The linguistic and cultural immersion offered by studying abroad is often positioned as the perfect context to build second language skills and to acquire cultural knowledge. The study abroad context is idealised as ‘an imagined monolingual utopia’ where language learners can be completely immersed in the target language. Students are expected to return from stays in Seoul and other global cities having spent the whole time talking with native speakers and having made huge gains in their linguistic proficiency.
The reality, of course, is more complicated. Research on the acquisition of a swathe of languages shows that students on study abroad spend varied amounts of time interacting in their target language, often face struggles to adapt to the local culture, and return from study abroad having made variegated linguistic gains. In some cases, teachers might even perceive students’ language skills to have regressed.
The expectation that study abroad provides a perfect setting for linguistic and cultural immersion may be particularly problematic for students who visit South Korea, a country grappling with the early stages of multiculturalism and where powerful ideologies of cultural homogeneity still hold strong. The Korean language remains a powerful emblem of ethnic homogeneity via ideologies that equate ‘speaking Korean’ with ‘being Korean.’ These racialised ideologies translate into folk beliefs shared to varying extents within South Korean society that all people of Korean ethnicity should be able to speak ‘good’ Korean and, on the flipside, that learning Korean is difficult, unnecessary or incongruous for those of non-Korean ethnicity.
Due to these ideologies that conflate Korean language ability to Korean ethnonational identity, study abroad students’ experiences in Korea are from the outset likely to be heavily racialised. Students who are of non-Korean appearance may be viewed as unable to speak Korean, their attempts to speak Korean may be met with surprise or even astonishment, and their Korean ability may be underestimated and undervalued. Consequently, their opportunities to interact in Korean and develop their linguistic proficiency may be limited, even during prolonged sojourns in South Korea. However, as discussed in more detail below, experiences are very different for those of Korean ethnicity or who are ‘Korean-passing.’
In my paper ‘Sorry, I don’t speak any English’, I traced the experiences of Grace (a pseudonym), a proficient and highly-motivated Caucasian American female learner of Korean. Although Grace went to Korea with the explicit goal to speak only Korean in order to immerse herself as much as possible in the language, my analysis showed that many of her daily interactions featured English and she was engaged in an ongoing struggle to establish an identity as a potential speaker of Korean. Her attempts to speak Korean were often met with responses in English, and sometimes seemed to disrupt rather than assist her interactions. In some cases, Grace’s use of Korean was so unexpected that her interlocutors mistakenly assumed that she was in fact using English.
Grace and other exchange students in Korea also tend to report limited opportunities to interact with local Korean speakers. This situation is exacerbated in many university-based study abroad programs, where exchange students are sequestered into separate accommodation, and only have limited chances to take classes alongside Korean students or join student clubs and associations. Grace quickly became frustrated with the lack of Korean that she was using in her day-to-day life, and also felt guilty for interacting so much in English.
It should of course be acknowledged at this point that the expectation that Grace and other Caucasian exchange students are non-Korean speakers who need to be addressed in English reflects wider global orders regarding ethnicity and language. It also reflects the reality that the majority of white people who visit or even sojourn in Korea speak little if any Korean. Caucasians from the Anglosphere enjoy a racial and linguistic privilege that allow them to travel to or even sojourn in South Korea (and many other countries) without the pressing need to learn another language. In a study charting the experiences of 14 teachers of English from Anglophone countries who had resided in Korea for 7.9 years on average, the vast majority (12 from 14) spoke virtually no Korean and had little motivation to learn it. A study of white women in South Korea who were married to Korean men found similarly low levels of investment in learning Korean.
Grace was acutely aware of her privileges as a white English speaker, and there were times when she understood the benefits of being able to fall back on English. For instance, when she lost her debit card during a night out, she was relieved that her bank offered a 24-hour English helpline. However, for her, this privilege was a double-edged sword, since it also limited her opportunities to speak Korean and integrate into Korean society. Likewise, the studies of English teachers and English-speaking women who were married to Korean men cited above show that they were largely isolated from Korean society, unable to perform everyday transactional tasks without the assistance of their partners, excluded from discussions within the extended family, and limited in their career prospects beyond working in English language education.
Experiences of study abroad are of course different for students who have Korean ethnicity or who are ‘Korean-passing’ (i.e., whose appearance leads people to assume they are Korean). In a blog post written by Hong Konger-American Rachel Wong who spent a semester in Seoul, the author reports never being addressed in English, and notes that there were high expectations that she would be a proficient Korean speaker (in fact, she only had novice Korean). When visiting restaurants with non-Korean passing friends, serving staff would look to her to make the order. In shops, sales assistants would expect her to provide translation help. On one occasion on a packed subway, she overheard two middle-aged Korean men criticising her for speaking English in public, which they saw as being inappropriate for someone who was ‘Korean.’ Although she lacked the fluency in Korean to respond to the comment, it led her to question her own identity as an Asian-American and made her feel guilty that she was unable to live up to the expectations that came with her Korean-passing appearance.
For students who do have Korean heritage, studying abroad can be a transformative experience for some. In a study of a mixed-heritage learner of Korean named Gina (a pseudonym who had a white father and Korean mother, her Korean heritage allowed her to make meaningful connections with local communities, and afforded her greater opportunities to learn Korean in comparison to her non-heritage peers, strengthening her sense of ‘Koreanness.’ However, Gina also experienced heightened levels of anxiety in the immersion classes that she took, due to tacit expectations that as a ‘half’ she should be able to outperform her non-heritage classmates. She also shunned chances to practice Korean with proficient non-heritage students in her dorm, since their high levels of proficiency would exacerbate her own insecurities about her Korean ability. In addition, perhaps due to exposure to the same ideologies that equate ethnicity with linguistic ability, she seemed to conceptualise using Korean with non-native speakers as inauthentic and unhelpful.
For other heritage learners of Korean, traversing the expectations that they speak fluent Korean and behave according to Korean social norms can be a painful experience. In a paper of mine about identity and the use of linguistic politeness features by learners who were studying abroad, fluent Korean-German learner Daniel (a pseudonym) reported a clash between his desire to speak Korean like a ‘real Korean’ and his struggles to adapt to Korean cultural norms that dictate the use of elaborate honorifics towards status superiors and where there is no ‘equal basis.’ Although Daniel followed the norms by using honorifics towards status superiors, he would explicitly tell younger speakers not to use honorifics towards him. ‘I’m not going to sit there and say you have to respect me by the rules of your society that I’m not actually really [part of],’ he explained. ‘I think that’s kind of stupid.’ Due to such issues, Daniel reported that he preferred to spend time with German and American friends speaking German and English. However, this came with potential dangers. As noted above, ethnic Koreans and those who are Korean-passing may be subjected to public shaming for speaking English in public places, or even experience verbal and physical attacks.
Although we have ample evidence of the experiences of study abroad students in South Korea who are white English speakers and who are of Korean ethnicity or Korean-passing, as yet we lack the same level of research that looks at the experience of exchange students from other ethnic backgrounds. We may expect that South Asians and Southeast Asians as well as black students, for instance, would face particular hurdles, since non-Koreans who are of darker skin tone tend to face high levels of discrimination. Whereas South/Southeast Asians may at least be treated as potential Korean speakers, black students will likely not be afforded such treatment. They would likely thus face the same struggles to establish Korean speaking identities as their white peers but coupled with the explicit racial discrimination documented elsewhere.
Previous studies have also shown that the racialised experiences of study abroad learners in South Korea interact closely with gender and sexuality. White female students in Korea frequently complain of receiving unwanted attention or even sexual harassment in public places from Korean men, including Grace in my own study. In contrast, Hong-Konger American Rachel Wong observed that she would not ‘get hit on by creepy guys who fetishise Western girls.’ Meanwhile, in my study of a white lesbian Korean learner named Julie, she struggled to negotiate her identity in a context where markers of her sexuality such as her short hair and androgenous clothes were not necessarily understood in the same ways as they would be in her native US. These struggles with sexual harassment and gender identity can negatively impact study abroad learners’ sojourns in Korea, including curtailing their opportunities to practice the language.
These studies suggest that students who are set to study abroad in South Korea might benefit from pre-departure training that explicitly sensitises them to these complex issues that involve the interaction of race, gender, sexuality, and linguistic ideologies. Such sessions should also look to break down the stereotype of study abroad as a monolingual setting where all that counts is speaking Korean with ‘real’ Koreans. In the case of Grace, the path towards the resolution of her identity struggles and attempts to speak more Korean ultimately lay in developing an appreciation for study abroad as a multilingual and multicultural space. She found that interactions with fellow Korean-speaking international students from third countries including China and Iran who shared her desire to improve their Korean skills were valid and productive contexts for developing her linguistic proficiency, as well as for building her intercultural competence. Through this process, she moved away from seeing Korean native speakers as the model that she needed to follow, and instead aspired to adopt the identity of a translingual international student who could skilfully switch between English, Korean and other languages. With this shift, she gained confidence to use Korean in her interactions, while she also managed to shed the guilt that she had previously felt about using English, and she became interested in learning further languages and building her knowledge of additional cultures. Pre-departure training should thus pinpoint the importance of interactions with global Korean speakers (rather than just local Korea-born speakers) as the goal of study abroad and should discuss how to balance and integrate the use of Korean, English and other languages during sojourns in Korea.
As South Korea progresses towards becoming a multicultural society, it is vital that studying abroad in South Korea is repackaged as a multicultural and multilingual experience, rather than ‘pure’ Korean immersion. I believe that this shift in thinking allows students to gain a deeper understanding of Korean society, and also assists them to gain the most linguistically and culturally meaningful experience during their sojourns in Seoul and elsewhere on the Korean peninsula.
Image: Tourists in front of Gyeongbokgung Palace. Credit: whyyan/Flickr. This image has been cropped.