Kathleen Lee
Ph.D. student in Educational Linguistics
As the worldwide demand for English speakers continues to grow, local policymakers will need to address the status and acquisition of English through language policies.
Recently, South Korea passed a new policy that requires that English classes be taught only in English. Kathleen Lee is examining how this top-down policy is implemented in public schools in Seoul. In order to make learning as effective as possible, it’s important to understand how teachers and students use, and change, English. Kathleen is approaching this macro-level issue—the new national policy—from a micro-level perspective—the classroom. Classrooms, the places where policies are actually implemented, are all too often overlooked by the people writing those policies. And that means that the people most affected—students and teachers—aren’t always heard.
Kathleen is focusing on interviews and classroom discourse for two reasons: to help her understand how local ideas about language affect the role of English in Korean education and to give voice to the students and teachers who are actually in the classrooms and who have significant contributions to make to the dialogue about global English.