영어로 교육을 하는 것에 대해 어떻게 생각하세요 - English-medium education

Research demonstrates that children learn more when they are taught in their mother tongue than when they are taught in any other language.

한국어 문화권에서 영어 공부에 한계가 있다는 영어 환경론을 주장하는 분들이 있다. 아직도 진행 중인지도 모르지만, 조기 영어교육, 조기 유학 등에 대해 열풍이 불었던 시절이 있었다. 영어캠프, 기업 언어 연수원에서는 입소기간 동안 영어만 사용하도록 해서 서로 소통이 안 되는 해프닝도 벌어지기도 했던 것 같다.

 

이러한 English-medium education(영어를 매개로 교육을 하는 방식)에 대해 "The Economist" 의 기사를 일부 인용합니다. 즉, 집에서 일상 대화를 부모가 영어로 유창하게 구사하는 환경이 아니라면, 모국어로 배우는 것이 학습 효과가 높다는 주장인 데, 영어교육에 관심 있는 분이라면 한번 생각해봄 직한 재미있는 글입니다.  

 

The perils of learning in English - Young children should be taught in their mother tongue instead

 

When Winston Churchill was at Harrow School, he was in the lowest stream. This did not, he wrote in “My Early Life”, blight his academic career, for “I gained an immense advantage over the cleverer boys. They all went on to learn Latin and Greek and splendid things like that...We were considered such dunces that we could learn only English...Thus I got into my bones the essential structure of the ordinary British sentence—which is a noble thing.”

 

Partly thanks to Churchill and the post-war Anglo-American ascendancy, English is these days prized, not despised. Over a billion people speak it as either their first or second language; more still as a third or fourth language.

 

Parents have the desire for their children to master English. So it is not surprising that there is a surge in “English-medium” education all over the world. 

 

Teaching children in English is fine if that is what they speak at home and their parents are fluent in it. But that is not the case in most cases. 

 

When children are taught in a language they don’t understand. The children learn neither English nor anything else. English should be an important subject at school, but not necessarily the language of instruction. 

 

Research demonstrates that children learn more when they are taught in their mother tongue than when they are taught in any other language.

 

The perils of learning in English