From here:
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According to results of the first ever Digital Reading Assessment (DRA) for 15-year-old students conducted in conjunction with the OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment, Korea placed 1st with a total score of 568 points.
Korea was 31 points ahead of Australia and New Zealand which tied for 2nd with 537 points. Japan placed 4th with 519 points and Hong Kong-China placed 5th with 515 points.
Approximately 38,000 participants from 19 countries (16 OECD member states and 3 non-member states) including 1,488 students from 20 middle schools and 137 high schools in Korea.
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It kind of hit me the other day how truly digital the world had become. I was forced to do a translation test by hand under the watchful eye of two proctors and after having written only a single page my hand began to hurt. The motion of writing for prolonged periods of time has become so uncomfortable that by the 4th page I felt like my hand was going to fall off. Actual writing in formal situations has drastically died off and I predict that real books aren’t that far behind.
I wasn’t aware that such testing was being conducted, but it kind of makes sense. Though knowing how result-based (or the appearance of result-based) this society can be sometimes, part of me wonders if they didn’t choose the top 10 students from each school to take the test just to take 1st.
{ 15 comments… read them below or add one }
For a long time, I completely swore off the notion of reading complete books or long articles on a computer screen. I couldn’t even imagine myself doing it.
That is, until I got my iPad. Now I regularly read ebooks. Carrying around an entire library of books, as opposed to a whole backpack is really convenient. The iPad’s Retina Display is easy on the eye and allows one to read comfortably in low-light or dark situations. It makes reading an “interactive” process in that you can conveniently and easily copy and paste text, look up words in the dictionary, highlight (without physically destroying the book), surf the Internet to explore tangents. etc.
Nevertheless, there is still “something” about reading and holding a physical book. Maybe it’s just force-of-habit, but I’d still take a physical book over an ebook any day. There have even been times when I’ve been tempted to purchase a physical copy of an ebook I already own. I don’t know why.
‘Though knowing how result-based (or the appearance of result-based) this society can be sometimes, part of me wonders if they didn’t choose the top 10 students from each school to take the test just to take 1st.’
i’ve noticed this is the first thing alot expats want to say. they want to take away.
Fewer people are reading on paper, more are reading on screens, however, isn’t reading a process whether you are reading online or reading a physical book?
People are still reading like crazy, all over the world, and the computer revolution has created more and more readers.
Although, I haven’t read a [paper] book for over 10 years, reading is reading, whether we are reading on a paper surface or online or on a Kindle or PDA screen.
I do read heaps everyday though, ONLY digitally (internet, iPad, etc).
I do understand that the emotional and intellectual process of reading on paper is vastly different from reading text on a computer screen.
I am also not surprised that Korean students are so good at it, because usually all Korean children do is read digitally (except for those who still read paper comic books).
Also, what interests me is, were the Korean students doing the assessment by reading the Korean language (in Hangul-mul) while the second placed students (Australians/NZ’s) were doing the assessment in English ?? most probably.
Is reading Hangul-mul faster than reading English? maybe, because even if you type a FULL A4 page of English then translate it into Korea, it would only fill up HALF an A4 piece of paper.
so was that their advantage??
In terms of page usage Korean is shorter than English, but reading fast doesn’t necessarily equate to comprehension. It wouldn’t surprise me if the repetitive nature of Korean sentences made concepts easier to recall than English. (Though extensive test messaging, cyworld usage, MMORPGs and Starcraft are likely contributers as well). Frankly I am little surprised that Australia and New Zealand did so well. There are numerous places in both of those countries where the Internet is non-existent or painfully slow. To think that they beat out Japan and Hong Kong is a little shocking, but then the non-phonetic characters in Japanese and Chinese might mess with the results as well. What I really want to know is why only 16 countries from the 22 OECD nations participated and which nations did not participate. That might be more telling when one examined the results.
http://www.oecd.org/document/42/0,3746,en_21571361_44315115_48267882_1_1_1_1,00.html
There is the original. It turns out neither the UK or the US participated. One wonders if they wouldn’t have done at least as well as their English speaking brethren in the Southern Hemisphere.
Pawi-
I’m not taking anything away from them. For all I know all of the data is accurate. I’m the one who posted the article. However, I have been witness to (and complicit) in efforts to distort the truth merely to please superiors in my years in Korean institutions more times than I care to count and this has caused me to be suspicious of all results from any organization.
I wonder if it has anything to do with the number of words and expressions Koreans use? Koreans may be using a smaller language set to communicate on average since it is a smaller, more monolithic society than many others.
I do not remember seeing many Korean vocabulary-building books in Korea or seeing Koreans working to build their Korean vocabulary, which makes me suspect that there are not as many “word” subtleties in the average Korean-language newspaper or magazine article as there are in an English article.
Yes, Koreans do seem to use a lot of subtle adjectives and adverbs in their speech and writing, but they also seem to use a lot of vague phrases and similies (같은 것) to communicate rather than precise, individual word choices.
While working with my son to help build his English vocabulary, I have been reminded of just how big a challenge the English language is.
I had a look at the PISA data on their website. I would not surmise that Korea’s excellent performance is a result of having stacked the deck or differences in language and text structures. In my experience, Korean students of all ages are skilled internet users who navigate easily in Korean and in English. The US did apparently did not participate. Scores from PISA’s reading and content tests show that countries like Korea and Finland which score near the top have the smallest socioeconomic achievement gap between the wealthiest and the poorest students while the US is dragged down by having a relatively high percentage of students in poverty and a large achievement gap. Examining the achievement gap in the US usually focuses on schools only, ignoring critical differences in home and neighborhood environments. A poor Korean family is qualitatively different from a poor family in the US. Most of my students do not have a computer and home, and the ones that do don’t have internet access. This reality across America is why state curriculum standards include a technology component. We have to make time to teach technology skills at school because many kids never handle anything electronic at home other than a Gameboy or Wii.
gbevers wrote:
You’re trying to say, like, teenagers say “like” too much. So I’m, like, listening to some, like, teenagers talking today and they’re, like, using the word “like”, like, all the time. Isn’t it American kids?
Comparing newspaper articles is like comparing two steaming piles of shit. If you want to compare the nuances of language one must look at literature and/or poetry and in that case I would say Korean is at least as nuanced if not more so than English.
Also, just because you haven’t seen Korean texts for building vocabulary doesn’t mean they don’t exist. I own 2 of them. They are not packaged the same way as the English ones are (Learn 3000 SAT Vocab! or Learn 5000 GRE Words!) But there are sections on all 모의고사 and the 수능 in the 국어 언어영역 section entitled 어휘. Many of the questions regarding vocabulary place 반의어 or 동의어 among the options in order to have the students identify a word’s meaning by picking its equivalent or opposite from a list. The questions are not easy because once Chinese gets involved the number of vocabulary you can have is near infinite.
Yeah, 조엘 is right. I also have tons of those kinds of books designed not for KFL learners but for native speakers. There are tons of books (and iPhone apps!) not just for “일반”단어, but also for 한자어, 속담, 전문어, 관용구, 사자상어, etc.
what about Korean students are smart?
there is something wrong with saying that?
Joel, Milton, Wjk:
Do you think more Koreans would understand “13 공포증” than Americans would understand “triskaidekaphobia”? A lot of difficult words in English are simple expressions in Korean.
Even though Korean may have a lot of Chinese-based words that convey subtle differences in meanings, how many Koreans use them in their speech and writing? If they do use a difficult Sino-Korean word or expression, it seems they often follow it with a definition or the Chinese characters for the word. Also, rather than use difficult words to convey a meaning, Koreans seem to prefer using well-known proverbs or idioms.
I am simply suggesting possible reasons for the high score Korea received. Maybe Koreans are just smarter, as WJK suggested, but from my experience, the average Korean does not spend much time studying his native language and does not seem to know Korean grammar or Chinese characters all that well, so that was why I suggested that Korean writers may be using a more limited language set or more easily understood words and expressions than the writers of other countries.
Let me throw your question back at you. How many Americans would ever use triskaidekaphobia in their everyday writing or speech? How often have you used this word except to prove this point? That seems like an outrageous example that could be countered with various similarly outrageous examples from Korean. What if a Korean were unfamiliar with the characters or the meaning behind 비몽사몽 (非夢似夢)? Wouldn’t they be worse off than an American who only had to learn the word half-asleep? Or in and out of sleep? Which are essentially basic modifications of words they already know whereas 비몽사몽 must be memorized and stored to memory just as triskaidekaphobia must be? Or how about 괄목상대 (刮目相待·刮目相對)? This would have to be written out in English expressing astonishment at the growth/change/development that has occurred during a period of separation. If you’re a Korean and you don’t know the word you lose the whole context of the sentence whereas it would be okay in English because it would be explained for you in its parts. I think you are judging Koreans based on the common every day language that you have witnessed them using while basing your assumptions of English on background tainted with academics and academic writing. I would encourage you to head to Mississippi or Idaho sometime and tell me if the average person uses expressions that are more or less specific than their Korean counterparts. Korean and English both are capable of great depth and nuance and trying to prove one is more this or that is a fruitless endeavor in my opinion.
Koreans, particularly Korean students, are agile and frequent swimmers in an information-rich online environment, i.e. they’re online all the time!
They also almost invariably learn to read hangeul at a very young age and are able to absorb pages or at any rate paragraphs of hangeul text as a gestalt, quite possibly with greater ease than in other nations.
Speculatively, it also seems as if the nature of Korean allows you to pack more information into each line because you can express complex concepts with multiple combinations of hanja, each character of which is, of course, a single syllable. Further, connectives in Korean are often just one or two syllables as opposed to the multisyllabic subordinating conjunctions that frequently perform equivalent functions in English; and English places greater restrictions on the use of relative clauses, and, in general, favours simpler sentences probably because grammatical structure is less well-defined, or even perhaps because the very wealth of expressions and collocations in English means you can’t play around with the sentence structure too freely lest you end up suggesting an unintended meaning.
I should say not ‘grammatical structure’ but ‘grammatical form’.
@4: I have been witness to an attempt of a Korean professor to distort experimental data in a scientific paper in order to perform better than other research groups on an international benchmark. The professor in question is tenured at one of the so-called prestigious universities. Obviously, for this and other reasons (e.g., corner cutting and confirmation bias due to the “quickly, quickly” mentality and the authoritarian-hierarchical way of doing research), I am now quite suspicious of results presented in Korean papers.
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