For the last several summers, I have been invited to Korea for speaking engagements. This summer I had an opportunity to talk to middle school English teachers in Korea on Communicative English Language Teaching.
The Korean Department of Education has instituted a new policy requiring elementary and middle school English teachers to teach English in English. Although I can understand their rationale behind it, I thought it was rather a drastic move considering the fact that most English teachers in Korea do not have sufficient English proficiency to teach their students in English. Students need role models in English, but their teachers do not have a good command of English, so Korean English teachers in Korea resort to the antiquated translation method or audio-lingual approach when they teach their students English as a foreign language.
Communicative language teaching involves real communication; carrying out meaningful tasks; and using language which is meaningful to the learner. Language is a system for the expression of meaning; its primary function is for interaction and communication. Teachers are facilitators of the communication process and process managers.
Stephen Krashen, an applied linguist at the University of Southern California, and Tracy Terrell, a teacher of Spanish in California, in their 1983 book, The Natural Approach see communication as the primary function of language. Their approach focuses on teaching communicative abilities.
Language is viewed as a vehicle for communicating meanings and messages.
In order to implement student-centered communicative English language learning, teachers must have a clear picture of the skills they want their students to master and a coherent plan for how students are going to master those skills.
No longer is learning thought to be a one-way transmission from teacher to students, with the teacher as lecturer and the students as passive receptacles. Rather, meaningful instruction engages students actively in the learning process. Good teachers draw on and synthesize discipline-based knowledge, knowledge of child development. They use a variety of instructional strategies from direct instruction to coaching to involve their students in meaningful activities and to achieve specific learning goals.
As I have been interacting with the Korean educators in Korea for the last several years, I would like to make the following suggestions to their educational policy makers:
l. You cannot impose a top-down policy on teachers without strategic planning and resources for on-going professional development.
2. You need time for reform with substance in English education. You cannot quickly reorganize and replace the key government officials including the minister of education.
3. There has to be a balance of top-down support and bottom-up reform for meaningful change for positive student outcomes.

4. Training principals as instructional leaders is crucial.
5. There has to be articulation between K-12 educators and university professors so that their innovation will be research-based and practice-validated.
English is the universal cyber language in this era of internet explosion; it is not just the language of commerce and trade. I just hope that the educational leaders in Korea will collaborate, cooperate, and communicate on the importance of English communicative fluency skills, both oral and written, to prepare their students to succeed in this global economy.

(Suzie K. Oh, principal at the Third Street Elementary School in Los Angeles, can be reached at (323)256-1765 by fax or at sko1212@aol.com by email. )