The Routledge Handbook of Korean as a Second Language

Andrew Sangpil Byon, Danielle Ooyoung Pyun, Andrew Sangpil Byon, Danielle Ooyoung Pyun

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000551891
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Filología
• Subtopic: Idiomas

The Routledge Handbook of Korean as a Second Language aims to define the field and to present the latest research in Korean as a second language (KSL).

It comprises a detailed overview of the field of KSL teaching and learning, discusses its development, and captures critical cutting-edge research within its major subfields. As the first handbook of KSL published in English, this book will be of particular interest to advanced undergraduates, graduate students, language teachers, curriculum developers, and researchers in the fields of KSL and applied linguistics.

While each chapter will be authored by internationally renowned scholars in its major subfields, the handbook aims to maintain accessibility so that it can also be of value to non-specialists.

1 KOREAN AS A SECOND/FOREIGN LANGUAGE (KSL) An overview

Andrew Sangpil Byon and Danielle Ooyoung Pyun

DOI: 10.4324/9781003034704-1

Introduction

Korean as a second/foreign language (KSL) is an academic endeavor, and it is based on a rigorous and scientific process of accumulating knowledge about KSL teaching and learning either inside or outside of classroom settings.¹ Within the field of second/foreign language (L2) studies, KSL has expanded and gained ground as an independent academic discipline in the past two to three decades. Accordingly, there has been a growing number of Korean reference materials published in English and available to the general population and international market in recent years. For example, as for Korean linguistics, there have been two handbooks published: Brown and Yeon (2015) and Cho and Whitman (in pres s). Both handbooks provide an overview of the field of Korean linguistics as it currently stands, serving as a comprehensive guide to a wide range of topics in Korean linguistics. These books have a section on language acquisition. However, the primary target readers are researchers and advanced students in Korean linguistics.

As for Korean as a foreign language, Byon and Pyun (2012) and Cho (2021) are noteworthy. The edited volume by Byon and Pyun (2012) is a collection of both theoretical and empirical studies that support the development of instructional strategies and enhancement of student learning and performance of Korean as a foreign language in the US educational college setting. While each article in the volume is of significant value, offering a number of pedagogical implications, the scope and focus of the book is not comprehensive enough to be used as a handbook for KSL. Meanwhile, Cho (2021) is a welcome addition to the field, as this addresses several key topics and findings of KSL research. However, its main focus is on Korean as a foreign language (KFL) in the US college setting, and it is primarily designed and intended as a textbook for graduate programs in KFL, rather than a comprehensive reference guide.

Despite the increasing number of Korean reference publications for English-speaking readers, there has not yet been one that presents state-of-the-art overviews of KSL research in English.

This handbook fills this void as the first authoritative body of work written and published in English to serve as a comprehensive reference guide for the rapidly expanding field of KSL. The volume aims to define the field, providing a wide range of topics in KSL, discussing the development within the topic areas, surveying the latest research in KSL, capturing critical accounts of cutting-edge research within its major subfields, and suggesting a path for future research.

The handbook consists of 27 chapters (including the current chapter) written by 35 world-renowned experts and prominently emerging researchers in the field. The contributors come from diverse research backgrounds precisely due to KSL’s cross-disciplinary nature (e.g., linguistics, conversational analysis, corpus linguistics, discourse analysis, language testing, multi-lingualism, pragmatics, sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics, foreign language pedagogy, and so forth). They were requested to provide an informed, but not necessarily exhaustive, introduction to the topic under consideration. We believe that each chapter serves four purposes: (1) providing key findings and issues of updated literature, (2) sharing the contributors’ understanding of and approaches to the issues, (3) providing direct links between research and practice, and (4) suggesting directions for future research.

Components of the handbook

To achieve the goal of surveying state-of-the-art research in the multifaceted disciplines of KSL, we divided the handbook into the following five parts, and each part covers varying topics of KSL:

Part I: The acquisition of Korean as a second language

(vocabulary, phonology, linguistic politeness, syntax, and semantics)

Part II: Teaching and learning Korean as a second language

(pragmatics, task-based language teaching, instructional technology, culture, Korean for specific purposes, content-based instruction, and community-service learning)

Part III: Approaches to Korean as a second language

(corpus-based research, conversational analysis, discourse analysis, error analysis, social interactions, national standards, and usage-based approach)

Part IV: Individual differences and social factors

(psychological and cognitive factors, Korean as a heritage language, language ideologies and identity formations, and instructor variables)

Part V: Assessment

(assessment methods, integrated performance assessment, and interactional competence assessment)

It should be noted that, in reality, there is sometimes considerable and inevitable overlap between chapters. For instance, the subject of Korean honorifics is covered not only in Chapter 4, “Linguistics politeness,” but also in Chapter 7, “Pragmatics teaching and learning,” and Chapter 10, “Culture in Korean language teaching: focusing on a dynamic view of culture.” Issues related to heritage language learners are extensively discussed in Chapter 22, “Korean as a heritage language,” but it is also discussed in Chapter 23, “Language ideologies and identity formation among KSL learners.” However, many of these same topics and variables are covered in multiple chapters from different but complementary perspectives.

Part I: The acquisition of Korean as a second language

Part 1 (Chapters 2–6) concerns different aspects of KSL from language-acquisition perspectives. The first chapter of this section discusses KSL learners’ vocabulary acquisition. One most common cause for KSL lexical errors is L1 interference. The meaning of the target word, for instance, rarely overlaps in its entirety with that of learners’ L1. However, learners often directly translate the target word from their L1 to L2. When a target word has multiple meanings and usage, the error is more prone to occur.

Chapter 2, by Ebru Türker, looks into L2 lexical acquisition in KSL contents with a focus on teaching and learning of polysemous Korean words in KSL contexts. The author provides a survey of empirical and theoretical works related to L2 polysemous words acquisition and explores how the current L2 theoretical and instructional approaches of L2 polysemous acquisition studies can be applied to KSL settings. As pedagogical implications, the author suggests that the frequency of occurrences of polysemous meanings in both written and spoken speech modes should be considered when prioritizing target words to teach. In addition, she advocates for consciousness-raising activities that aim to raise learners’ awareness regarding the differences in L1 and L2 word meanings.

Understanding how KSL learners acquire phonological segments is crucial for pronunciation teaching. In Chapter 3, Jeffrey J. Holliday reviews key research findings and issues related to the segmental phonology of Korean. With an introduction to the phonetic properties of Korean phonological contrasts and its relevant theoretical frameworks, the author focuses on phonological acquisition patterns of stops, affricates, fricatives, sonorants, and vowels by KSL learners with different L1s (e.g., Chinese and English).

KSL learners’ communicative success depends to a large extent on their ability to understand and express “politeness.” Traditionally, the description of politeness in Korean linguistics and KSL literature tends to focus on its intricate honorifics. However, an increasing number of recent studies point out that politeness is communicated not only through linguistic levels but also multimodality. Chapter 4, by Lucien Brown, provides a comprehensive overview regarding how Korean politeness (or impoliteness) is achieved not only through its intricate honorifics system but also through various communicative acts, formulaic expressions, and multimodal cues. In addition, the author surveys up-to-date research on KSL learners’ acquisition of politeness, both inside and outside of the classroom setting. He remarks that even highly advanced learners may not display appropriate use of honorifics, and learners can intentionally defy the norm in order to highlight their “foreigner” or “L2 learner” identity. For future research direction, the author calls for more extensive research that covers not only fixed linguistic politeness but also other aspects, such as address terms, speech acts, impoliteness, and multimodality.

The last two chapters of this section tackle the issues related to the L2 acquisition of Korean syntax in KSL settings. In Chapter 5, EunHee Lee overviews unique syntactic and semantic features of Korean that include clause types, case, number, topic markings on nominals, relative clauses, honorifics, tense, aspect marking on verbs, and wh-questions. Then, Lee introduces several key linguistic hypotheses to investigate whether/if/how these hypotheses can be applicable in describing KSL acquisition.

Korean is one of the most difficult languages to acquire, especially for learners with English as their first language, and this is partly attributed to the vast morphosyntactic differences in English and Korean. Chapter 6, by William O’Grady and Chae-Eun Kim, focuses on the acquisition of Korean relative clauses, presenting two case studies involving the acquisition of relative clauses by American adult KSL learners. Their two case studies, though separated by a span of two decades, reveal that the difficulty of relativization follows the relational hierarchy: Subject > Direct Object > Indirect Object/Oblique.

Part II: Teaching and learning Korean as a second language

Part II (Chapters 7–13) covers a number of central issues related to KSL pedagogy. The chapters in this section explore different types of instruction that have been theoretically and empirically supported, presenting overarching themes of past and present pedagogy with implications for future practice.

Chapter 7, by Jieun Kiaer, Jiyoung Shin, and Derek Driggs, discusses several instructional issues pertaining to pragmatic features in KSL settings. The authors offer an overview of multifaceted pragmatics features of Korean that include address terms, speech styles, speech acts, and appropriate nonverbal behaviors. Examining how pragmatic elements have been taught and assessed in KSL instructional contexts, the authors reveal that current educational practices often have overlooked the pragmatic features, and teaching materials often fail to reflect sociopragmatic complexity, embedded in the language, correctly. For future endeavors, the authors urge for more innovative and explicit instruction of pragmatic elements in contexts.

In the last few decades, task-based language teaching (TBLT) has emerged as a major teaching method in the field of instructional second language acquisition. Chapter 8, by YouJin Kim and Sanghee Kang, looks into the TBLT for KSL. The authors first introduce major concepts and terminologies related to TBLT, then summarize core findings and research issues of past and present studies on TBLT, and finally discuss its key issues related to its task design, implementation factors, and assessment. After which, they explore instructional implications and applications for KSL settings.

Beside TBLT, another fast-growing topic that has received increasing attention among L2 pedagogy is computer-assisted language learning (CALL). As coinciding technology advancements and positive empirical findings from CALL studies accumulate, the use of technology in KSL has also become more autonomous, convenient, and frequent in this digital world.

Chapter 9, by Jayoung Song, focuses on instructional technology in KSL settings. With an aim to review and explore what, why, how, and to what extent the instructional technology can benefit KSL teaching and learning, the author narrates a historical overview on the KSL instructional technology; discusses theories pertinent to L2 teaching and learning with technology; and introduces the past, present, and emerging technological tools for KSL pedagogy.

In Chapter 10, Kyung-Eun Yoon concerns L2 culture teaching and learning in the KSL curriculum. The author provides an overview of existing L2, as well as KSL studies on teaching culture. The author discusses how target cultural values are embedded and reflected in the Korean language – its intricate honorific system and major communicative acts, such as apologies, complaints, and requests – and discusses challenges faced by KSL teachers with suggestions for future research directions.

With the increasing number of KSL learners who intend to learn the target language for a specific use or purpose, the research interest in Korean for a specific purpose (KSP) and the need to develop KSL curricular of interdisciplinary and of a student-oriented nature that can meet different demands of learners, has been growing. Chapter 11, by Ji-Young Jung, examines the current status and possibilities for future research on KSP. Jung points out key trends, findings, and issues in KSP research and practice in the United States, as well as in South Korea. Different forms of KSP reviewed include Korean for occupational purposes (e.g., business Korean, Korean for healthcare professions, Korean for translation/interpretation, Korean for missionaries, etc.), Korean for tourism, and Korean for female marriage immigrants (although specific to Korean as a second language context). The author takes the chapter further by finding ways of teaching and learning KSP in the digitally advanced era. Also included in the chapter are instructions as to how to design the curriculum and assess KSP, including high-stakes tests.

Content-based instruction (CBI) is a teaching method that combines content study and target language study, designed to correspond to the needs of learners (Brinton, Snow, & Wesche, 2004). The focus of Chapter 12, by Sang-Keun Shin, is content-based instruction (CBI) and KSL. Shin summarizes the definitions and characteristics of various CBI models, introduces major CBI courses in KSL settings, discusses the challenges faced with CBI, and gives suggestions for future direction.

The physical classroom is not the only context of interest for KSL, as considerable L2 learning can occur outside of the classroom. In Chapter 13, Sung-Ock S. Sohn and Soyeon Kim introduce community service learning as an effective pedagogical tool for delivering KSL language curricula. The aut...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of contributors
• 1 Korean as a second/foreign language (KSL): an overview
• Part I The acquisition of Korean as a second language
• Part II Teaching and learning Korean as a second language
• Part III Approaches to Korean as a second language
• Part IV Individual differences and social factors
• Part V Assessment
• Index