Winner of the Hankyoreh Literature Award, Seo Su-jin's debut novel follows four Korean language lecturers at Seoul's prestigious H University over the course of an academic year. Readers will spend one season with each of the four protagonists―Seon-yi in the spring, Mi-ju in the summer, Ga-eun in the autumn, and Han-hee in the winter―getting a close glimpse into the challenges and joys of sharing a new language and culture with students from abroad.
An office worker who has no one to eat lunch with enrolls in a course that builds confidence about eating alone. A man with a pathological fear of bedbugs offers up his body to save his building from infestation. A time capsule in Seoul is dug up hundreds of years before it was intended to be unearthed. A vending machine repairman finds himself trapped in a shrinking motel during a never-ending snowstorm. In these and other indelible short stories, contemporary South Korean author Yun Ko-eun conjures up slightly off-kilter worlds tucked away in the corners of everyday life. Her fiction is bursting with images that toe the line between realism and the fantastic. Throughout Table for One, comedy and an element of the surreal are interwoven with the hopelessness and loneliness that pervades the protagonists’ decidedly mundane lives. Yun’s stories focus on solitary city dwellers, and her eccentric, often dreamlike humor highlights their sense of isolation. Mixing quirky and melancholy commentary on densely packed urban life, she calls attention to the toll of rapid industrialization and the displacement of traditional culture. Acquainting the English-speaking audience with one of South Korea’s breakout young writers, Table for One presents a parade of misfortunes that speak to all readers in their unconventional universality.
This book constitutes a sociological, anthropological, and curricular inquiry into the factors surrounding high academic achievement rates of students in South Korea. Taking root in similar studies conducted around the exemplary nature of the Finnish education model, it explores the phenomenon of success in South Korea, uniquely connecting it to the scholarship and models for examining the recent shift in attention and popularity of Korean culture. The authors argue that Korean education or "K-edu" can also be studied and understood as a Hallyu and an exemplary form of education. Drawing on longitudinal qualitative studies spanning over 15 years, the authors advance understandings of Korean academic success beyond more generalized understandings of how Asian students learn and towards a holistic explanation for the case of Korea. As such, the book challenges the perception of Korean students as passive learners with a controlled learning culture and instead advocates the ways in which Korean students are leading a changing culture by utilizing all available resources and opportunities in the space of South Korea’s evolving ecological system of education. In addition, this book provides one explanation as to how students from East Asian countries achieve such excellent academic performance. A crucial exploration of the culture and growth of education systems in Asian countries, this book will appeal to scholars and researchers with interests in Korean education and Korean students’ academic achievement as an emerging inquiry for both Korean studies and East Asian Cultural Studies. In addition, this book will also be informative for scholars of comparative education, sociology of education, educational policy, and postcolonial educational research in the world.
Comprehensive and authoritative, this Handbook provides a nuanced description and analysis of educational systems, practices, and policies in Asian countries and explains and interprets these practices from cultural, social, historical, and economic perspectives. Using a culture-based framework, the volume is organized in five sections, each devoted to educational practices in one civilization in Asia: Sinic, Japanese, Islamic, Buddhist, and Hindu. Culture and culture identities essentially are civilization identities; the major differences among civilizations are rooted in their different cultures. This framework offers a novel approach to capturing the essence of the diverse educational systems and practices in Asia. Uniquely combining description and interpretation of educational practices in Asia, this Handbook is a must-have resource for education researchers and graduate students in international and comparative education, globalization and education, multicultural education, sociocultural foundations of education, and Asian studies, and for educational administrators and education policy makers.
Learn your first 500 Korean words and thousands of related words and expressions that you can start using right away in your everyday conversations in Korean!
Teaching Korean as a Foreign Language: Theories and Practices is designed for prospective or in-service Korean as a Foreign Language (KFL) teachers. With contributions from leading experts in the field, readers will gain an understanding of the theoretical framework and practical applications of KFL education in the context of Second Language Acquisition (SLA). The eight chapters explore the history of and current issues in language education, the practicalities of being a classroom teacher, and teaching and evaluation techniques for developing language and cultural proficiency. This comprehensive volume also includes an annotated bibliography which lists over 500 of the most recent and pertinent research articles and doctoral dissertations in the area. This bibliography will be of great service to students, teachers, and any researchers in applied linguistics and second language acquisition interested in Korean language education.
Economic activity has contracted less in Korea than in other OECD countries, thanks to the prompt and effective reaction of the authorities to contain the spread of the COVID-19 virus and to the wide-ranging government support to households and businesses. Nevertheless, the pandemic generates strong headwinds.
The dilemmas and tensions uncovered directly from the perspective of teachers and teacher educators develop narrative inquiry as a methodological approach to examining teacher knowledge in cross-cultural teaching, providing invaluable findings for teachers, teacher educators, and educational researchers internationally.
