I am a crude boor, for sure, but I’m hardly the only one here. If Sonagi was easily offended by boorishness, she’d had left a long time ago. One of the best kind of women are women who act like women but is familiar enough with guy crap to not get easily offended by it and just lets guys be guys. I think she is like that.

I concur. This is one of the fallacies of bilingual education. The use of a student’s L1 can become a crutch because the end result is that no real meaningful communication is occurring in the target language. The struggle to communicate in the L2 is an important part of the language learning process.

My own experience learning Korean also bears this out. When I first started learning I attended a special class for foreigners taught by an English speaking Korean. She spent time introducing Korean words and simple grammatical structures, but used English to do so. In fact, the real language of communication was always English. I spent two months enrolled like this, but made little progress. Finally, in my third month, I took a class with a Korean teacher who had majored in Korean education (국어교육학). This teacher, either out of embarrassment or design, never used English in class. As a result we were forced to use Korean to say things like “I have a question”, “Please write that on the board”, “Could you repeat that?” etc. While it was certainly more difficult at first, it gave us more chance to actually practice using Korean. The result is that I was actually starting to develop confidence in the language for the first time. That experience taught me that using the student’s native language is not a help, but a hindrance.

I can only conclude that LMB is grasping at straws for solutions to Korea’s problems with English education. In the end, I think the best solution is to work on improving the professionalism of Korean schools so that talented English teachers are not scared off. Unfortunately, the current system is so discriminatory and xenophobic that many of the best teachers leave out of frustration.

They get plenty of “instruction” in Korean from Korean teachers. You’re just sheltering them from foreigners. This will not produce people that are communicatively competent in the target language.

Can you imagine taking Spanish I with a teacher that can only speak Spanish?

A few years ago, I taught ESL to beginner children at a private K-12 international school in China. My students were Korean, Chinese, and Japanese speakers. Guess which language I used for instruction (I speak all three plus English, of course). I now have a class of kindergarteners with minimal English. Five are Spanish speakers and one is a Chinese speaker. Guess which language I use for instruction? Native language clarification is helpful for complex grammar and vocabulary nuances, but children learn best by extensive modeling in context. I rarely use another language for instruction. Knowing the native language of young children is more useful for behavior management; the kids can’t get away with cuss words and insults. If those Korean beginners “didn’t learn jack” from their foreign teachers, it’s because of ineffective teaching methods, not because of a lack of Korean language proficiency. Some of the beginner children I taught in China had already had some prior instruction in their native language. Knowledge of the students’ native language in a monolingual class is helpful but not essential.