seen at ROK Drop: AI for EFL

Headline:

WILL AI BECOME A THREAT TO THE FOREIGN ENGLISH TEACHER INDUSTRY IN SOUTH KOREA?

An excerpt from this Korea Herald article:

Robots powered by artificial intelligence will aid English education in five elementary and middle schools in Seoul starting in March 2024, the Seoul Metropolitan Office of Education said Wednesday.

The English tutoring robots will aid students in brushing up their English language knowledge, conversation skills and pronunciation. For students struggling academically, the robots will provide a customized education service, enabling them to learn the language at their own pace.

The education office also said it would provide schools with a chatbot app, which allows users to practice conversations via mobile phones. The app enables students to engage in conversations and discussions with the robot based on a topic selected by the user.

English education is already a joke in South Korea, often run by idiots with a weak grasp of English who think they're more fluent than they really are, i.e., it's the Dunning-Kruger Effect run amok. With Korea's reflexive xenophobia, the idea of getting rid of foreign English teachers has been floating around since at least the 90s, when I first arrived—young, fresh, and naive—to live and work in Seoul. 

Koreans will often take foreign ideas, "Koreanize" them in some way, then claim those ideas as their own. It's a point of national pride to be able to say, "See? We can do this ourselves!" Have you ever watched a toddler get upset when a parent tries to do something for him, but he knows he can do the thing himself? South Korea has never escaped that toddler mentality. Doritos came to Korea, so Koreans made their own (shittier) triangular corn chip as a way to say, "See? This is our corn chip!" Ever watched a Korean variety show, with its zany music and superimposed speech balloons and cartoon graphics? That's all taken from Japanese variety shows, which did it first. "But these are Korean variety shows!"

None of this is to say Korea is incapable of innovation or originality. I've seen plenty of examples of both. Not so much in the smart-phone arena, but definitely in fields like fine/plastic arts, literature, and robotics. Koreans can rightfully be proud of a centuries-long history of innovation, from armored seagoing vessels to astronomical observatories. But a lot of modern Korea is simply about copying (stealing) ideas, changing them a little, and labeling them as Korean. For petty pride's sake.

So my theory is that Korea would love to develop AI in order to be able to say, "We don't need no stinkin' foreigners to teach our kids proper English!" The toddler mentality: I can do it on my own! The problem in the language-teaching sector, though, is that AI is still a long way from being able to teach natural English, and I suspect that the results of an AI curriculum will lead to kids who speak English in just as stilted and unnatural a way as the current crop of kids—kids who learn most of their English from well-meaning-but-incompetent Korean instructors who themselves have, at best, a poor grasp of English. 

Adding to the problem—and I can say this as an insider—is the rejection of native-speaker help when it's offered. My department, R&D (one of several competing R&D departments in our company), churns out textbook after textbook, and in most cases, our efforts are in vain because one Korean gatekeeper, a bitch who shall remain nameless, keeps turning our books down in favor of books produced by her own team. Our department has had a look at her books, and frankly, they suck. Yet those are the texts, with their fucked-up lessons and tortured phrasing, that get picked up and used in various curricula. 

I stopped banging my head against the wall about this years ago. These days, I just do what the boss tells me, and I get paid for my efforts. What I do now is only about the money, not about a desire to change or improve anything. The system won't change until important people finally realize the need to change things. At this rate, that'll be never. But just like the uncreative restaurant business on the peninsula, people are afraid to innovate in EFL because they're afraid they'll lose to the competition. I talked about the seafood-restaurant problem in South Korea on my Kevin's Walk 5 walk blog—during my walk, every coastal restaurant offered the same damn thing because going off-menu and producing something both interesting and worthwhile would mean—gasp—innovating! And we can't have that.

I've heard from people who have translated things like the explanatory blurbs you might see next to a castle or other tourist attraction. You know the blurbs I'm talking about: a few paragraphs in Korean, then a panel next to the Korean blurb with the English translation. Some of the folks who've translated such Korean text have told me that the work they did was perfect when they handed it over to the "We'll take it from here" Korean team... then later, when they saw the final product, there were stupid and embarrassing errors because some half-wit who presumed to know more than the native speaker decided to leave his mark on the translation, thinking he was somehow improving it when, in fact, he was simply fucking everything up. This is the kind of idiocy that native speakers who work as teachers and/or translators have to deal with all the time. Some Korean higher-up gets a hold of your work, and being unable to appreciate its perfection, decides he needs to tweak it here and here—again, it's the toddler mentality. I can do this myself. Except you can't, you dumb motherfucker. It's like hosing down a restroom, then the moron janitor comes in and helpfully "cleans" the floor you just hosed down with a shit-covered mop.

This isn't to say the country lacks Koreans who are also fluent English speakers. I won't name him here, but the guy who heads the Asan think tank, where I once applied for a job, is a scarily, natively fluent speaker of both English and Korean, and by "natively," I mean right down to the idiomatic level. There are some young gyopos who are like that in this country; they can essentially write their own ticket, so to speak, i.e., do whatever work they want. To be natively fluent in both languages (which I'm not) makes you a hot commodity, but I imagine that even that class of people still has to deal with the incompetent idiots who surround them.

Anyway, back to the question of AI domination of EFL. I'd call that unlikely, at least for now. Get an AI that can carry on a natural conversation in modern, idiomatic English, and maybe I'll change my mind. But for the moment, I think we're far, far from having robotic teachers in the classroom, so the foreigners can breathe easy for now.*

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*The flip-side of this issue is the great number/percentage of incompetent foreign English teachers who give the EFL profession a bad name. They don't know basic grammar, and/or they have no idea how to teach, and/or they're banging their students, and/or they're getting loudly drunk at night or on weekends, and/or they're secretly growing fucking pot plants inside their apartments (it's usually Canucks who get caught doing this, many of whom honestly don't see what the problem is... some Yanks get in trouble as well). Many Koreans are aware of these problems, and as a result, respect for foreign teachers is often low. There's a persistent stereotype that Korean culture holds teachers—and education—in great respect. Maybe that was true for my mother's generation, but it's bollocks now. These days, and this applies to more than just EFL, education is seen merely as a stepping stone, a way to get a piece of paper that permits you to move forward in the assembly line. Knowledge isn't valued for itself; it's cherished only for its instrumental value (i.e., what it can get you). Not so different from how Americans view education these days. Unfortunately.