English is for dummies: linguistic contradictions at an international college in South Korea

Abstract

Under the slogan of internationalisation, Korean universities have opened international colleges as a way to better attract and accommodate foreign students. However, due to a lack of foreign student recruiting capability, the majority of the students who enrol at one such international college are not foreign, but Korean. Contradictions arise when the English-language medium enforced by the foreign faculty members of the college conflicts with the linguistic practices of the mostly Korean student body. This article uses an international college in South Korea as a case study for the examination of the role of English on student life at Asian universities pursuing internationalisation strategies via the recruitment of foreign faculty members. Paradoxically, by establishing an international college that aggressively enforces the English language medium, the Korean university has created an environment where students avoid using English at all.

Keywords:

• South Korea
• English
• internationalisation
• higher education

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the participants of the Comparative and International Education Society 2014 Annual Meeting and 2013 Western Regional Conference, as well as the anonymous peer reviewers, for their invaluable feedback on previous versions of this article.

Funding

Research for this project was conducted with the support of the Institute of International Education Fulbright Fellowship to South Korea.

Notes

1. Administrator and faculty member interviewees were recruited by individually contacting each person affiliated with UIC and requesting an interview. Student interviewees were recruited through the snowball method: one faculty member referred me to his students, who then referred me to their friends, who then referred me to their friends, and so on.

2. Whenever I describe UIC, I refer specifically to the Underwood Division of UIC. Also, the number of full-time faculty members does not include those who hold joint appointments between UIC and another academic unit of Yonsei University because those with joint appointments belong to another academic unit’s administrative functions and payrolls.

3. However, all faculty vacancy announcements for a start date of 2014 possess the following revised statement: ‘As part of Yonsei University’s continuing effort to increase faculty diversity, we are only accepting applications from non-Korean citizens or Korean citizens who have undergraduate and graduate degrees from institutions outside of Korea’.

4. While UIC faculty members are all citizens of the USA or Western Europe, they come from diverse ethnic backgrounds, including those with Korean ethnic heritage (e.g. Korean-American faculty members). But the way the college advertises itself as a non-Korean college is reflected in the way it advertises its faculty members to potential students: UIC brochures prominently display faculty members with a Caucasian appearance, while conspicuously under-emphasising or omitting faculty members with a Korean or Asian appearance. This racialised form of advertising in international higher education marketing materials is a topic for future research.

5. Underwood International College defines foreign students as those who possess foreign citizenship and whose parents both possess foreign citizenship.

6. This is the case with UIC majors that draw from a range of courses from multiple departments, such as Comparative Literature and Culture, International Studies, and Life Science and Biotechnology. The Economics and the Political Science majors have much closer relationships with their traditional department counterparts, where advanced courses can be found in both Korean and English.

7. Recently, many traditional students have applied to Yonsei University through the susi admissions system that does not necessarily require a suneung score.