Abstract
This chapter deals with motivations for English learning in Korea from two major angles: historical context and motivational changes that occur at each educational stage. In Part I, socio-historical incidents in Korea that impacted students’ motivations for learning English are examined, and reasons for the historical increase in competitive motivations, or for students’ desire to attain superior social status over their peers, are investigated. In Part II, motivational changes are discussed in chronological order as learners advance through school from elementary to junior high, high school, and eventually college level. For each educational stage, salient subcomponents of students’ motivational profiles are identified and analyzed, with specific attention paid to major historical incidents. Finally, a summary is provided and future directions for research are suggested.
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Notes
- 1.
In Korea, while English has been taught as a major foreign language, German and French had been mainly taught as minor foreign languages in high schools (Kim, 2003), but over the past 30 years, the number of students taking Japanese and Chinese language classes has increased (Kwon, 1999). In terms of Japanese, the Japanese government provided funding to expand Japanese education. As diplomatic relations between Korean and the People’s Republic of China were established in 1992 and China’s economy has been growing fast, the number of the learners in Chinese classes has been increasing accordingly (Kim, 2003). In high schools, Japanese and Chinese languages are mainly taught as elective courses under the classification of liberal arts. Japanese classes are available in 57.3% of high school classes and Chinese ones are 40.6% (C. Kim, 2014). Those languages are elective subjects for CSAT, but those are not considered as significant in terms of university entrance. In this context, most learners in these elective courses tend to show a low level of interest (J.-E. Kim, 2014).
- 2.
Kyungsung (or Keijo) Imperial University (京城帝國大學), founded in 1924, was the only existing university in Korea at the time, and was also one of the six imperial universities across Imperial Japan. After the liberation from Japan in 1945, most of the university’s facilities were annexed to Seoul National University. Besides Kyungsung Imperial University, quite a few professional colleges had been established either by Korean educators or by foreign missionaries, but none of them were officially accredited by the Japanese Governor-General’s office.
- 3.
Expanding Dörnyei’s (2001) definition, Kikuchi (2015) defines demotivator as “the specific internal and external forces that reduce or diminish the motivational basis of a behavioral intention or an ongoing action” (p. 4) and demotivation as “the negative process that pulls learners down” (p. 5) (see Thorner & Kikuchi, this volume).
- 4.
The number taking the TOEIC in South Korea was 2.07 million in 2013 (Park, 2017). TOEIC scores are widely used by companies and governmental organization as a default criterion for employment. Some top companies also require TOEIC speaking scores.
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Kim, TY., Kim, Y. (2019). EFL Learning Motivation in Korea: Historical Background and Current Situation. In: Lamb, M., Csizér, K., Henry, A., Ryan, S. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Motivation for Language Learning. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-28380-3_20
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