Continuing Korean. Ross King
the book does not teach the course in the classroom.
The authors believe the textbook is amenable to any number of language teaching approaches and styles in the classroom and see it primarily as an out-of-class reference tool to ready the students for whatever activities their teacher has prepared for them in class. The grammar notes here are richer (though still concise, we hope) than those in other textbooks for at least two reasons:
1) to help those students working on their own without recourse to a teacher, and
2) to reduce the amount of class time needed for “fact” (as opposed to “act”).
About the Exercises
The exercises at the end of each lesson are designed primarily as written homework, not as oral exercises for the classroom. We have deliberately omitted oral pattern drills from the lessons because we feel such drills are easily constructed by the teacher and take up unnecessary space. Thus, one major shortcoming of the two volumes is the lack of a teacher’s manual with ideas and guidance for both task-based classroom activities and pattern drills. The lack of a teacher’s manual places an additional burden on the teacher, but in this respect our textbook is no different from other Korean textbooks currently available. Insun Lee has published a workbook for Elementary Korean and is in the process of producing one now for Continuing Korean. She has also prepared an excellent series of Web-based exercises (with extensive audio) to accompany the materials in both volumes. The materials for both Elementary Korean and Continuing Korean can be found at UBC’s Korean Language and Literature Web site (http://www.korean.arts.ubc.ca/). In the meantime, we encourage teachers using the book to share their ideas and supplementary materials with us.
About the Dialogues: Themes and Situations
The dialogues were written after the authors had determined which patterns were to appear in which sequence in the course. This introduces the danger of producing dialogues that become mere vehicles for the structural items being introduced. Keeping this danger in mind, we have tried to write dialogues that succeed at once in illustrating each new structural point in the lesson and in introducing tasks and situations likely to be of immediate use to a beginner in the language. We have tried to keep the conversations natural and colloquial, and where possible, humorous.
The dialogues cover the themes of daily academic life in Korea and business and travel. Most of the dialogues center around two middle-aged foreigners (Chris and Eunice Murphy) and their two university-aged children (Eric and Sandy). The authors hope this will enhance the functional range and potential market for the book.
Situations and functions covered in the two volumes include greetings and leave-takings, classroom expressions, identifying things and introducing people, existence, location and possession, asking for directions, buying tickets and other travel-related situations, discussing one’s studies and one’s language abilities, telling time, ordering at a restaurant, asking for people on the telephone, shopping, and social drinking. Though our treatment of situations is by no means comprehensive, most situations and tasks necessary for attaining basic proficiency are covered.
About Contact Hours
Most university Korean courses in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia and New Zealand meet four or five hours per week. At this pace, the authors would recommend covering one lesson every eight to ten classroom hours, where the students have at least a thirty-minute quiz at the end of every other week. But the authors recognize that different students and different courses proceed at different paces; thus, anywhere from six to ten hours per lesson is possible, depending on the circumstances. The authors believe the book is particularly well-suited for an intensive course of eight to ten contact hours per week, in which case it would be possible to finish both volumes in one academic year.
About Vocabulary
This textbook introduces a lot of vocabulary, some one thousand items in each volume. The authors are skeptical of statistical “frequency list” approaches to introducing vocabulary, since these frequency lists are never based on the vocabulary needs of university students, businessmen, or travelers learning Korean. Thus, our book includes many sophisticated adult, intellectual vocabulary items — the sorts of words that mature adults would like to be able to say early in their Korean learning career. Furthermore, since Korean does not give the English speaker as many shortcut vocabulary “freebies” as French or Spanish or German, it is a hard fact of life that students need to spend more time on vocabulary building.
It is also the view of the authors that some vocabulary items “cost” more than others to learn. This view is reflected in the layout of the vocabulary sections, where certain words are indented beneath others to indicate that these items are related to the main vocabulary item in question, and thus “cost less” to learn.
Other features of the vocabulary sections to be born in mind are these: (1) all verb bases are given in the special notation that students learn in Lesson Seven in Elementary Korean; (2) processive and descriptive bases are distinguished from each other by their English glosses — descriptive verbs are always preceded by be (blue, sad, etc.), while processive verbs are not; (3) vocabulary is broken up into sections according to part of speech — verbs, nouns, adverbs, and so on (although the classification of verbal nouns is often arbitrary); (4) we have tried to provide more exemplification of the vocabulary items than is typical of other textbooks. Example sentences using a particular vocabulary item in context are indented below the main word. Note also that in Continuing Korean we have adopted the new tactic of listing new vocabulary items in alphabetical order within their part-of-speech category (usually “Noun,” “Verbs,” and “Adverbs”).
About Orthography
Some teachers are finicky about spelling and conforming to the latest official orthographic guidelines. We would prefer not to be, and the earlier edition flouted many standard spelling conventions. Whether one writes 할 거예요 or 할 거에요, for instance, seems to have little or no bearing on how well students assimilate this pattern. This new edition uses the former, standard spelling, even though it often leads teachers and students alike into literal “spelling pronunciations”—Koreans actually pronounce 할 거에요 (actually, [할 꺼에요]), and learners should beware of the “our Korean language is spelled perfectly phonetically myth” that is so pervasive among Koreans. On a related note, this new edition writes -예요 everywhere for the Polite Copula after vowel-final forms. Students who have successfully mastered Elementary Korean will have already learned the simple rule for the copula that the -이- drops regularly in colloquial speech after a vowel: thus, what gets spelled 바나나예요 “It’s a banana” is pronounced [바나나에요], etc. We have made a few other additional minor orthographic changes in this volume: (1) we now write -(으)ㄹ게요 instead of -(으)ㄹ께요, and (2) we have tried to be more consistent with word spacing rules (e.g., 이분 vs. 이 분 this esteemed person, etc.). The authors would still maintain that students can learn about the vagaries and idiosyncrasies of official Korean orthography at a later stage in their learning, but the spellings in Continuing Korean now are largely in line with standard South Korean usage.
About the English Translations and Glosses
Many of the English translations of Korean expressions and patterns are structured to resemble as closely as possible the Korean meaning. In some cases, students and teachers may feel that certain English renditions are not typical English usage. For example, the authors are well aware that “wanna” is not considered good English. However, this contracted form is used for pedagogical reasons (the form in question is also a contraction in Korean), and seems to work as a mnemonic device, too. The same goes for other less-than-typical English usages in the book, and the authors ask for indulgence on this matter.
About Linguistic Symbols
Both primary authors received their doctoral training in linguistics, and this background is reflected in the analyses in the book and in the use of certain linguistic symbols. Our use of linguistic symbols amounts to a special kind of code that is designed to streamline the learning process for the student and to streamline the book’s presentation.