STARTING autumn semester next year, around 100 teachers from India will be teaching English at South Korean elementary, middle and high schools, the JoongAng Daily has reported.
The South Korean Ministry of Education, Science and Technology recently announced a plan to improve its system for native English teacher assistants. A high-ranking ministry official said they expect a number of qualified English teachers from India to arrive.
The ministry will invite approximately 100 Indians early next year. If the trial run is successful, the ministry plans to raise the number to 300. The official said there is a strong chance that those teachers will be dispatched to areas outside metropolitan Seoul, where there is a shortage of native English teachers.
South Korean schools introduced the “English Program in Korea” project in 1995 for “globalized education” and set the goal of allocating one native English teacher for every class. Currently, there are 7,088 native English teacher assistants employed, from seven English-speaking countries — the United States, Australia, Britain, Ireland, Canada, New Zealand and South Africa. Their monthly salary ranges from two million won ($1,735) to 2.5 million won ($2,168).
The ministry has spent more than 300 million won ($260,190) a year on hiring and training those teachers, but still has experienced difficulties finding enough “qualified” teachers, given that only 13 percent of them have official teaching certificates. “A large number of Indians are teaching mathematics and English in the United States and Britain. I think we can expect much from those teachers,” the ministry official said.
As for the concerns that some Indians speak English with a local intonation, the ministry will pick only those with teaching certificates of English and scrutinize the screening process through written and oral examinations.
Park Jun-eon, a professor of English language and literature at Soongsil University, said competition for jobs will intensify in South Korea if the government brings in native English speakers from Asian countries such as India and the Philippines, who might better understand Asian culture.
