glory’, a Korean drama, has ranked the top among the ten most watched TV and films since its release on March 10, 2023 on Netflix. The Glory has received 1.82 billion views on Weibo, the second largest Chinese social media platform at the time of writing this blog. Chinese youths, the largest group of Weibo members, are enthusiastic about discussing the plot, sharing their memes about this drama, and picking up popular terms for fandom communication.

Over the past two decades, Korean cultural products such as dramas, movies, music and dance, food, cosmetics etc. have gained worldwide popularity, and the global spread of Korean culture is known as Hallyu or Korean Wave (한류). Hallyu has been promoted by the South Korean government as cultural diplomacy and soft power projection since the 1997 financial crisis. The global promotion of Hallyu turns out to be a huge success. There are about 51.74 million population in South Korea, but the number of Hallyu community members reaches over 156 million people across the globe. China constitutes over half of the fan community with over 86 million.

As Hallyu emerges as a global cultural consumption among young people particularly in China, learning Korean has rapidly carved out a niche market for China’s youth to craft their subjectivities and produce bundles of skills. Mr. Bin He, a postgraduate student at Yunnan University under the supervision of Professor Jia Li, has conducted an ethnography with four Chinese university students on how relevant practices and discourses socialize Chinese youths to align themselves with learning Korean through self-study and out of class channels.

Even though China has the largest number of students learning English as a compulsory course, Chinese youths do not necessarily see English as the only source for empowerment and upward mobility. Chinese students who are economically and linguistically under-privileged find it more useful and easier to learn to speak ‘small languages’ (as we previously discussed here and here). This is exactly what happened to Bin’s participants who major in English but found it more desirable and promising to invest into learning Korean and dreamed of taking up Korean-related jobs.

Performing cool posture

Chinese youths develop their initial incentive to learn Korean because of their desire to get close to their Korean idols and their orientation to be part of a Korean-oriented consumption style. The digitization between China and South Korea facilitates such transnational communication. By subscribing to a paid app (about 5 $) per month, Chinese youths can get in contact with their Korean idols by listening to their voices or reading their updates online on a daily basis. They also choose to spend about 20$ collecting a Korean album imported from South Korea to show their distinct cultural taste.

Ming’s Weibo post

Their affective attachment to the Hallyu community gets closer through their interactions with other Hallyu fans on public and private social media platforms. Ming, one of Bin’s participants, has been learning Korean by himself for over six years. Like many Hallyu fans, Ming has developed basic Korean proficiency by watching Korean dramas and variety shows and listening to Korean songs. To test his Korean proficiency and to enhance his reading competence, Ming took up a volunteer job translating Korean idols’ stories into Chinese on Weibo for Chinese fans to keep updated with their idols. In addition to being recognized as a legitimate member of the Hallyu community because of his Korean proficiency, Ming also likes to share his consumption of Korean lifestyle on Weibo.

The screenshot captures Ming’s enjoyment with his friends drinking 참이슬 (“Chamisul”), the most popular brand of Korean liquor that frequently appears in Korean dramas, TV series, and variety shows. 참이슬 is recontextualized as symbolic source styling himself as someone cool and authentic. Using English ‘talk with’ indicates both modernity and the imagined engagement with the Korean world as Ming told us in interview: “感觉喝着烧酒，仿佛喝着烧酒就置身于韩剧中。” (“I feel like drinking soju, it’s like I’m physically in a Korean drama while drinking soju.”)

Consuming desire

Longing is one of the most featured themes in Korean dramas. The filming locations of hit Korean dramas are often promoted as must-go destinations for Chinese tourists travelling to South Korea. For Chinese youths who are living and studying in China, love stories constitute an important part of their romantic imagination as reported by Fang, a Chinese female university student: “想去首尔学习生活，去看看电视剧里出现的各种场景。” (“I dream of studying and living in Seoul. I want to visit the featured locations that appear in Korean dramas.”

Fang’s post

As someone who was born and brought up in the hinterland, Fang has grown up with the imagination of the sea, and the sea is often depicted as semiotic potential for romance in Korean dramas. Fang expressed her sense of attachment to 갯마을 차차차 (Hometown Cha-Cha-Cha), a romantic story in a small coastal village. She posted a moment on her Chinese social media in Korean: “아~듣기만 해도 바다 냄새 맡은 것 같애” (“Wow～ Just listening [to the song in Hometown Cha-Cha-Cha] I feel like the smell of the sea”).

Fang’s sense of enjoyment and desire is also expressed by her semiotic and linguistic choices. Using tilde ‘～’ after ‘wow’ (아) emphasizes her desire and longing. The choice of using Korean indexes her sense of feeling distinct and unique compared to her Chinese peers who might understand English but who are unlikely to be able to read Korean.

Crafting a niche in learning Korean

Ad for Korean online classes

Both Ming and Fang started to learn Korean online through various apps after they had been exposed to Hallyu for some time. Their desire to seriously invest in learning Korean took a clearer form when they saw an ad for online classes:

Why learn a small language
Korean

• The most accessible second foreign language. You will be surrounded by Korean from the moment you turn on your app.

• There are about 70% of Chinese words in Korean. Korean is the language that sounds like ancient Chinese. Chinese students learning Korean do not start from zero.

• Cheap tuition fee for overseas study. The best choice for the working-class family.

• Advanced educational system with the combination of the East and the West and world-leading IT shipping industry, mass communication, e-sports etc. All of these advantages can provide Korean learners with more opportunities.

In contrast to the way Chinese youths learn English, learning Korean has been discursively constructed as ‘accessible’, ‘easy’, ‘affordable’ and ‘advanced’. This promotion discourse is particularly attractive to those who cannot afford to travel to Western countries and who are fed up with the exam-driven learning style in English. As confessed by Ming, “我就是不知道为什么我对好莱坞电影、美剧不感兴趣，我想可能是讨厌英语总是考试吧” (“I just don’t know why I didn’t have any interest in watching Hollywood movies or American TV series. I guess it’s because I was tired of taking English exam.”)

Feeling cosmopolitan

After two years of formal training at a language school, Ming decided to take the Test of Proficiency in Korean (TOPIK), and pursue her master’s degree in South Korea after her graduation from an English department in China. When she prepared her application documents, she worked as an English tutor for a Korean family where she taught two children English in Korean. Because of her capacity in Korean, Fang was able to communicate with the Korean mother about her children’s English performance, which in turn facilitated her Korean oracy. Over two years, Fang used the money she earned by working as an English teacher to pay for her Korean language test and tuition fee for Ewha Womans University.

Fang’s chat

In September 2022, Fang started her postgraduate study online due to the restricted travel policy and the Covid-19 pandemic. Fang was eager to go to South Korea and socialize with local people to fulfill her Korean dream. While doing her online classes, she liked to share with her WeChat friends her Korean learning experiences.

The image in Fang’s chat shows the official promotion image of her Korean university with the blooming cherry flowers and one of its famous buildings. By re-posting this world-famous university, Fang also displays her privileged access to advanced education in Seoul, a cosmopolitan city with all her imagination for study and lifestyle in South Korea, as commented by her post “나한테 이게 학교아냐 자유다” (“To me, this is not only a school but also freedom.”) It is worth noting that Fang’s choice of studying in South Korea is partly due to her unwillingness to follow a planned life trajectory by working as an English teacher in her hometown like her peers. Despite her parents’ disagreement with her decision, Fang gave up working as an English teacher and chose to take the risk of investing into an unknown future with Korean.

Becoming entrepreneurial

Apart from desire and cosmopolitanism, Hallyu also displays a strong embodiment of neoliberal discourse upon individuals. Both Ming and Fang have been nurtured by entrepreneurial discourses while exposing themselves to Hallyu. Self-entrepreneurial ethos prevails in many Korean songs, books, and movies. Growing up with Hallyu for over 10 years, Chinese fans have witnessed the ups-and-downs of their idols and have been encouraged by their positive and never-give-up spirits, as Ming shared: “一直喜欢她(Taeyeon),我能从她身上看到许多积极的能量，情绪低落的时候，我就会听听她的歌或是刷刷她舞台表演的视频。” (“I’ve been one of Taeyeon’s fans. I can sense her positive power. When I’m feeling down, I would like to listen to her songs or watch her dancing performance.”)

Ming recalled his struggling experiences when he prepared for his postgraduate entrance exam. For over a year, Ming had to fight alone given that most of his classmates decided to look for a job and very few people including his parents understood his emotional struggles. By listening to Taeyon’s songs, Ming felt understood and comforted. Ming drew strength from witnessing Taeyon’s confrontation with suicide. Taeyon’s re-fashioning herself as someone overcoming her depression became a mental power for Ming to draw from in his own struggles in a competitive and stressful society.

Fang’s post about her Korean readings

Self-regulated and self-enterprising discourses are often circulated on Fang’s social media. Apart from signing up for a gym club and following a healthy lifestyle, Fang also likes to share her reflection on reading Korean novels. The caption about the images of the books she’s reading says: “One section a day; 43 days to finish the book; a story book on life experiences for the youth.”

By purchasing imported reading materials from South Korea, Fang said that she could kill two birds with one stone: enhancing her Korean reading capacity while enriching her life experiences. The philosophical statements of life experiences in the book are mainly self-enterprising and self-driven as indicated by her underlined notes like “너에게 주어지는 기대에 합당한 자기관리를 시작해” (“Start taking care of yourself and meet your expectations”) or “값진 자아 반성 시간” (“the valuable time of self-reflection”).

Navigating between freedom and precarity

Language learning in the digital economy is not problem free. Despite their aspiration to manage their life trajectory through neoliberal promises, Chinese youths find themselves constantly navigating between their desired freedom and structural constraints.

One of the problems that hinder their desire to invest in learning Korean is their lack of time. Chinese youths keep their strong connection with Hallyu but they find it hard to keep learning Korean as learning a language requires consistent and systematic devotion. As English majors at university, they are kept busy by taking exams and getting various certificates to enhance their employment prospects. Two of Bin’s participants imagined that they would have more time for themselves to pick up Korean after they started to work as English teachers in future.

For those who squeeze time and save money to take the TOPIK, their devotion to learning Korean may suffer from anti-Hallyu sentiments due to the diplomatic disputes between China and South Korea. Over the past three decades, the surge of Hallyu has also coincided with several waves of anti-Hallyu movements in China. Ming’s diligence and persistence in learning Korean is not recognized but misunderstood by populist nationalists as “媚韩” (literally, “flattering South Korea”), meaning betraying China and showing allegiance to South Korea.

Publicity shot of Korean star Taeyeon

For Fang who is receiving her master’s degree in South Korea, she is confronted with high living expenses in Seoul and thinking of returning to China to settle down. However, when it comes to her future employment prospect in China, Fang seems to lack of confidence. For one thing, she does not think she can compete against ethnic Korean Chinese for a job position in teaching Korean to Chinese students. For another, her master’s degree in TKSOL is not as desirable as an English major to secure an English teaching position.

By the time of writing up this blog, two of Bin’s participants had to give up learning Korean because of their overwhelming workload and new identity as English teachers. Only Fang and Ming still kept learning Korean. As noted, Fang is doing her master’s degree in South Korea, and Ming has just got a job offer from a Chinese multinational automotive subsidiary targeting the South Korean market. After several months of training, Ming will be sent to South Korea to work for this Chinese company in South Korea.

This study has provided a nuanced understanding of Chinese youths’ Korean language learning experiences in the context of emerging Asian pop culture and digitization. Chinese youths’ learning of Korean is not driven by pragmatic pursuits or academic pressures, but largely rooted in their desire to be part of the Hallyu community. Growing up with Hallyu and learning Korean opened up new spatial and affective imaginations for them to capitalize on their performance and cultural consumption that traverse national boundaries in our digital age. Despite having access to Hallyu and learning Korean through new technological affordances, their pursuit of Korean-related subjectivities gets inculcated with the affective facets of language learning activities rooted in the neoliberal logic of self-management, human capital development and surging populist nationalism.

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The initial impetus for the book was sparked by my own language journey. At the age of 23, I decided to become an English-Korean interpreter, a glamorous bilingual, who would be respected for her English language proficiency in Korea caught in the phenomenon of “English fever”.

However, after many years of hard work, when I had finally achieved the dream of becoming a professional interpreter, I found myself perplexed and puzzled as a gap emerged between the pre-held dreams and the realities in the field.

And that’s where English language ideologies in Korea: Interpreting the past and present starts: the book critically examines the contrast between dreams and realities of English in the context of “English fever” in Korea from both historical and contemporary perspectives. It explores two overarching questions: why is English so popular in Korea? And, why, despite the enormous popularity of English, is there such a gap between the promises and realities of English?

In order to explore the first question of why English is so heatedly pursued in Korea, I conducted historical analyses of the development of English in Korea with English-Korean translation and interpreting as a key site of inquiry. The historical relevance of English-Korean translation and interpreting is well illustrated in the fact that English arrived in Korea for the first time in the late 19^th century in order to educate English-Korean translators and interpreters. English was important for the embattled Korean government of the time as they actively tried to strengthen relationships with the U.S. in order to curb its ambitious neighbours with predatory designs. Korea’s continued economic, political, and security dependence on the U.S. throughout the modern era has added more power and prestige to English, which has evolved to serve as a form of cultural, economic, social, and symbolic capital with class mobility as a key driver.

The second question of why there is such a gap between dreams and realities in English is examined from the perspective of contemporary English-Korean translators and interpreters, who represent the most engaged and professional learners of English in Korea. The social reputation of the profession as perfect English speakers and glamorous cosmopolitans provides an ideal site to explore the contrast between expectations and experiences in English, which was investigated from multiple perspectives including commodification, gender, and neoliberalism. Internal conflicts relating to English language learning and use are illustrated through interview data analyses, in which the aspect of English as an ideological construct shaping and shaped by speakers’ internalized beliefs in and hopes about the language is highlighted.

By exploring the gap between dreams and realities in English, I endeavoured to make sense of what appears to be an irrational pursuit of English in Korean society. Making huge sacrifices to learn the language only seems a “rational” act in Korea because English has been firmly established as a language of power and prestige as documented and explored in English language ideologies in Korea: Interpreting the past and present. It is my hope that the book highlights the importance of examining local particularities involved in the construction of particular ideologies of English, which is often approached from the monolithic perspective of “English as a global language”.

Jinhyun Cho was awarded her PhD for her thesis about “Interpreting English language ideologies in Korea: dreams vs. realities”

Many people around the world dream of learning English. The pursuit of English is rarely only, or even predominantly, about language learning: it’s about self-improvement, self-transformation and the aspiration to live a better life. Unsurprisingly, with English as with anything else in life, dreams and realities do not always match. Recent PhD research conducted by Jinhyun Cho at Macquarie University examines this gap between dreams and realities of English in the national context of South Korea and for one of the most intensely engaged groups of English language learners, namely female translators and interpreters.

The thesis is now available for open-access downloaded and can be accessed here.

This research explores English language ideologies in Korea in relation to the recent phenomenon of “English fever” or yeongeo yeolpung, which refers to the frenzied pursuit of English as valued language capital among Koreans. The popularity of English in Korea has recently attracted significant scholarly attention in sociolinguistics. Despite a growing body of research on the issue of English in Korean society, the question of how the promises of English translate into lived experiences and life course trajectories remains underexplored.

Based on a multi-method qualitative approach, the study draws on three sets of data through which to present a holistic picture of the tensions between dreams and realities in relation to English in Korea: historical textual data, media discourses, and one-on-one interviews with 32 English-Korean translators and interpreters.

Historical textual data are used to trace the genealogy of English in Korea since the late 19^th century via Japanese colonization, the post-independence period and industrialization, to government-led globalization campaigns. The English language ideologies identified through the historical periodisation serve as a baseline for the analyses at macro as well as micro levels.

Contemporary English language ideologies are then elucidated through media discourse analyses of news items related to English-medium lectures in higher education in order to examine how dreams about English are sustained and how such dreams contrast with actual classroom experiences.

In order to understand the uptake of these macro-level language ideologies by individuals, interview data from translators and interpreters as the most engaged group of English language learners are then examined. This includes an exploration of the ways in which individual pursuits of linguistic perfectionism reinforce linguistic insecurity in relation to dominant neoliberal discourses of desirable language speakers. Disparities between dreams and realities in English as experienced by the participants are examined from a gender perspective to show that the pursuit of translation and interpreting is a gendered career choice in relation to societal norms of females. Particular attention is paid to the recent media phenomenon of “good-looking interpreters.” The analysis demonstrates how English has been remoulded as an embodied capital in which aesthetic qualities of speakers can enhance the value of English.

The findings of this study highlight the multiplicity and evolutionary nature of English language ideologies. The historical documentation of the development of English suggests English as multiple forms of capital – cultural, economic, political, social and symbolic – with class mobility as a key driver. In addition to the earlier meanings of English, the micro-level investigations illustrate more diverse aspects of English as a gendered tool to achieve desirable female biographies, as an instrument to enhance individual competitiveness, and as added value to personal aesthetics. While such diverse ideologies attached to English testify to the enormous value attached to English and possibly answer the question as to why English is so popular in Korea, the examination of media discourses about English-medium lectures reveals the use of English as a tool to sustain existing societal structures that advantage the already powerful conservative media. Combined with the constant mediatisation of the benefits of English, neoliberal influences on English in which achieving linguistic perfectionism is presented as real and feasible further contribute to masking the sustained gap between dreams and realities in English. As people blame themselves for lacking individual commitment to the mastery of English as celebrated in popular neoliberal personhood, the substantial costs of the pursuit of English remain hidden, which in turn drives more people to pursuing English and further fuels “English fever”.

Overall, the research illuminates historical, mediatized and gendered aspects of English as an ideological construct. The study has implications for future research and stakeholders, particularly as related to the need to rethink English as a global language, the diversification of English language ideologies in gender, and the potential of translation and interpreting for interdisciplinary research.

Related content

• English Gangnam Style
• Why does English spread in global academia
• Would you mind if your child wanted to become an interpreter?
• Internationalization and Englishization in higher education
• Early study abroad students in young adulthood
• Does internationalization change research content?
• The dark side of TESOL
• Warning: Global English may harm your mental health

References

Cho, J. (2012). Campus in English or campus in shock? English Today, 28 (02), 18-25 DOI: 10.1017/S026607841200020X
Cho, J. (2015). Sleepless in Seoul: Neoliberalism, English fever, and linguistic insecurity among Korean interpreters Multilingua DOI: 10.1515/multi-2013-0047
Cho, J. (2016). Interpreting English Language Ideologies in Korea: Dreams Vs. Realities. (PhD), Macquarie University. Retrieved from http://minerva.mq.edu.au:8080/vital/access/manager/Repository/mq:60718 [open access to full thesis]
Piller, I., & Cho, J. (2013). Neoliberalism as language policy Language in Society, 42 (01), 23-44 DOI: 10.1017/S0047404512000887 [open access to full article]

Images of glamorous interpreters in the recent Chinese movie “Les Interprètes” (Source: dramafever.com)

I recently volunteered to give a presentation on the profession of translation and interpreting as a parent helper for a community worker series at my son’s primary school in suburban Sydney. To make my presentation entertaining for little kids, I showed them how to interpret simultaneously between English and Korean. The children were just fascinated by instant language conversions and kept asking me to show them more. While I was delighted by the enthusiastic responses from the kids, one question occurred to me afterwards: how many parents in Australia would be happy if their child wanted to become a translator or interpreter?

Let’s consider the following two real stories: in the 1990s, an Anglo-Canadian boy who wanted to become an interpreter had to give up his dream because his parents wanted their son to pursue a “better” profession. On the other side of the planet, a Korean girl with the same dream was warned by her parents that she was “too ordinary” to become an interpreter; her parents believed only extraordinary people could make an interpreter. The former is my husband’s story, and the latter is mine.

Why is there such a contrast in terms of parental reactions to children who wish to become an interpreter? One way of examining this question is to consider the relationship between the status of language workers and the status of a second language in a society. In Korea, English is highly valued as a commodity, and this phenomenon is known as yeongeo yeolpung or “English fever”. Due to a high level of prestige attached to English, English-Korean interpreters are admired as master English speakers who are often glamourized in Korean media. Popular images of interpreters are cosmopolitan multilinguals working at international conferences for high-ranking officials or business tycoons as circulated in local media.

On the other hand, the societal valorization of translators and interpreters in Australia and other Anglophone countries remains very low. Translators and interpreters are associated with low-paid casual work that offers little chance for career progression. The low profile of the profession in Australia is strongly related to the societal recognition of languages other than English (LOTE). Despite Australia’s purported pride in multiculturalism, LOTEs have always remained on the periphery in its symbolic and practical values. While LOTEs are gradually gaining recognition particularly among middle-class parents primarily for instrumental purposes, their status as the “other” languages spoken by “other” people – immigrant Australians from non-Anglophone backgrounds – suggests that the status of language workers is perhaps determined by the status of LOTEs as well as the people and communities who they serve. Examining the status of language workers is, therefore, a good prism through which to understand the sociolinguistics of bilingualism.

If you are still not convinced, ask yourself this question: would you be happy if your child wanted to become an interpreter?

Further Reading

To learn more about English fever and the experiences of interpreters in South Korea, check out this article:

Cho, J. (2015). Sleepless in Seoul: Neoliberalism, English fever, and linguistic insecurity among Korean interpreters Multilingua, 34 (5), 687-710 DOI: 10.1515/multi-2013-0047

To show that language choice is not primarily a question of language, I will focus on the spread of English-medium lectures in Korean universities as an example: in 2011 global media reported the suicides of four students and one professor at an elite Korean university. The media blamed these tragedies on the university’s language policy of conducting classes in English only.  These media reports motivated us (Piller & Cho, 2013) to investigate the more fundamental question of what drives the zealous pursuit of English in Korean higher education.

The findings of our research show how the powerful ideology of neoliberalism can serve as a covert language policy, where market capitalism combines with academic capitalism. Since the neoliberal turn of Korea during the 1997-8 Asian Economic Crisis, improving competitiveness has become a mandate for Koreans, who endured immense social suffering during the crisis (e.g., massive unemployment, family breakups and suicides). In this context, English came to be seen as a key to competitiveness. While English as a competitive advantage may seem a common-sense approach given the global status of English, the Korean case demonstrates that the spread of English is inextricably linked with capitalist expansion.

English-medium lectures are important for local universities as they are mandated to compete for global excellence, which is tied to profits from increasing numbers of foreign students and government grants. Moreover, English-medium lectures are directly related to university rankings conducted by mainstream media. These rankings annually assess Korean universities according to set criteria with English-medium lectures being one of the key components to measure institutional internationalization. While other criteria such as research, learning environment and social reputation of graduates require time to produce measurable outcomes, increasing the number of classes taught in English can create instantaneous effects on the internationalization score and hence improve rankings almost immediately.

Universities are not the only institutions deriving a profit from English-medium lectures. For mainstream newspapers losing revenue due to increasing competition from online media, university rankings serve as a new source of revenue through production of special issues and university advertisement placements. This capitalist chain in which university and media interests are inextricably linked remains largely invisible to the public.

The spread of English as medium of instruction is widely seen as the result of the “free choices” of institutions and individuals who wish to better themselves and accordingly make personal choices as free market agents. However, it usually goes unnoticed that these “personal choices” are not really choices but are made within a narrow set of options that are determined by market interests.

In the e-seminar, Ingrid raised the question of how to remedy disadvantage resulting from language policies in education. I believe that research aiming to investigate and expose the complex power relations behind English-medium lectures has an important role to play. However, all too often such research is not accessible to policy makers and other stakeholders. Our 2013 article demonstrating how neoliberalism works as a language-policy-setting mechanism in favour of English medium lectures, for instance, was published in Language in Society, a sociolinguistic academic journal published in English. Although our article is available for open access from Cambridge University Press, the language of publication means, in effect, that our research follows the same logic that we describe for English-medium lectures. While we do not derive a direct financial benefit from publishing in English, we derive profits of distinction and reputation that may enhance our careers.

How can our research make a difference when it is published in English in an international sociolinguistics journal that is only read by fellow sociolinguists? Does it make sense to be critical of the global spread of English in education if we only publish that criticism in English? For us, the answer is no and we have been fortunate that 녹색평론 (“The Green Review”), a progressive social policy journal in Korea, has just published our work about “English-medium lectures in Korean higher education” in Korean.

References

Piller, I., & Cho, J. (2013). Neoliberalism as language policy Language in Society, 42 (01), 23-44. DOI: 10.1017/S0047404512000887

Piller, I. & J. Cho. (2016). 한국의 대학과 영어강의 [English-medium lectures in Korean higher education]. 녹색평론 Green Review 148, 89-106.

Panel devoted to Jeju Global Education City (Source: Jeju Weekly)

Now that Psy’s “Gangnam Style” has become a global hit, I wonder if you know what Gangnam is? The dictionary definition of ‘Gangnam’ is the southern part of Seoul – the capital of South Korea – but in actuality ‘Gangnam’ is much more than a place name: it refers to the most affluent and exclusive area of the country. “Tower Palace,” a luxury residential apartment complex, is the pinnacle of its exclusivity. Built in the most prestigious section of the Gangnam district by Samsung between 2002 and 2004, it is literally a palace, in that its occupants are among the wealthiest and the buildings are equipped with amazing amenities ranging from a library, spas, a golf range, banks, and, yes, high-end boutique shops such as Channel.

Education is part of Gangnam’s attraction: South Korea’s best schools are located in Gangnam. And that includes English-language education. Gangnam parents are wholeheartedly devoted to their children’s English education, as English proficiency is a key status marker in 21^st-centry Korea. They led the trend of sending children abroad for English learning (known as jogi yuhak) either alone or accompanied by their mothers as guardians beginning in late 1990s. The number of jogi yuhak children, which peaked at 27,331 in 2008, has been on the wane since 2009. Apart from the Global Financial Crisis, family breakups as well as readjustment issues found among the first-generation returnees are cited as reasons behind the decline.

Undeterred, Gangnam parents are now setting a new trend in English education of Korea: they have found a way to immerse their children in an English-Only environment without actually going abroad. English language immersion is now available on Jeju Island, the country’s largest island. As part of Korea’s globalization drives, the government launched 940-acre Jeju Global Education City, a self-contained community, in 2011. Designed as an English-only district, there are currently three international schools operating within Jeju Global Education City.

Tuition fees in Jeju Global Education City are hefty. If accommodation is included, parents pay between 31,000 and 48,000 US dollars per year for schooling there.

Despite these high fees parents have little control over their child’s education once they are enrolled in a school in Jeju Global Education City. A recent report on a bullying case in one of the three schools there exposes what happens behind the ambitious global education project. The family of a victim student, who had been bullied by his roommate for one and a half years, was helpless at the school’s inaction. While that may not be unusual, what is unusual is that the victim’s family could not take this matter to the Korean education authorities or to police, since the school is “international” in nature and thus not subject to the Korean laws. International schools operating in Jeju have neither internal dispute settlement systems nor a teacher-parent committee to discuss such issues as bullying, as such measures are merely recommended, not required. As is the case in other countries, the Korean anti-bullying regulations stipulate that primary, middle, and high schools put in place an anti-school violence committee composed of various education stakeholders of whom parents should take up a majority. In the absence of such schemes, parents take to the media to air their grievances.

The absence of a requirement to follow Korean laws is even more extraordinary when one considers that the Korean government made a huge financial commitment to woo foreign schools to Jeju. For example, North London Collegiate School Jeju is committed to pay 56 million US dollars in royalty to their parent school North London Collegiate School in the U.K. over the next 21 years. In fact, the government even promised to find money from tax revenues (paid by all citizens) in case the school (which caters to a tiny elite who can afford to send their children there) runs into deficit.

The bullying cases reported above occurred in an extraordinary constellation of a globalization-driven Korean government, commercialized international schools, and education-obsessed parents. Who is the ongoing expansion of Western schools in Asia actually serving? As seen in the Jeju case, international schools even get away with not protecting the children in their care from harm as they are granted exclusive powers to resolve any ‘internal’ matters.

Whether you can afford going Gangnam style or not, it is a losing game for everyone in South Korea. In their search for exclusivity, Gangnam parents have ended up being excluded from their children’s education in the island. As for non-Gangnam parents who work hard to pay for their children’s extracurricular English education on land, they are doing so without realizing that their hard-earned money might only fatten the pockets of schools faraway.

University rankings drive the Englishization of global academia

The Intercultural Communication Special Interest Group of the British Association of Applied Linguistics is hosting a seminar at Newcastle University next week devoted to “Intercultural Communication in Higher Education – principles and practices.” Given that internationalization of higher education is all the rage internationally, the seminar could not be more timely. I am one of the invited speakers and, as I cannot be there in person, have just finished recording my lecture about the “Englishization” of global higher education.

I use the term “Englishization” to refer to the spread of English as medium of instruction in institutions of higher education in non-Anglophone countries. A recent case study of English as medium of instruction in higher education in South Korea, particularly at the elite university KAIST (Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology), demonstrates that the pursuit of “global excellence” as expressed through a high rank in global university rankings is a key driver behind the expanding use of English as medium of instruction (Piller & Cho 2013).

University rankings are based on assessments of four broad areas: research and publications, learning environment, reputation of graduates, and internationalization. Of these four areas only ‘learning environment’ is a language-independent variable. It measures things like infrastructure and student-teacher ratio.

The fact that measurement of ‘research and publication,’ usually the most heavily-weighted criterion, is language-dependent is well-known: the most highly ranked journals (as measured by being indexed or having an impact factor) are predominantly published in Anglophone countries and, even if published elsewhere, tend to use English as their medium of publication. Reputation of graduates, too, is language-dependent as it is usually measured through surveys of the HR departments of international corporations where English is widely used.

Here I want to focus on ‘internationalization.’ While ‘internationalization’ is usually the assessment area with the lowest weighting, it is an important aspect of any institution’s strategy to improve its ranking because it is relatively easy to manipulate. Notching up points for ‘internationalization’ takes much less time than to improve research, the learning environment or the reputation of graduates. And achieving a quick jump in rankings through improved internationalization from one year to the next will have flow-on effects on the measurement of research (where reputation also plays a huge role, as evidenced by attempts to influence research reputation votes such as this one by University College Cork) and graduate reputation.

So how is an institution’s ‘internationalization’ measured? In the Korean rankings explored by Piller & Cho (2013), there were four measurements:

• The proportion of foreigners among a university’s teaching staff
• The number of international students
• The number of exchange students
• The proportion of English-medium lectures

Internationalisation is therefore both directly and indirectly language-dependent: the proportion of English-medium lectures is a direct measurement of language; measurements of foreigners among students and faculty are indirectly language-dependent as foreign faculty are more likely to lecture in English than Korean and as the presence of foreign students (even if they are almost exclusively from other non-Anglophone countries, particularly China) is – in circular logic – used as a further justification for the ‘need’ to have English as medium of instruction.

In sum, the desire to perform well on national and international university rankings pushes for English as a medium of instruction in a number of direct and indirect ways. University rankings are phenomenally influential: students base their decisions on where to seek admission on university rankings, governments base their funding decisions on university rankings, the public increasingly understand the value of academia based on university rankings. In that sense, increasing the use of English as medium of instruction is a rational strategy for a university as it has consequences for its position on university rankings. Sadly, in the rush to compete no one seems to have taken pause to reflect on the intrinsic value of the measurements that go into university rankings. Does the proportion of foreigners, for instance, really mean anything much other than, well, the proportion of foreigners?

The benefits to an individual institution of performing highly on university rankings are obvious. The costs of academic competition usually remain hidden. However, there are significant social costs attached to the Englishization of global academia. Here on Language on the Move we have recently discussed the transfer of the burden of language learning from society to the individual; increased social stratification as those who can afford private tuition in English will enjoy better access to higher education than those who cannot; and the damage done to critical inquiry if the medium is more important than the message. Cho (2012) adds educational costs as teachers may feel insecure, or lack proficiency and confidence when teaching in English or students may simply find lectures delivered in English incomprehensible.

All this raises a key question about Englishization and internationalization: What is the meaning of ‘excellence’ if it does not involve service to the common good?

Cho, J. (2012). Campus in English or campus in shock? English Today, 28 (02), 18-25 DOI: 10.1017/S026607841200020X
Piller, I., & Cho, J. (2013). Neoliberalism as language policy Language in Society, 42 (01), 23-44 DOI: 10.1017/S0047404512000887

Jogiyuhak (early study abroad) is very popular in South Korea (Source: chosun.com)

Readers of Language on the Move will be familiar with South Korea’s English fever, the sweeping zeal for learning English. Parents enrol children in English medium-preschools, arts and sports classes, nursery schools with native-speaking English staff, toddler gyms with English speaking trainers, or hire English-speaking babysitters to talk to their baby in English. Pregnant mothers read an English storybook, attend English medium church services or listen to online English courses for prenatal education in hopes that their foetus will hear and absorb English. Some parents drag their child to a clinic to have tongue surgery, snipping the membrane under the tongue, on the assumption that they will then be able to pronounce the r-sound better.

In short, Koreans are obsessed with English, particularly with native-like fluency and accent.For Koreans who have limited English skills, English proficiency means native-like accent and fluency and the key to this is starting early and being around English speakers. Children’s study abroad, jogiyuhak, is the perfect embodiment of the belief in early exposure in a native environment. While it is often said that Korea’s examination-obsessed education system and intense competition is another reason for early study abroad decisions, the overarching goal is to achieve a native level of English proficiency. More precisely, their ultimate aspiration is to add perfect English to their presumably impeccable Korean.

My first encounter with an early-study-abroad student dates back to the days when I was doing my master’s degree in TESOL as a ‘late’-study-abroad student in Sydney. It was for the first time in my life I was sitting in two hour-long academic lectures in English and I missed much of the lecturer’s instruction. I thought that my problem was normal for an adult international student from Korea who had hardly experienced such a situation before. After the class, I went up to another Korean student, I’ll call her Jenny, and said, in Korean, of course: “It’s hard to understand the lecturer, isn’t it?” Jenny’s response was surprising, “No. I’m used to listening to lectures.” Oh, was this only my problem? To my relief, she added that she had completed her bachelor degree in Australia. Yeah! I was not abnormal after all!

Later on I found out more about Jenny’s background. She had come to Australia at age 16 and had joined a private high school as a boarder, spending a total of eight years in Australia before starting her master’s degree. Soon I started to notice that Jenny often missed the point of an argument or presented irrelevant ideals in informal discussions with other Korean international students. It was obvious that she frequently did not understand the subject of discussions. In addition, she did not understand some words that we were using in discussions, which we had learnt from books or through formal education. These language problems in her ‘mother tongue’ presumably resulted from the fact that she had been absent from the Korean curriculum and other Korean literacy contexts. So, there was a formal Korean register she either forgot or had never learnt.

This observation led me to ponder the role of literacy in language development. The absence of Korean education during jogiyuhak would mean an interruption to the development of formal and literate varieties in Korean.

Well, you might say that stunted Korean is the price Jenny had to pay for her high level of English. However, it did not take long before I found out that, even if listening to a two-hour lecture in English was not arduous to her, her level of understanding of the class contents was not enough to fulfill subject assignments. Jenny often had to ask her Korean classmates, including myself, about concepts and terminologies and she sought assistance with her assignments. I should acknowledge that she wasn’t hiding her difficulties and was straightforward enough to tell everyone that she wrote her essays by cutting and pasting from other texts and that her boyfriend helped her.

Jenny’s struggle with academic English reminded me of Cummins (2000), who argues for the need to distinguish conversational fluency from academic language proficiency, noting that despite their seeming fluency in English, the level of migrant students’ academic achievement is usually far behind their local peers. He suggests that the students may attain age-appropriate levels of conversation fluency within two years. However, it takes at least five to seven years to reach grade-level academic proficiency in English. Furthermore, this does not necessarily mean that migrant students eventually catch up to grade norms after five to seven years. Rather, during that time of language learning students’ academic performance is most likely impeded due to language barriers. This long period of language impairment of migrant students has significant implications for their overall academic development and their preparation for the worlds of employment and citizenship.

My own PhD research on Korean students’ early study abroad and bilingualism in Australia sheds further light on these issues. Many of my research participants reported that they were constrained to select learning areas such as Mathematics and Sciences in which reading and writing was less demanding compared with humanities subjects. So, ironically, early study abroad placed a severe constraint on pursuing language-related areas of inquiry: those who might have had more aptitude for heavily language-dependent fields in the humanities and social sciences were not able to pursue those areas of study in English. Consequently, their choice of careers in Business and IT was linguistically constrained.

To put it differently, early study abroad seems to be more favorable to those with an aptitude for and an interest in these less-language-dependent areas.

On the other hand, the language barriers and impeded adaptation can also mean that early-study-abroad students lose interest in studying. Some of my participants accordingly were regretful that they had come to Australia where they felt they had been transformed from academic high achievers into students with no interest in academic work.

Overall, early study abroad or submersion into English monolingual education in an English-speaking environment seems to entail the under-development of linguistic repertoires in both languages. Most participants revealed that they felt that neither language was fully developed or that they were not as good as a native speaker of either language. This resulted in a sense of confusion and feelings of discomfort. Consequently, they reported difficulties in interactions with speakers of both languages and a sense of not knowing where to belong.

Sending children overseas is costly but many Koreans believe that early study abroad will bring their children advantages outweighing those enormous expenses. While the assessment of the outcome is an individual one, as young adults many of my research participants, whether they continue to reside in Australia or have returned to Korea, struggle to find their place – maybe more so than those who never left?

Cummins, Jim (2000). Language, power and pedagogy: bilingual children in the crossfire, Multilingual Matters

Now google ‘foreign languages crisis’ or similar search terms and you will get more newspaper articles arguing that language learning is in dire straits in Australia, UK, or the USA than you are likely to have the time to read. They all predict economic decline, an inability to compete and cultural isolation because of the fact that schools in these countries by and large fail abysmally when it comes to language learning. If that’s the case, why don’t they put their money where their mouth is? Could it be that staunch English monolingualism is actually the more economically rational strategy for these countries?

Let’s see what non-English speaking countries are doing. South Korea, for example: in 2009, roughly 40% of that country’s public education budget went towards English language education. The Hankook Ilbo article stating this figure doesn’t say what that means in absolutes and I’ve extrapolated around USD 12 billion as follows: in 2009, South Korea’s GDP was USD 834,060,000,000 and in 2002 (the most recent figure I could find on the internet), they spent 3.8% of their GDP on education. A national annual investment of around USD 12 billion for foreign language learning is HUGE! Now add to that an additional private investment of KRW 1.5 trillion (around USD 13 billion). A nation of less than 50 million inhabitants spending USD 25 billion per annum on English language learning is an average expenditure of more than USD500 per person per year on English language learning. Wow!

So, language learning costs big bucks! Add the opportunity cost of devoting a lot of time and energy to language learning (i.e. you can’t spend the money nor the time and effort on other things that might be equally or even more useful) and it’s easy to see why Australia, the UK and the USA don’t go in for language learning: it’s not in their national interest as long as they can get away with making everyone else learn English. Robert Phillipson (2008) puts it this way:

Building on research in Switzerland and worldwide, François Grin (2005) was commissioned by a French educational research institution to investigate the impact of the current dominance of English in education. He calculates quantifiable privileged market effects, communication savings effects, language learning savings effects (i.e., not needing to invest so much in foreign language learning), alternative human capital investment effects (e.g., school time being used for other purposes), and legitimacy and rhetorical effects. The research led Grin to conclude that continental countries are transferring to the United Kingdom and Ireland at least Euro 10 billion per annum, and more probably about Euro 16–17 billion a year. The amounts involved completely dwarf the British EU budget rebate of Euro 5 billion annually that has been a source of friction between the United Kingdom and its partners. The finding is likely to be politically explosive, as this covert British financial benefit is at the expense of its partners. It is also incompatible with the EU commitment to all European children acquiring competence in two foreign languages. It shows that European education is skewed in fundamentally inequitable ways. It indicates that laissez faire in the international linguistic marketplace gives unfair advantages to native speakers of English not only in cross-cultural interaction but also in the workings of the market. The commodification of English has massive implications. Grin (2004) has also calculated that the U.S. economy saves $19 billion p.a. by not needing to spend time and effort in formal schooling on learning foreign languages. (p. 28)

Basically, monolinguals get a free ride at the expense of everyone who invests in language learning!

Writing this blog post I came across a fascinating ‘visual economics’ site ‘how countries spend their money.’ Take a look! It’s illuminating to see at a glance what percentages of their GDP countries spend on military, health and education. The map made me wonder whether we can do something similar for the costs of (English) language learning here on Language-on-the-Move? Everyone could help by sending links to reports, newspaper articles etc. with figures about language costs in their country/state similar to the Hankook Ilbo one I cited above. Here’s a Language-on-the-Move challenge – get cracking!

Reference
Phillipson, R. (2008). THE LINGUISTIC IMPERIALISM OF NEOLIBERAL EMPIRE. Critical Inquiry in Language Studies, 5 (1), 1-43 DOI: 10.1080/15427580701696886

Source: Kang 2009, p. 201

Every linguistics undergraduate student is by now familiar with the fact of linguistic imperialism in academic publishing where the pressure to publish in international journals translates into the pressure to publish in English, leaving researchers from non-English-speaking backgrounds at a competitive disadvantage. I have often joked in my introductory sociolinguistics lectures that discovering a cure for cancer and not being able to publish it in English would probably be little different from not discovering a cure for cancer at all. The academic pressure to publish in English is thus old news but I’d never before thought about the fact that there might be more to the story: does the dominance of US- and UK-based journals among the most highly-ranked journals not only constitute pressure to publish in English but also pressure to conduct particular types of research? I.e. is there not only a form effect but also a content effect?

Myungkoo Kang’s article about university reform in South Korea demonstrates exactly that. In the name of globalization and international competitiveness, South Korean academics, just as their colleagues elsewhere, are under pressure to publish in SCI- and SSCI-indexed journals. In South Korean academia, publications in SCI- and SSCI-indexed journals bring financial rewards for faculty, have become indispensable for being awarded tenure and constitute a positive hiring consideration.

In 2007, for example, there were 1,865 journals indexed in the SSCI. 1,585 (79.62%) of these originated in the USA and UK (see table for details). SSCI-indexed “international” journals are thus clearly hugely skewed towards those originating in Anglophone “center” countries. Among Asian countries, 7 SSCI-indexed journals (0.38%) originate in Japan, 5 (0.27%) in China, 4 (0.21%) in India, 3 (0.16%) in South Korea, and one each (0.05%) in Singapore and Taiwan. Even those SSCI-indexed journals published outside the Anglophone “center” countries are overwhelmingly English-language publications. So, the fact that pressure to publish in SSCI-indexed journals translates into pressure to publish in English is obvious.

In order to find out whether it is not only the language of publication that changes with the pressure to publish in SSCI-indexed journals but also the actual research, Kang analyzed articles published by Asian scholars in the top SSCI-indexed journals in the area of Communication. He found that most such articles “framed local phenomena with American mainstream theories” or “appropriated mainstream theories by redefining mainstream theoretical concepts.” By contrast, only a very small number of these articles attempted to formulate research problems from the local context.

The author concludes that South Korea’s policy for improving research competitiveness (as expressed in pressure to publish in SSCI-indexed journals) actually jeopardizes local/national knowledge production and the formulation of local/national research agendas with relevance to the actual needs of local/national societies. The attempt to foster globally top-ranked social sciences researchers in South Korea constitutes simultaneous encouragement of social sciences researchers to neglect issues within their immediate social contexts.

Kang’s paper is part of a special issue of Inter-Asia Cultural Studies devoted to “Neo-liberal Conditions of Knowledge.” All the contributions in that volume demonstrate how academic “internationalization” in effect means the imposition of English-mediated centralized regimes of knowledge. It is not only local/national languages that are being pushed aside and undermined in the process but, more worryingly, locally informed, locally engaged, and critical forms of knowledge production and dissemination.

Kang, M. (2009). ‘State‐guided’ university reform and colonial conditions of knowledge production Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, 10 (2), 191-205 DOI: 10.1080/14649370902823355

Based on case studies from Japan and South Korea, this review paper explores the hidden costs of English language learning (ELL). In a context where English has become a commodity and ELL a form of consumption, we focus on the personal and social costs of (a) studying abroad as a much-touted path to “native-like” proficiency and (b) sexualization of language teaching materials in order to reach new niche markets. The hidden costs of ELL are embedded in language ideologies which set English up as a magical means of self-transformation and, at the same time, an unattainable goal for most Japanese and Koreans. We end with the call to expose debilitating language ideologies in order to shed light on the hidden costs of ELL.

We are particularly excited that this journal article is our first piece of peer-reviewed research writing that started life on this blog, with a post about the mental health effects of the English fever in South Korea and a post about pornographic language teaching materials in Japan.

The full text of the article is also available from our Resources section under Language & Consumerism.

Ingrid Piller, Kimie Takahashi, & Yukinori Watanabe (2010). The Dark Side of TESOL: The Hidden Costs of the Consumption of English Cross-Cultural Studies, 20, 183-201

The CEO of Rakuten, one of the companies who are changing to English, apparently is tweeting stuff like “All elementary school teachers must be sacked. Their English is bad,” “Let’s fire all Japanese English teachers and hire native speakers” or “Japan has failed. Cambodians speak better English than the Japanese.” I’m quoting from memory so this may not have been the exact wording but it’s the gist of the messages. Apart from the fact that the message that “Japanese can’t speak English” is now also delivered via Twitter, nothing seems to have changed in the many years since I’ve been following news about English in Japan.

Hang on! Japan has invested heavily into English language teaching for a couple of decades. Japan probably has a higher native-speaker-teacher—English-language student ratio than any other English-as-a-Foreign country in the world. If anyone has any actual stats on that ratio, send them in! While the eikaiwa business seems to have slowed down a bit, over the past decades huge numbers of Japanese from all walks of life enrolled in private English classes to practice their speaking skills. Many went abroad to study English in a total immersion environment. All for nothing?!

Factually, all that English language learning must have had an impact and today’s Japanese are more proficient in English than ever before, and the way it’s going, each generation is progressively more proficient. However, the discourse that the Japanese collectively don’t know how to speak English hasn’t moved an inch: everyone with an opinion on the matter still seems to say that they need to start earlier, have more native-speaker teachers, overcome their anxiety and just speak, work harder or send their children abroad in the same way the Koreans do as was suggested in yesterday’s discussion. Regular readers of Language-on-the-Move already know what I think of that.

So what does it all mean? The Japanese have been learning English with great dedication and determination for many years and yet the perception of their English as a poor has not changed. There can be only one explanation: inflationary pressure! As proficiency in English goes up, the bar to achieve the promise of English (a better job, a more competitive economy, self-transformation into a cool cosmopolitan etc. etc.) goes up to. Drawing on Bourdieu, Joseph Park has incisively analyzed the process for Korea: as more and more people learn English and attain the qualifications that promised access to jobs and other desired economic (and also social and cultural) benefits, the market constantly needs to be recalibrated to maintain the value of English as a marker of distinction.

Language is immensely suited to be such a marker of distinction and to reproduce social inequalities because in an absolute, philosophical sense it is impossible for anyone to ever speak “perfectly.”

I fully expect to hear another lecture drawing on media data deploring the dire state of English in Japan in 10 years’ time unless someone tells all those commentators to just butt out! Leave our language alone and concentrate on the real challenges – maybe global warming for starters.

Park, Joseph S.-Y (2009). The local construction of a global language: ideologies of English in South Korea
Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter. DOI: 10.1515/9783110214079

حدود ده سال پیش یک دانشجوی خارجی که از کره ی جنوبی آمده بود و نزدیک بود درسی را که من تدریس می کردم بیفتد، یک نامه ی خود کشی زیر در اتاق کارم گذاشت. او خودش را “بازنده ای” می دانست که – بر خلاف سایر دانشجویان خارجی – آن قدر انگلیسی یاد نگرفته بود که بتواند از عهده ی گذراندن درسش برآید. نوشته بود که چقدر احساس گناه می کند از این که انگلیسی اش بهتر از این نیست؛ نوشته بود که چه طور با انگلیسی ضعیفش به والدین و دیگر افرادی که برایش زحمت کشیده بودند، از جمله خود من به عنوان “یک استاد خوب”، “خیانت” کرده است. با این که به ذهنم هم خطور نکرده بود که به انگلیسی هیچ یک از شاگردانم به دید “خیانت” بنگرم، بسیار شوکه شدم و سعی کردم از هیچ کمکی، اگر میتوانستم، هر چند هم کوچک، مضایقه نکنم. می دانم که او از این دوران افسردگی نجات پیدا کرد، اما از کمی بعد از این حادثه، یعنی زمانی که دانشگاه را ترک کرد و از استرالیا رفت دیگر نمی دانم چه به سرش آمده است. این تجربه برایم دلخراش بود و در این سال ها اغلب به او فکر می کنم. در حقیقت، انگلیسی او در حد استانداردهای لازم برای ورود به دانشگاه بود و بنابراین مشکلش سطح مهارت واقعی انگلیسی نبود، بلکه مشکل از اعتقادش به این که انگلیسی اش آن طور که باید خوب نیست و همچنین از توقعات غیر واقع بینانه و بلند پروازانه ی او از سطح زبان انگلیسی اش ناشی می شد. امیدوارم توانسته باشد خودش را از شر وسواس فکریش خلاص کند و خوشبختی را در کارهای دیگری که ارتباطی به زبان انگلیسی ندارند، بیابد.

وقتی در شماره ی آخر ﮋورنال بین المللی آموزشِ دوزبانه و دوزبانگی  مقاله ای راجع به تحصیل زود هنگام دانش آموزان کره ای در خارج و خانواده های این دانش آموزان خواندم، به یاد این خانم جوان افتادم. جیونگ سونگ، نویسنده ی این مقاله، با در نظر گرفتن این حقیقت که بچه های بیشتر و بیشتری کره ی جنوبی را موقتاً با هدف  chogi yuhak (“تحصیل زود هنگام در خارج”) به مقصد ایالات متحده یا دیگر کشورهای انگلیسی زبان ترک می کنند، در باره ی “هجرت تحصیلی در کره” می نویسد. در سال ٢٠٠٦، تعداد ٢٩٫٥١١ دانش آموز کره ای از مقطع دبستان تا دبیرستان در پی اخذ ویزای تحصیلی بودند، که حدود نیمی از این افراد در سنین دبستان بودند. به علاوه، این آمار و ارقام شامل بچه هایی که والدینشان را همراهی می کنند، یعنی مواردی که دلیل اخذ ویزا کار والدین است، نمی شود. روی هم رفته، ظاهراً بیش از ٤٠٫٠٠٠ کودک کره ای خارج از کشور زندگی می کنند تا آموزش زود هنگام زبان انگلیسی را دنبال کرده و بتوانند “لهجه ی عالی” داشته باشند. از قرار معلوم، روال عادی این است که این بچه ها به همراه مادرانشان باشند، در حالی که پدرانشان همان جا در کشورشان می مانند تا بتوانند از عهده ی تأمین مخارج تحصیلات خارجی فرزندانشان برآیند. این مسئله آن قدر رایج است که اصطلاحی خاص برای اشاره به این خانواده ها وجود دارد: kiregi kajok یا “خانواده ی غازها” – آن ها، مثل غازها، هر از گاهی پرواز می کنند تا یکدیگر را ببینند.

هنگامی که بچه بودم، پدرم که یک کارگر ساختمان بود، اغلب دوره های زمانی طولانی دور از خانواده بود و خوب به یاد دارم که چقدر دلم برایش تنگ می شد. بنابراین، همیشه جدایی زود هنگام بچه ها از والدینشان در نظرم یک جنبه ی بسیار حزن انگیز مهاجرت ِ کاری بوده است. حتی به ذهنم هم خطور نمی کرد که والدینی که از لحاظ اقتصادی تأمین اند، جدایی را انتخاب کنند چون فکر می کنند به نفع بچه هایشان است. آیا این جالب نیست که جاذبه ی انگلیسی آن قدر زیاد است که مردم مایلند پیوند های نزدیک خانوادگیشان را با کسب مهارت بالای انگلیسی معامله کنند؟ در واقع مسئله فقط به پیوند های خانوادگی ختم نمی شود، بلکه در این مقاله از قول یکی از مادرها نقل شده است که این مسئله که بهترین دوستِ دخترِ جوانش در طول یک سالی که در ایالات متحده تحصیل می کرده، یک دختر کره ای بوده و با هم به زبان کره ای صحبت می کرده اند، ناراحتش می کند. این مادر احساس می کرد سرمایه گذاری ای که برای مهارت انگلیسی دخترش کرده بود، به هدر رفته است.

 خوشحالی برای مادرهایی که سونگ با آن ها مصاحبه کرده بود در پیوند با بازده خوب در سرمایه گذاریشان بود، و این بازده با سطح مهارت انگلیسی بچه هایشان، و به خصوص لهجه ی آن ها، سنجیده می شود. یکی از مادر ها می گفت:

 انگلیسی همان چیزی است که می توان در آن رابطه ی مستقیمِ نزدیکی را بین پولی که خرج می کنید و پیشرفت در یادگیری بچه ها ببینید. هر چه بیشتر خرج کنید یادگیری پربازده تر می شود. بله، به خصوص هنگامی که بچه ها کوچک هستند، (نتیجه ی) مقدار پولی که خرج تحصیلات انگلیسی آن ها می کنید قابل مشاهده است، و این من را خوشحال می کند. (ص. ٣٠)

این مسئله به نظر من شبیه یک نوع خاص از اعتیادِ به خرید است – یادگیری انگلیسی به عنوان شکل خاصی از اعتیاد به مصرف! با توجه به این موضوع که طبق گزارش لس آنجلس تایمز در سال ٢٠٠٢، صنعت آموزش زبان انگلیسی در کره ی جنوبی، بدون احتساب chogi yuhak، حدود ٣ میلیارد دلار آمریکا درآمد داشته است و با در نظر گرفتن این نکته که بی شک این رقم از آن موقع تا به حال افزایش یافته است (طبق گفته ی سونگ chogi yuhak بین سال های ٢٠٠٠ تا ٢٠٠٦، هفت برابر افزایش یافته است)، مقایسه ی این صنعت با تجارت مواد مخدر زیاد هم نا به جا به نظر نمی رسد. تب و تاب برای یادگیری زبان انگلیسی به نحوی است که حتی بازار جراحی پلاستیک، فرنکتومی زبان(lingual frenectomy )، هم گرم شده تا به ذم خودشان تلفظ انگلیسی شان بهبود یابد.

 بازار یادگیری زبانی که تقریباً اشباع شده است تنها در صورتی می تواند به رشد خود ادامه دهد که نوعی اعتیاد در سیستم وجود داشته باشد. چه طور به یادگیری زبان معتاد می شوید؟ با جادویی و در عین حال غیر قابل دسترس جلوه دادن این آرمان! این همان جایی است که ایدئولوﮋی زبانی دیگری که سونگ آن را شناسایی کرده است وارد عمل می شود: خود نکوهی زبانی. ظاهراً علیرغم سرمایه گذاری در یادگیری و آموزش زبان انگلیسی، مردمان کره ی جنوبی فکر می کنند که انگلیسی شان وحشتناک و آموزش زبان انگلیسی در کشورشان نا امیدکننده است. یکی از مادرها به خاطر انگلیسی ضعیفش خود را مثل “قورباغه ای در چاه” می دانست؛ یکی دیگر از مادرها می گفت که شوهرش فقط “دو کلمه انگلیسی” می داند – توجه کنید که این مرد که فقط “دو کلمه انگلیسی” می دانست، پژوهشگر یکی از دانشگاه های ایالات متحده بود.

 در بندِ اسارتِ صنعتِ آموزشِ زبان انگلیسی بودن، صنعتی که آن قدر فراگیر است که مردم را وادار می کند برای مهارت انگلیسی بیش از روابط خانوادگی شان ارزش قائل باشند، صنعتی که با القای یک احساس حقارت همیشگی هم خوانی دارد، مطمئناً ابزاری است که از یک طرف منجر به کسب سودهای کلان می شود و از طرف دیگر مخاطرات مهمی را برای سلامت روانی افراد به دنبال دارد. متأسفانه استفاده از این ابزار فقط  به کره ی جنوبی محدود نمی شود، بلکه ظاهراً در مورد نقاط بسیاری از جهان – در هر یک به نحوی – صادق است.

Song, J. (2010). Language ideology and identity in transnational space: globalization, migration, and bilingualism among Korean families in the USA International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, 13 (1), 23-42 DOI: 10.1080/13670050902748778

I was reminded of this young woman when I read a paper about Korean early study abroad students and their families in the current issue of the International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism. The author, Juyoung Song, writes about a “Korean education exodus” with more and more children leaving South Korea temporarily for chogi yuhak (“early study abroad”) in the USA and other English-speaking countries. In 2006, 29,511 Korean elementary to high school students pursued education visas, with around half of these of elementary school age. Furthermore, these numbers do not include children who accompany their parents, i.e. where the reason for the visa is some parental activity. Overall, more than 40,000 Korean children seem to be living abroad in order to pursue an early English education and to acquire that “perfect accent.” The typical pattern is apparently for these children to be accompanied by their mothers while the fathers stay behind to support their children’s foreign education. So widespread is the pattern that there is a special term for this type of family formation: kiregi kajok or “geese family” – like geese, they fly every now and then to see each other.

When I was a child my father, who worked as a construction worker, was often away from home for extended periods and I remember well how much I missed him. Consequently, I’ve always considered the early separation of children from their parents a particularly poignant aspect of labor migration. It had never occurred to me that economically secure parents would choose separation because they thought it was in the best interest of their children. Isn’t it amazing that the allure of English is such that people are willing to trade close family bonds for high levels of proficiency? Not only family bonds as a matter of fact, one of the mothers in the study is quoted as being upset about the fact that her young daughter’s best friend during her study abroad year in the USA was another Korean girl and that they spoke Korean with each other. This mother felt cheated of her investment into her daughter’s English proficiency.

Happiness for the mothers interviewed by Song was tied to a good return on their investment as measured by their children’s English proficiency, and particularly their accent. One mother had this to say:

English is the place where you can see a close correlation between the money you spend and the improvement of children’s learning. The more you spend, the more efficient the learning. Yes, especially when the children are young, the amount of money spent in their English education is visible, which makes me happy. (p. 30)

Sounds like a special brand of shopaholic to me – learning English as a particular form of consumption addiction! Seeing that in 2002 the South Korean English language teaching industry, excluding chogi yuhak, was worth around 3 billion USD according to an LA Times report and assuming that that figure has undoubtedly grown since then (according to Song, chogi yuhak figures grew seven times between 2000 and 2006), the comparison with a drug market feels not entirely inappropriate. The craze for English is such that there is even a market for plastic surgery, lingual frenectomy, to supposedly improve English pronunciation.

A language learning market that looks pretty saturated can only continue to grow if addiction is built into the system. How do you become addicted to language learning? Make the goal seem magical and, at the same time, impossible to reach! That is where the other language ideology identified by Song comes in: linguistic self-depreciation. Apparently, for all their investments into English language teaching and learning, South Koreans feel that their English is terrible and that English language teaching in the country is hopeless. One mother spoke of herself as a “frog in the well” because of her poor English; another one said her husband had only “two words of English” – the man with the “two words of English” worked as a researcher at a US university, mind you.

Being in thrall to an English language teaching industry that is so rampant that it makes people value proficiency in English more than family relationships and that is geared to instilling a perpetual sense of inferiority is surely a recipe for great profits on the one hand and significant mental health risks on the other. Sadly, the recipe is not restricted to South Korea but – with variations – seems to be working well in many places around the world.

Song, J. (2010). Language ideology and identity in transnational space: globalization, migration, and bilingualism among Korean families in the USA International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, 13 (1), 23-42 DOI: 10.1080/13670050902748778