Pathfinder in Korean (review)

The Institute of Language Education of Ewha Womans University recently published Pathfinder in Korean. This is the institute's second series of Korean textbooks since its first twelve-volume series (six textbooks and six workbooks) was published in 1990. The fact that this institute has been one of the top Korean teaching programs alone is enough to prompt us to pay special attention to the publication of Pathfinder in Korean. The new series consists of five levels; for each level, one textbook and one workbook are provided. In 1999, the first two levels of the series appeared, the "beginning" and the "low intermediate" levels. This review will focus on the beginning-level textbook and workbook.

Pathfinder in Koreanis designed for "adults who begin to learn Korean as a foreign language" (quoted from the back cover). As its Korean title, Mali thuinun hankwuke(Mouth-opening Korean), indicates, this text adopts the communicative approach, aiming to "increase learners' communicative competence in real-life situations" (quoted from the back cover). Hence, the main contents of the book involve communication activities in various situations. Besides this, we also can see traces of the situational approach in that at the beginning of each unit, the authors introduce the key grammar points and sentence patterns that are relevant to the theme of the unit. Such preparation helps students to get more easily involved in the communication activities; this can be considered one of the strengths of this book.

Each unit in the textbook consists of three main sections: "Activities," "Tasks," and "Reading"—in this order. In the preparation stage, "Activities," new sentence patterns and grammar points are introduced with short example conversations. Next, the "Task" section includes three or four actual tasks to get students to communicate in a variety of real-life situations with the newly learned grammar items. To assist students in this task, one example dialogue is provided for each task. Finally, in the "Reading" section, students can practice reading skills with materials that incorporate the grammar points of the unit with information on Korean culture. The accompanying workbook consists of fifteen corresponding units, each of which is divided into four exercise sections: "Grammar," "Vocabulary," "Function," and "Sample Dialogs." It includes various exercises designed for students to practice/review what they learned in the textbook. Hence, this can be ideally utilized for students' homework.

The outstanding strength of this text is the excellent use of color illustrations and pictures. In fact, this is the first color textbook ever published for adult learners of Korean. With color illustrations and pictures of real Korean lives, students will likely find this text interesting and motivational. Another strength of the book is that it successfully links the learning of the Korean language with the learning of Korean culture. This is especially true of the sections titled "Resting Place" and "Reading," which present authentic materials and statistical data about the Korean people. By doing so, the authors also encourage a discussion that can build a bridge between the Korean culture and the learner's own culture.

Despite all the above strengths, the text also has its weak points. Although it attempts to teach "four language skill areas—listening, speaking, reading, and writing—in balance" (quoted from back cover), it does not include materials for listening skills. Furthermore, to adequately address writing skills, it needs to go beyond the fill-in-the-blank type exercises and include composition-type exercises even at the beginning level. Nevertheless, with the addition of teacher-developed listening and writing lesson plans, this can be an excellent text for teaching Korean to those students who want to learn about Korean culture as well as the Korean language.