On Literacy in EFL Situations

I had about five things I wanted to write about this week, but I try to limit myself to one topic per blog entry. Maybe I'll add another one tomorrow on a different subject. The topic for today is literacy and teaching English.

I'm constantly surprised by my students' inability to read English. When my co-worker first told me -- about a month after I started -- that students studied English starting from the third grade but didn't learn to write until the fifth grade, I was shocked (the idiom I want to use is "floored," but I guess you won't know that one). How, I wondered, could third- and fourth-grade students study without writing?

The answer, which came to me the next second, is that of course they don't.

Whoever wrote the national syllabus appears to have tried to follow natural language learning principles, but failed to understand that first and second languages aren't acquired in the same way. Sure, first-language learners learn language long before they learn to write, but that's because the human brain isn't developed enough for literacy at that point. Heck, even a large percentage of boys aren't ready to read and write in second grade. By third grade, however, almost all the dyslexia problems have disappeared and students are increasingly relying on writing as a form of studying and memorization.

As a result, third- and fourth-grade students, whose lives -- especially in Korea -- revolve around studying and literacy, write down what they've learned, but what they've written is in Korean. They have no choice in the matter: the want to write, but the don't have the tools to do it in English. The reliance on the Korean alphabet brings about pronunciation problems. I suspect that whoever planned the syllabus this way did so precisely to solve speaking and pronunciation problems. Sadly, his or her choice led to exactly the opposite result -- students whose pronunciation is awful.

Sure, I've taught straight listening and speaking without literacy, but the target audience was of pre-K to kindergarten age, when the brain isn't ready to accept literacy-based teaching. Any student who is learning to read and write in his or her native language in school is prepared to learn to read and write in English. In fact, by third or fourth grade, the student's brain is so geared toward literacy that not to teach reading seems absurd.

The result is that we have sixth-grade students who have been studying English for over three years yet still neither spell nor speak, can't understand simple commands like "stand up" or "turn to page 5," and have no chance of truly speaking English.

There are exceptions, of course. The exceptions are the students who study reading and writing at academies after school.