Sixth International Conference on Immersion and Dual Language Education: Connecting Research and Practice Across Contexts

Laptop Poster Session for Graduate Students

Korean L1/English L2

One-Way Second/Foreign Language Immersion

Elementary (K-5)

Although English immersion programs for Korean children in South Korea began 20 years ago, they have not yet been described in detail. This project places such programs in the global immersion context, using autoethnography and document analysis to paint a rich picture of the design and daily realities of one school.

Research has long shown L2 immersion to be an effective way for many children to learn a second language, and such programs began appearing in South Korea in the mid-1990s, offering at least 50 percent of instruction in English to native Korean-speaking children. While Jeon (2012) gives a useful overview of forms of English immersion education in South Korea, surprisingly little scholarship in English or Korean has looked in detail at the design and daily operation of English immersion programs for school-age children as actually practiced in the Korean context. (Shin 2015, in Korean, provides a somewhat detailed description of one program’s history and structure.) This is an undertaking that is likely only to become more difficult as previously warm official attitudes toward English immersion education have chilled under the current government of President Park Geun Hye, driving some such schools to conceal their immersion programs under the guise of after-school enrichment.

This project combines autoethnography and document analysis to examine the structure and practice of immersion education at one Seoul immersion elementary school (molip chodeung hakgyo) from an insider’s point of view. With the support of lesson plans, e-mail communications, newsletters, journal entries, and other contemporary documentation, four years of one teacher’s experience are examined based on core features of immersion programs as described by Johnson and Swain (1997), and the school’s design and daily realities are illumined. In this way, the Korean iteration of additive immersion education can be better understood in the context of international conceptions of immersion education, and strengths of and challenges for the practice of immersion in the Korean context are made clearer.