Clever Turtles

Min Pyong-ch'ol, at one time Korea's most famous English lecturer and founder of the BCM English education corporate group. I worked at a BCM franchise during my first year in Korea, and Autumn was my replacement when she came on her first EFL tour of duty.

I actually met the guy once. His 'R's are hilarious -- he pronounces them correctly, but he puts so much emphasis on them that gives his accent a little bit of a hard-to-place Midwest/Northeast feel.

"The next day my mother went out and bought one."

NY Times is running a story on South Korea's biggest tutoring website, Megastudy. I haven't heard of it before, but I have heard mention of online study systems while I was teaching both adults and children.

The article gives a very good overview. What is not really addressed, however, is the quality or pedagogy of the online courses. They appear to be run pretty much like typical hagwon courses.

A translation of an interview with the guy in charge of Anti-English Spectrum Cafe, the leading anti-foreign-teacher group in Korea.

It will be a while before I get to posting regularly, now that I'm transferring to a new country, trying to find housing, and getting ready for grad school.

I thought I'd mention an interesting linguistic note I observed in a student. A Korean-American high school kid who grew up in the US mentioned to me that he and his sister often add '-ing' and '-ed' tense markers to Korean sentences. For example, "I'm studying" could be "난 공부해-ing".

This diary entry cracked me up. I'm not sure, but I think the student was deliberately playing off of the double meaning of the phrase "good for you". I made a few minor edits for readability but the words were not changed.

(Good for you)

My mother said, "good for you." Because when I watch TV my mother said, "Are you finish your homework?" and I said, "No." So my mother said again, "Turn off TV." I said, "Oh, mom." My mother said, "It's good for you."

Wouldn't it be awesome?

I was browsing Angry Asian Man and found they did an interview with the director of "Planet B-Boy". He's a Korean-American, and it turns out he did a stint as an English teacher in the schools here. It sounds like a Fulbright deal, or something along those lines. Anyways, he said he's working on a script about 원어인 선생의 생활:

Funniest thing I've seen all damned week.

Just had a particularly frustrating listening exam today. Both as an instructor and a student, I've given a lot of thought towards listening comprehension. How to teach it, how to test it, and so forth. There are a lot of variables which can affect student performance, although I'm not sure how the research bears out for learning efficiency.