Language Ideological Approaches to English Education in Korea: A Sociolinguistic Perspective

Abstract

The overheated atmosphere of English education in contemporary Korean society is popularly represented as English Fever. The phenomenon of English Fever dates back at least to 1945 when there was a socio-political transition from Japanese colonial rule to a newly emerged U.S. army military government rule. This dissertation attempts to elucidate historically accumulated aspects of English education in Korea from a critical macro-level approach (Pennycook, 2010; Phillipson, 1992). In doing so, a theoretical framework for the dissertation is based on language ideologies (Kroskrity, 2000; Schieffelin, Woolard & Kroskrity, 1998; Van Dijk, 1995), which are produced, mediated, transformed, and reproduced by interacting with ever-changing socio-historical, political, economic, and structural contexts of Korea. Language ideologies of English influence and contribute to what is at stake in English education in Korea, depending on what is primarily required in each of three major socio-historical periods in modern Korean: nation building (1945-1960), modernization (1961-1980), and globalization (1990-present). This dissertation elaborates how language ideologies about the English language are dedicated to serving as indexicality, reifying dominance, and prevailing in social institutions (Fairclough, 2001; Gal, 1989; Hill, 2008; Irvine, 1989; Kroskrity, 2000), giving rise to a variety of forms of social power in Korean context. Analysis of the relationship between language ideologies of English and English proficiency in Korea suggests that the English language is ideologized to exert profound influence on Korean social structures, although it hardly functions as a tool of communication within Korean society. In other words, the ubiquitous phenomenon of English Fever in Korea may have little correlation with an actual guarantee of English proficiency. Rather English Fever can be attributed to the accumulated and deeply held English language ideologies permeated into Korean society.