Tips for Teaching ESL to Koreans

Grammatical differences | Linguistic interferences | What ESL teachers say | Tips for ESL teachers

Grammatical Differences between English and Korean

Followings are some salient grammatical features of Korean grammar that are different from English.

  1. Article: Korean does not have articles such as a, an, or the in English.
  2. Numbers: There is no strict rule about singular and plural noun/pronoun agreement .

    3. Common mistake 1) There is three chair in the room.

    Mistake 2) I misplaced my eyeglasses. I can't find it.

  3. Pronouns: There is no distinction between gender pronouns.

    4. e.g. 1) I have a friend in New York. The friend is a teacher.

    e.g. 2) Mr. Kim called me an hour ago. Mr. Kim said he has been sick.

  4. Subject and verb agreement: There is no subject and verb number agreement.

    5. Common mistake1) She go to school.

  5. Verb form: There is no regular vs. irregular verbs such as go-went-gone. Korean attaches suffixes to a verb stem to indicate tense (past, present, or future), aspect, and honorification.

    6. Common mistake 1) My father call me yesterday. He say he was very busy these days.

  6. Auxiliary verbs: There are no auxiliary verbs in Korean.

    7. Example 1) * What did you buy at the bookstore? (English)

    * At the bookstore (you) what bought?(Korean)

    Example 2) * I do not eat breakfast in the morning. (English)

    * I in the morning I breakfast eat not. (Korean)

  7. Response to negative questions: Answering the negative questions, Koreans affirm or deny the statement of whole question rather than the respondent's statement of the intention.

    8. Common mistake 1) Native speaker: No butter on your popcorn, ma'am?

    Korean: Yes. (She meant 'no butter', but as a consequence, she got butter on her popcorn.)

    Mistake 2) Native speaker: Do you mind if I borrow your pencil?

    Korean: Yes. (She meant it's okay for the speaker to borrow her pencil, but as a result, the native speaker did not get the pencil from her.)

  8. Word order: Korean has in most cases a Subject-Object-Verb pattern. Korean is also verb- or adjective-final language. As long as the verb or adjective comes at the end of the sentence, other grammatical elements can appear in different order without changing the basic meaning of the sentence.

Other linguistic interferences

With respect to pronunciation, Koreans typically have difficulties with the following phonetic sounds: [f], [z], [v], and [I]; as well as [r] as the initial phoneme in a word. These phonetic difficulties can be attributed to their absence in the Hangul alphabet.

What ESL teachers say about their Korean students:

• "They drop "s" either for plurals or for the subject-verb agreement. For example, they would say, "I bought some book at the bookstore."

• "They don't distinguish between / i / and / i: /. One time when I was in class, a male student came up to me and said, 'Can I have a shit? I don't have a shit." I thought to myself, 'What is he talking about ?" Later, he help up a sheet of paper, and said, "This is what I want."

• " Most of my Korean students put extra / i / at the end of a word. For example, they pronounce, "Englishy", "teachy", or "judgee".

 

Tips for ESL Teachers

Many of these tips may be used for classes with ESL students other than Korean.

  1. Show your concern about interesting Korean events or topics and often carefully contrast them with Canadian ones. Note: Korean youth enjoy food, soccer, hip hop music, computer games/chatting, and fashion.
  2. An interesting way to practice the rhythm of English, as well as grammatical features such as linking, is to use poetry. The web site "Poem of the Week" has a large collection of different poems.
  3. Lessen the time allotment given to grammar. Instead, introduce widely used ‘practical’ terms in spoken English. Idioms are always popular.
  4. Since most of your students will not be confident in active skills like speaking or writing, gradually increase the amount of time spent practising them.
  5. Continually try to change their deeply rooted positional type characteristics to the personal type in order to encourage them to voluntarily participate in discussions. Compliment their active participation.
  6. Since Korean is monotonic, drama is a practical way to focus on a particular aspect of pronunciation. The Dramatic Exchange Catalog of Plays is one good web site to find scenes to use with your students.
  7. Stress the difference between short vowels and long vowels, and have students practice them with examples, such as, "ship" and "sheep", or "live" and "leave" [More about this]