영어 교육의 효용: 언어의 구체성과 추상성

Abstract

The emphasis on the practical use in the teaching of foreign languages especially English has prevailed among Korean educational policy-makers in recent years and is often considered the corrective guide that may redress all past irregularities in pedagogy. One of the important cultural counter concepts to this is what they call Bildung or Ausbildung in German or simply English culture in the sense of cultivation of human potential. The so-called practical dimension of language learning is not only tied to the whole gamut of cultural signification; the fundamental need to learn another language also concerns an individual or collective desire to embrace the cultural Other through its language. In overly anathematizing grammar-oriented pedagogy as it happens in recent tendentious thoughts, the teacher could possibly be sacrificing the learner' s discipline and exercise in cultural intelligence. 1n the Chosen Dynasty, the prevailing elite culture based on the Sino-Korean classics very often resulted in the division of concrete reality and abstract language. The recent emphasis on the practical in language teaching apparently gives one the impression that it could remedy the cultural harm created by that divisiveness. However, the blind and superficial emphasis on the merely practical could be in its negative capacity of abstraction as detrimental to the human potential of a culture as the precedent Sino-Korean culture of the Chosen era at its worst moment.