Up and down Korea, in hundreds of English hagwons, the teaching of English vocabulary is perhaps one of the clearest examples of silliness in a business where even in this modern age, in this modern country, the basic principles of effective language teaching have never really been imported. The harsh fact is that Korea has not kept up with developments in language teaching and with few exceptions, follows methods written off by educators in the west decades ago. In these private language institutes, the daily “voca” tests have very little long term or practical value.

Of course one can argue that in true Confucian style, there is a form of mental discipline which can be developed from the memorization process necessary to pass these tests. Additionally there are students who can retain a percentage of these words which may later help a little in reading and passing multiple choice tests in the exams.

However for most students, the process of learning these lists of English words is purely a means to an end: passing the test, avoiding a re-test and keeping parents happy. Once this has been achieved, it’s on to the next page and a false notion of progress is established. Many parents even select a hagwon for their child based on how many words their child will “learn” per week.

Everyone knows of course, or ought to know that at the moment, English language instruction in Korea is very little more than teaching to the test, whether it be college entrance, TEPS, TOEFL, TOEIC or whatever and very little about real life skills. But learning long lists of words out of context, without pronunciation, dependant grammatical structures and usually way beyond a student’s actual level of proficiency is a pretty joyless and ineffective way to do it even with this limited objective.

Grammar, Listening and Reading are taught as separate disciplines in these hagwons. Speaking and Writing are the responsibility of the native speaker teacher. Since pronunciation is not dealt with for these words, these tests can’t help much with listening. Because the words are mostly decontextualized and often presented with several definitions or inaccurately translated into Korean, they must assist reading in a very limited way. As for speaking and writing, forget about it…

The way forward must be real integration and cooperation between all the teachers in a hagwon, ideally all using the same materials but with different emphases. This would result in the regular recycling of words, correct pronunciation and the ability not only to recognize them in reading and listening but also to activate them in speech and writing. This way, voca tests would have some real value, speaking and writing would benefit too and the good news for stressed out kids would be that, of necessity, they would occur a lot less often!