Introductory-Level Korean Language Textbooks for the Anglophone Adult Learner: A Survey of Three Recent Publications

Book Reviews INTRODUCTORY-LEVEL KOREAN LANGUAGE TEXTBOOKS FOR THE ANGLOPHONE ADULT LEARNER: A SURVEY OF THREE RECENT PUBLICATIONS The field of Korean Studies in the Anglophone world has long lacked a diverse range of high-quality Korean as a foreign language (KFL) textbooks for use at the university level. This dearth of teaching materials specifically designed for and appropriate to teaching KFL at English-speaking universities remains acute at all levels, from novice to advanced, and has been remedied only partially in the past ten to fifteen years by the publication of a few new textbooks. In this article, I review three such relatively new textbooks in their order of appearance.1 Michael C. Rogers, Clare You, and Kyungnyun K. Richards. College Korean [Korean title: tfl^Hl·"^"0!]. Berkeley, Los Angeles, Oxford: University of California Press, 1992. xiv, 363 pp. $45. Young-Mee Cho, Hyo Sang Lee, Carol Schulz, Ho-Min Sohn, and Sung-ock Sohn. Integrated Korean: Beginning 1 (352 pp., cloth $50, paper $25) and Integrated Korean: Beginning 2 (336 pp., cloth $50, paper $25). Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2000. Soohee Kim, Emily Curtis, and Haewon Cho. Q^Ik *MLil -Ö.! [English title: You Speak Korean!]. Two vols. Seattle, WA: Paradigmbusters, 2003. 260 pp. $44. Before discussing the strengths and weaknesses of each of these books, a few words about textbooks published in Korea are in order. For many years, and even up to the present day, numerous Korean language programs outside Korea have—for lack of anything better—been forced to use textbook series produced by KFL programs operating in Korea. The most representative such series is that published by Yonsei University, but in the past decade or so a number of other Korean universities (e.g., Seoul National University, Korea The Journal ofKorean Studies 10. no. 1 (Fall 2005):145-89 145 146The Journal ofKorean Studies University, Ewha Women's University, Kyung Hee University) have jumped into the KFL business and all have quickly produced multivolume textbook series of their own. In fact, there are now so many textbooks that it would require a significant cash outlay to purchase all of them. However appropriate these textbooks might be for teaching Korean to foreign learners in Korea, they are all woefully inadequate as teaching texts at an Anglophone university outside of Korea. The primary reason for this is that they typically have little or no explanatory prose in English to help the learner outside the classroom. Vocabulary lists are often not translated at all, and in many cases the quality of the English prose and glosses is dreadful.2 College Korean Generally speaking, College Korean (CK) suffers from four problems: 1) inaccurate , inconsistent use of terminology; 2) incomplete or misleading explanations of structural points; 3) apparent lack of attention to pattern sequencing and step-by-step build-up of structural knowledge; and 4) too little English prose explanation. The contents of CK are as follows: Preface, Using the Text, Abbreviations and Han'giil letters, Pronunciation Rules, 26 Lessons, Glossary , English-Korean Grammar and Notes Index, and Korean-English Grammar and Notes Index. Writing, Exercises, Glossary CK uses han'gul from the first page of Lesson (L) 1. However, from L 7, it introduces 6-10 Chinese characters each lesson, for a total of 142 characters. It is difficult to imagine a good pedagogical reason for introducing Chinese characters in the first year of a Korean language course, even if one makes this portion "optional," as the authors do here. In CK, the Chinese characters appear as an afterthought to each lesson—there are no separate exercises for them, nor are there reading passages or other practice materials of any kind. The exercises for each lesson are too short and too scanty in their coverage, and while new vocabulary items introduced in them are usually flagged in situ, the glossary does not record first sightings. Korean Sounds and Han'gül Letters In addition to confusing phonetic and phonological notions, the authors here give some misleading statements about Korean phonetics and phonology. In the vowels chart on page 1, the Korean vowels are accompanied by a "modified McCune-Reischauer" romanization. It is doubtful, however, that students of beginning...