Korean Language and Six-day Immersion Course
A HUNGER FOR ENGLISH LESSONS
By Choe Sang-Hun
Kim Hyo Jin, a timid junior high school student, stood before her American teacher fidgeting. The smiling teacher held up a green pepper and asked in clear, enunciated English: "What is this?"
"Peemang!" the South Korean teenager blurted out, then covered her mouth with a hand as if to stop - too late - the Korean word that had left her mouth.
Mortified, she tried again. Without looking the teacher in the eye, she held both her hands out and asked, this time in English: "May I have green pepper?"
Kim took the vegetable with a bow, and darted back to her giggling classmates - beaming and feeling relieved that she had successfully taken a small first step toward demolishing what South Koreans consider one of their biggest weaknesses in global competitiveness: the fear of speaking in English to Westerners.
Kim was among 300 junior high school students going through a weeklong training in this new "English Village." Built a few kilometers from the western border with North Korea, the government-subsidized language camp is, at 280,000 square meters, or 3 million square feet, the largest of its kind in the world, officials say.
The complex - where the motto is, "We produce global Koreans!" - looks like a minitown scooped up from a European country and transplanted into this South Korean countryside dotted with pine groves, rice paddies and military barbed-wire fences. It has its own immigration office, city hall, bookstore, cafeteria, gym, a main street with Western storefronts, police officers and a live-in population of 160 native English speakers. All signs are in English, the only language allowed.
Here, on a six-day immersion course that charges students 80,000 won, or $82, apiece, pupils check in to a hotel, shop, take cooking lessons and make music videos - all in English. There are language cops around, punishing students speaking Korean with a fine in the village currency or red dots on their
By Choe Sang-Hun
Kim Hyo Jin, a timid junior high school student, stood before her American teacher fidgeting. The smiling teacher held up a green pepper and asked in clear, enunciated English: "What is this?"
"Peemang!" the South Korean teenager blurted out, then covered her mouth with a hand as if to stop - too late - the Korean word that had left her mouth.
Mortified, she tried again. Without looking the teacher in the eye, she held both her hands out and asked, this time in English: "May I have green pepper?"
Kim took the vegetable with a bow, and darted back to her giggling classmates - beaming and feeling relieved that she had successfully taken a small first step toward demolishing what South Koreans consider one of their biggest weaknesses in global competitiveness: the fear of speaking in English to Westerners.
Kim was among 300 junior high school students going through a weeklong training in this new "English Village." Built a few kilometers from the western border with North Korea, the government-subsidized language camp is, at 280,000 square meters, or 3 million square feet, the largest of its kind in the world, officials say.
The complex - where the motto is, "We produce global Koreans!" - looks like a minitown scooped up from a European country and transplanted into this South Korean countryside dotted with pine groves, rice paddies and military barbed-wire fences. It has its own immigration office, city hall, bookstore, cafeteria, gym, a main street with Western storefronts, police officers and a live-in population of 160 native English speakers. All signs are in English, the only language allowed.
Here, on a six-day immersion course that charges students 80,000 won, or $82, apiece, pupils check in to a hotel, shop, take cooking lessons and make music videos - all in English. There are language cops around, punishing students speaking Korean with a fine in the village currency or red dots on their