The KT has a piece on KAIST president Suh Nam-pyo and his supporters and detractors.
Unsurprisingly, it seems the foreign students like him.
Personally, I have no problem with him linking tuition to grades — if students want to use their university years as a four-year vacation, that’s fine, but it shouldn’t be on the taxpayer’s dime. A lot of the bitching, quite frankly, smacks of entitlement.
It’s the English lectures I don’t really understand. If this were a foreign language training school, and the students were studying to become English interpreters, I could understand. But they’re not — they’re students of science, which seems to be a sufficiently difficult subject to study and discuss in one’s own language, let alone in a foreign one. And really, who cares if a scientist can’t speak English — Japanese physicist Toshihide Masukawa won the Nobel Prize in 2008, and he doesn’t speak a word of English. Sure, English is a useful tool, but what’s the point of using as the language of education in a country where most people don’t speak it?
Daniel Craig has a discussion of this issue on his blog, too.
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I don’t get the lectures being in English either. Yes, they should be using the latest and best English language textbooks if a translation in the local language isn’t available, as they do in countless countries around the world (it’s how things were/are done at the French-language university I attended). But, holding the lectures in English only? I’m doubt this answers the needs of their students–heck, I’m unsure holding my own classes, conversational English and English compositions, answers the need of mine.
There speaks a non-scientist. If these students are serious about their science, they will need to publish and present papers in English to international conferences. I am at such a conference (on computer science) at the moment in Daejeon, half-listening to presentations. As it happens, I am the only native English speaker at this conference, though presenters come from a range of countries (India, Pakistan, South Africa, Iraq, Italy, Norway, Vietnam, China, Japan etc). The invited speakers also are non-native English speakers; even the two (I presume immigrant) Canadians. But, as is usual, all the sessions are in English, as are the papers in the proceedings, and those published subsequently in related journals. Most international conferences in Korea are held in English (with a few bilingual in Korean and English). Put simply, Korean students need high proficiency in English if they are to progress as scientists.
This one is in my wheelhouse, I’ve got plenty to say about this, and I’m right. But more importantly I need to book my some Varekai tix pronto. I’ll be back with the facts and realities later. Until then, have at it.
All of the students going there know this. If they’re not comfortable with it they should go somewhere else. I think it’s a good idea to try a project like this at at least one university. The future for these graduates will be much brighter as a result.
If these students are serious about their science, they will need to publish and present papers in English to international conferences.
Well, if they stick to only publishing in the myriad of Korean publications, English isn’t necessary. They may even benefit from another language altogether, say Russian or German, where they can then translate articles into Korean and steal the ideas as their own (anyone been here long enough to remember what I’m referring to?)
blockquote crap
#2,
Talking about me? I was a biochemist long before I became a linguist (both of which are sciences). I’ve thought university classes in both subjects, by the way.
What you guys are missing is that most undergraduate students will never publish in international papers. The school’s prime concern should be teaching these students a strong foundation in science. The best vehicle for this is their first language.
Frankly, I think most of your arguments seem to be based on linguistic pride (unilingual linguistic pride, may I add).
I don’t know much about the merits of the lectures being in English, I have an open mind about it. All I know is that one of my students is a graduate of KAIST and completed both his bachelor and masters degrees there and then went on to get his PHD in Tokyo. A very smart man indeed (a few months younger than me).
He is studying with me as he needs to improve his English. If he wants to progress beyond being limited to working for Korean companies. His area of expertise is far more advanced in Europe, The US, Hong Kong and the businesses of those areas use English. He is very good at what he does, but English is slowing him down. If he could establish himself as a consultant (his long term plan) he could make a killing.
It’s surely possible to do science just in Korean. But, as others have said, if you want to do internationally recognized research, which is what KAIST wants to do, then you need to do the English thing. It’s not as important as it is for translating, but speaking English is more important in day-to-day scientific activity than it is even in business or finance.
One of the time-consuming problems of trying to do cutting edge research in a language other than English is inventing words for all the technical terms that are only familiar to colleagues in English. This does provide some comic relief occasionally. Some clowns in Brazil put out a paper out in Esperanto yesterday about spacotempo in Generala Relativeco. How do you say “down with English” in Esperanto?
I wonder how many Maskawa’s get filtered out by doing everything in English. If KAIST was turning out one Maskawa every ten years they’d be doing well. Meanwhile there are thousands of students who need the English thing to talk to the scientific elite in the rest of the world. To paraphrase the OP, if they’re going to be attending international conferences on the taxpayer’s dime, they’d better be understanding what is said.
By the way, there’s an office at KAIST that does “English corrections” for papers and things. I’ve seen a few of these papers after they came back and somebody, possibly somebody on this board, is doing a very solid job translating technical articles that presumably don’t mean much to them.
Someguy, I think the argument is that the purpose of KAIST is to produce research scientists who will go on to publish papers in international journals and attend international conferences. Some of them won’t make it, but the assumption should be that KAIST at least, as a research based elite university, is trying to get them there.
#12,
What’s more important, the stated purpose or reality?
Face it, English is a hindrance to most of their students.
As I said on the other thread, the students I knew at KAIST were up to the task and they recognized the importance of speaking English. Sure it’s a hindrance, just like trying to do anything in a second language is a hindrance. But it doesn’t mean you’re not better off making the effort.
If you could show me that incoming students at KAIST spoke so little English that they weren’t learning any English in class let alone any science, then maybe the policy needs reconsidering. But in my experience that is nowhere near the case. We’re not talking about people who can barely form a sentence here. And in science or computing it’s not the nuanced sentences with subtle multiple meanings that are key. That’s why they teach them mathematics too. And there ain’t many people who are native speakers of math.
The whole thing about having lectures in English reminds me of a tale from LG Electronics back when Nam Yong was CEO. It was said that Nam would do all his board meeting in English and then his Korean executives would have separate meetings among themselves to figure out what Nam was saying. As a result, the interpretation by the other execs ended up being the most conservative interpretation and entire divisions dithered for months.
Perhaps Korea should give up all this emphasis in English. It just seems to me like a big money and resource pit that’s not yielding much no matter how much “stuff” is shoveled into it.
I don’t know. I just don’t think having mandatory English lectures at Korean universities is going to raise it’s rankings in worldwide lists. Hell, does mandatory English help Osaka University or Peking University with their rankings?
Best article (in English) on the situation I’ve run across so far:
http://www.koreaherald.com/national/Detail.jsp?newsMLId=20110413000987
Turns out it’s not just the grades for tuition problem that’s stressing out the students. It appears it’s the English lecture only policy compounded with the grades for tuition policy that’s stressing the students out.
I’ve avoided this story because it seems to fit into that category of “for Koreans only.” What policies KAIST decides to adopt or abandon is so far off the radar that only the most devoted of Koreanists need take note.
That said, I’ll just add my two cents that this seems to have nothing to do with the teaching of science and everything to do with the broader, competitive policy goals of Korea. Put another way, just like the mad rush in GSIS programs in Korea a decade-plus ago had everything to do with building a platform from which Korean undergrads could hone their skills for two years in a nominal master’s graduate program before heading off for Ph.D.s at Berkeley, Harvard, and Columbia, so too does KAIST’s program seem geared at prepping its students for eventual advanced study at Berkeley, MIT, and CalTech.
And I completely agree that this same push is aimed at enhancing Korea’s participation at international fora and in international publications. That other countries might not have this focus says nothing about it’s presence, nay, obsession in Korea.
But then, Korea has always tread its own path in these kinds of initiatives. Why should KAIST be immune from this?
DLB
As I was a student in KAIST before and for a while after the switch to english occurred I would say the biggest problem with this initiative is not the proficiency of the students but that of the lecturers. Combining the fact that both students and lecturers sometimes sport subpar english the classes will just end up a total mess.
I believe the changes where implemented way to quickly, a more gradual transition into english would have been a much better way to go. Heck, even in my home uni we don’t have english lectures for undergrads.. and that is in a country with much higher english proficiency than SK.
Mandatory English probably explains the laughable number of British universities in the top end of the Times ranking. Or maybe the Times is just biased…
If you look at the top ten of the Asia universities, the ones with a long history of lecturing in English like Hong Kong and Singapore are scoring pretty highly on “international mix” whereas the likes of Tokyo and Kyoto aren’t. Hopefully school presidents think of more than just rankings though.
It’s important to recognize exactly what the “English-only” policy at KAIST means: it means that lectures are held in English. Recitation sections — Korean. Labs — Korean. You can stay after class and talk to the professor in any language you want. (I often show up to teach my class and find a large knot of students surrounding the professor of the previous class, all speaking in Korean.)
The library and bookstore have all sorts of books in Korean if a student finds the textbook too hard to read; students can form study groups and work together speaking any language they want.
People say “English only” — but really, it’s English for 50 minutes, three times a week, and the rest is Korean.
(And it’s an open secret that many professors lecture in Korean anyway — first day of class, they look around and proceed in Korean if they don’t see any non-Korean faces.)
That’s the English-only environment that students are complaining about. Sure, it’s tough, but everyone knows what they signed up for.
Japanese is quite different from Korean.
at first, to get the information and knowledge are needed from books….
I think it is hard to study them in hangul
Some additional arguments in favor of experimentation with English (although I am not sure whether these and previous arguments justify teaching all courses in English at Korea’s most prestigious science and engineering university):
1) As it currently stands, most prestigious scientific journals use English as the language of communication. Being able to publish in these journals is important for universities that want to improve their international standing (citations to articles published in these journals have a high influence on the international ranking of universities). Being able to publish in these journals is also important for the personal prestige of scientists and engineers (as this typically translates into tenure, grants, positions on international editorial boards, etc.).
Note that China is currently also struggling with this. See for example the following article: “The outflow of academic papers from China – why is it happening and can it be stemmed”.
2) The Korean language is deferential to age and position, making it difficult to have one-on-one equal relationships. This is not good for discussion/innovation. This argument can be found in the following interview with Nam-pyo Suh:
http://chronicle.com/article/No-Looking-Back-Kaists/65974/
3) The Korean language is highly ambiguous, due to its context-driven nature. Science and engineering do not favor ambiguity.
4) Having good English language skills is a competitive advantage for Korea, compared to China and Japan.
5) It allows attracting foreign brain power (this is, foreign students and scholars).
6) Breaking the isolation of Korean scientists and engineers at international conferences and other international events (e.g., international standardization activities).
Two really good points have been made but not fleshed out in the comments so far:
1) Policy is policy- you know what you’re getting into. While some people suffered through a transition to English lectures, its my understanding that none of them took their lives- the students no longer with us had full disclosure.
2) English is used during lectures, not all the time. A study years back of Chinese education showed that English language-use in non language-related courses lowered the students scores, apparently hindering their ability to absorb the content.
However, (and the point was made that undergrads don’t publish) one task of undergrad education is to prepare you for post-grad studies. This is especially important in scientific fields- how many times has this blog made fun of ‘fan death’ the ‘kimchi cure-all’ or other localized wives’ tales that wouldn’t pass muster on the international stage?
One point that gets under my skin is that the KAIST president is being blamed for introducing an American system- one that effectively is the same as any other scholarship system in the world, ie the better you do, the more scholarship money you receive; and one that doesn’t explain why high school kids base-jump sans parachute when they think they won’t be able to attend.
Well, I guess to that, what I’ll say is that I’d hazard to guess that a lot of non-Koreans who spent a few years in Korea probably have about as much working knowledge of Korean as the standard “English knowledgeable” Korean has a working knowledge of English. So, the question here might be is if Korean wasn’t your native language, and you had some years of private “hagwon” training in Korea, could you depend on that to get you by about three our four hours of college lectures a week? Remember, a lecture on Physics can be a lot harder to navigate than a conversation on the weather or an everyday transaction. Could you survive with a GPA at or over 3.0? Perhaps, but it wouldn’t be easy.
The interesting things is that many of Suh Nam-pyo’s stanchest supporters are KAIST foreign students, who many times have better English abilities than the average Korean student. They like having the classes be in English and would be at a disadvantage if the classes went back to all Korean. However, they do see the difficulty for the Korean students. Foreign KAIST students are given a year to adjust when the first come in with longer grace periods and more opportunity to make up bad grades, etc. They also thought that, given the English requirements, regular Korean KAIST students should also be given the adjustment period too. They may have a point there as most of the students who committed suicide were freshman or sophomores and only 19 years old.
” Or maybe the Times is just biased…”
Probably not since the main competing Chinese ranking list is pretty similar.
“Remember, a lecture on Physics can be a lot harder to navigate than a conversation on the weather or an everyday transaction.”
Not sure I would totally agree with that. Having been involved in translating technical articles they were always much easier than non-technical ones.
Even bought a seriously expensive technical dictionary years ago in one science that we did a lot of work, only to find it was a complete waste of money since almost all the “Korean” terms were actually the same English!!! Just written in hangul!!!
It’s interesting to read this entire conversation, since I’m looking to study abroad in SK in two years, and I’m engineering major. Looking into studying at POSTECH, I found a lot of courses were offered in English. Somebody mentioned professors having subpar English. I can’t speak from experience, but I talked to a student who had recently come back from POSTECH and said she didn’t have problems understanding the professor’s English (and that many of them had even taught abroad).
While I haven’t been in a lecture taught outside of my native English, I feel like the core of my classes wouldn’t be too hard to follow along with, because most of the class is math and all written out on the board.
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