The Present Status of Chinese Education in Korean Colleges and its Facilitation
Nowadays Korean society including colleges and universities is paying great attention to teaching such practical subjects as English and Computer under the banner of internalization or globalization. In this stream of the modern age Chinese (literacy) programs are losing their ground day after day. Hence the author diagnosed the present status and problems of Chinese education executed in two colleges to locate the correct place of college Chinese education and to come up with the outline of the lessons that the students really want to take. A survey showed that 90 percent of the students agreed to the necessity of Chinese education, that their own knowledge of Chinese were limited, and that they were making efforts to improve their proficiency through individual study and by attending the classes offered. However, their basic interest in and knowledge of Chinese didn`t go beyond knowing the names of the works that were printed in the highschool textbooks, and they showed much interest in currently used characters or the old phraseology rather than the sentences. Some question items of the survey revealed that the students wanted to learn as much Chinese as they could read the newspapers. They simply want to learn words of Chinese characters, not the sentences from which we can discover the ideal or the view of value of our ancestors. This means that the present curriculum of Chinese education which focuses on sentence reading doesn`t meet the students` needs. In this respect, the author has thought about the lessons or materials that will fit into the stream of the age and meet the challenges. First of all we offer a curriculum with special focus on idiomatic Chinese and lead the students in the classroom to work on currently used Chinese words, not the sentences from the past literature. Second, we utilize the format of a special lecture series such as English TOEFL instead of offering a regular course. Third, we let the students have a broad choice toward Chinese literacy by offering subdivided courses like Chinese Novel, Chinese Poetry, Old Phraseology, Confucian Bible, and so on. We teachers should never forget that the fast-changing society and the new generation of students require us to adapt our Chinese education in colleges to the new stream and to the new tastes.