English Today

Table of Contents - March 2012 - Volume 28, Issue 01  

Original Article

English-only instruction at Korean universities: Help or hindrance to higher learning?

Hyun-Sook Kang c1

As the suicides by a few students at one of South Korea's (hereafter Korea) most prestigious universities drew a great deal of attention from the public, partial blame went to the new institutional policy imposed by the university's top administrator: exclusive use of English as the medium of instruction across the entire curriculum (McDonald, 2011). The fanatical pursuit of English education and the overall status of the English language in Korean society have been well documented in the literature (e.g., Jeon & Lee, 2006; Jeong, 2004; Lee & Shin, 2008; Park, 2009; Seth, 2002). However, little has been written about another controversial trend, English-only instruction, recently introduced at a few selective institutions of higher education in Korea.

(Online publication March 06 2012)

Correspondence:

c1 hkang@ilstu.edu

HYUN-SOOK KANG is an assistant professor of Linguistics/TESOL in the Department of English at Illinois State University, Normal, USA. She holds a PhD in Educational Linguistics from the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, USA. Her research interests include instructed second language acquisition and heritage language learning. Her work has appeared in the International Review of Applied Linguistics, Language Learning, Modern Language Journal and Studies in Second Language Acquisition. Email: hkang@ilstu.edu