This year is the 30th anniversary of the start of English education in elementary schools in South Korea. The pivotal year when English classes began in nearly all elementary schools was 1996, with the official national rollout completed in March 1997. At the time, I was teaching in Japan, where the topic was big news in education circles.
The 1990s were a period of rapid change and development in South Korea. The other important reform in English education was the adoption of listening comprehension questions on the college entrance exam in 1993. Apart from official reforms, the TOEIC spread rapidly as scores were used for employment and promotion. There was even a brief debate about adopting English as a second official language.
Yet after Korea’s sweeping reforms of the 1990s and the broader “English fever” in society at the time, interest in further reforms began to fade in the 2000s. To understand why, it helps to look back at how English came to dominate Korean education in the first place.
English was not always the most important foreign language in Korea. After the First Sino-Japanese War (1894-95) through the end of the Japanese colonial period, Koreans who received an education were forced to learn Japanese from elementary school and English from secondary school. Both were compulsory, while a small elite of university students studied other languages, mostly French and German. After liberation, Japanese disappeared, but English stayed on as a required subject, with other foreign languages being grouped together as “second foreign languages.” As the influence of English grew toward the end of the 20th century, second foreign languages were further demoted to electives and largely faded from public attention.
Meanwhile, the emergence of the internet in the 1990s gave English a strong boost. Because Korea embraced the digital revolution early, interest in English grew as part of that broader transformation. Following the institutional reforms of the 1990s, a strong social consensus formed around the importance of English as a tool to compete in a rapidly globalizing economy. From that point on, English became a measure of success, and the language became something no one could afford to ignore. The English fever of the 1990s, then, reflected social trends of the time more than a strong personal desire to learn English.
But like other trends, the English fever could not last forever. Toward the end of the 2000s, the student population began a steady decline and gaining admission to a university became easier as competition lessened. Today, the intensity of entrance exam competition bears little resemblance to earlier decades, except for elite universities.
Among younger generations, earning a university degree has become the norm. Some 70 percent of Koreans between the ages of 25 and 34 hold university degrees, the highest rate among the 38 Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development member countries. As competition to enter university has eased, so has the role of English as a gatekeeper to higher education.
In the workplace, too, English is not what it used to be. In recent years, advances in artificial intelligence have meant that tasks like translation and correspondence have become automated, causing attitudes toward the necessity of English to shift accordingly. The rapid advancement of AI over the past couple of years, in particular, has caused some young people to question the need to learn English, to say nothing of other foreign languages. In response, many universities have merged or even eliminated foreign language departments.
English fever has now faded into history, but English continues to function as the world’s de facto common language. This ensures that it will remain important to Koreans, but more as a source of information than as a spoken language. Many of the typical activities in “English conversation” classes, such as ordering at a restaurant and buying tickets, for example, have largely shifted to text-based interaction.
The rapid flow of information, much of which includes text, suggests that reading comprehension will only grow in importance. The need to make effective use of chatbots for information and translation, meanwhile, raises the importance of the ability to assess the accuracy of responses as a “fifth skill” beyond the traditional four skills of speaking, listening, reading, and writing.
In the 1990s, South Korea found the courage to undertake major reforms in English education to meet the needs of those times. Times have changed again and English education needs to change with them, particularly as AI plays an increasingly integral role in language use.