Tracing Transnational Identities of North Korean Refugee English Learners in South Korea DISSERTATION Presented in Partial Fulf

Home , 50M2, Education in South Korea, Family homelessness, Homelessness in India, Housing First, Provinces of North Korea

Tracing Transnational Identities of

North Korean Refugee English Learners in South Korea

DISSERTATION

Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University

Seo Hyun Park

Graduate Program in Education

The Ohio State University

2014

Dissertation Committee:

Dr. Leslie C. Moore, Advisor

Dr. Carmen Taleghani-Nikazm

Dr. Alan Hirvela

Copyrighted by

Seo Hyun Park

2014

Abstract

This ethnographic study focuses on (1) how adult North Korean refugees come to understand the practice of English language learning in South Korea and, in the context of this dynamic understanding, (2) how their identity work develops in the course of migration, resettlement, and language learning experiences. The study draws on varied data collected over the course of a year, including interviews, observations of the learners inside and outside of the classroom, and artifacts.

Unlike newcomers to the Anglosphere, immigrants new to the English as a foreign language context may not be aware of the need of English in the host society before or right after migration. The North Korean refugee population is an example of such border- crossers, whose sending and receiving countries are outside of the Anglosphere and who slowly discern the new or increased need to learn English. Contrasting North Korea‘s top-down management of English education to South Korea‘s family-driven ―English frenzy,‖ the study demonstrates that the current North Korean refugee population overlaps little with those in North Korea who are granted access to English education.

Even after their entry to the South, the majority of adult refugees are excluded from access to English learning opportunities due to South Koreans‘ double standard toward

English as critical for themselves but optional for the newcomers.

Other challenges arising from the refugees‘ decision to learn English from the beginning level are discussed, including their interrupted education, imagined community and its disjuncture from reality, familylessness, dilemma between hiding and promoting North-Koreanness, and pre-investment period in language learning owing to traumatic memories. This dissertation contributes to sociocultural approaches to second language education, research on transnationalism and refugee resettlement, and studies of the interplay between language learning and identity transformation.

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For Noel

Acknowledgments

There are a number of special people to whom I owe appreciation and gratitude. I must first thank the students, teachers, and administration at the British Council Korea for inviting me into their school and classrooms and for sharing their concerns and time with me for an entire year. I understand the risks they took in giving me permission to work with their English for the Future students and thank them for their trust in and empathy with my research project. In particular, I gratefully acknowledge the seven North Korean refugee students for letting me into their lives with sincerity and kindness. These participants are dear friends of mine by now and have taught me a great deal about what it means to live, struggle, and survive in the face of unimaginable obstacles and hardships. Without their willingness to share with me their experiences and feelings, this project would never have come to life.

Profound thanks are owed to Dr. Leslie C. Moore for making the journey through the doctoral process enjoyable and successful. She has always read and listened to my work patiently and provided me with exhaustive comments. Her invaluable personal and professional advice for the past five years will remain with me as a life-long treasure. I am also tremendously appreciative of the intellect and genuine care from my committee members, Drs. Carmen Taleghani-Nikazm and Alan Hirvela. Their comments on many parts of this study were very helpful. Beyond them, I am indebted to Dr. Marcia Farr for v her detailed feedback and expansive knowledge of the literature on my dissertation proposal. All four committee members have helped shape the person I have become.

My extended thanks go to my mentors at Korea University: Drs. Shinsook Lee, Oak

Song, and Jangro Lee. They encouraged me to pursue doctoral study in the States and up to now have motivated me to reach my professional goals with timely advice and prayer as amazing role models. I also wish to thank my good friends, Edmund and Jana Hodges-

Kluck, for their excellent feedback, fresh insight, and an ―outsider‖ perspective for my dissertation.

Most of all, I give loving thanks to my parents for believing in me and in my dreams. They have inspired me to ―rejoice with those who rejoice, and mourn with those who mourn,‖ and this guidance certainly influenced the kind of study that I chose to do.

Also, my sister deserves my gratitude for her unconditional love and energy, despite the far distance barrier. I am especially grateful to my husband and best friend Young Sang

Kim, who encouraged me to look beyond the dissertation with unwavering love, wisdom, and sacrifice. Last but not least, my eternal love goes to Noel C. Kim, whose prenatal nickname was ―Candi‖ because he came to us while I was working on my doctoral candidacy exam in 2011.

Vita

2006...... B.A. English Language and Literature, Korea University

2009...... M.Ed. English Education, Korea University

2009 to present ...... Ph.D. Candidate College of Education and Human Ecology The Ohio State University

Fields of Study

Major Field: Education

Areas of Emphases: Sociolinguistics Foreign, Second, and Multilingual Language Education

Cognate Areas: Conversation Analysis, Ethnographic Study, Qualitative Research

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Table of Contents

Abstract ...... ii Dedication ...... iv Acknowledgments...... v Vita and Fields of Study ...... vii Table of Contents ...... viii List of Tables ...... xi List of Figures ...... xii List of Excerpts ...... xiii

Chapters: 1. Situating the study...... 1 Introduction ...... 1 Modernizing Kachruvian circles of English speakers ...... 3 Diversity and transnationalism within the EFL context ...... 12 Significance of North Korean refugees as a subject of inquiry...... 15 Theoretical framework, assumptions, and definitions ...... 19 Research questions ...... 24 Structure of the dissertation...... 25

2. Researching, analyzing, and constructing the data ...... 27 Introduction ...... 27 Research concerns in ethnography of communication ...... 28 The British Council Korea and its social actors ...... 34 Gaining access to the British Council Korea ...... 34 The EFL program ...... 41 Study participants ...... 48 viii

Situating myself as the researcher ...... 57 Performing an ethnographic study at the British Council Korea ...... 59 Interviews ...... 59 Observing classroom interaction ...... 64 Observing interaction outside of the classroom ...... 69 Artifacts ...... 70 Data analysis ...... 71 Conclusions ...... 74

3. North Korean refugees as English learners: Past policies and current landscape ...... 76 Introduction ...... 76 English education in South Korea ...... 79 English education in North Korea ...... 84 North Korean refugees as English learners ...... 93 North Korean refugees as English learners in South Korea ...... 97 North Korean identity concealment and its relation to their English learning ...... 104 Conclusions ...... 116

4. North Korean refugees‘ imagined communities of English learners in South Korea ..119 Introduction ...... 119 Imagined communities of target language learners ...... 122 Songbun: North Korea‘s caste system ...... 126 Habitus and the forms of capital ...... 129 ―I wanted to be part of the panorama‖: South Korea as an imagined community for distinction ...... 132 Aural habitus and imagined command of English in South Korea ...... 139 Post-migration and pre-English learning: North Korean refugees‘ identity crisis ...... 143 The gateway for North Korean refugees to become English learners ...... 147 The familyless as EFL learners: The latest-comer‘s struggle ...... 152 North Korean refugees‘ English learning as resistance ...... 160 Conclusions ...... 170

5. Learning foreign language as recovery: North Korean refugees‘ pre-investment in EFL in South Korea ...... 176 Introduction ...... 176 Pre-investment and investment: The heads and tails ...... 177 ―Study is meaningless‖: North Korean refugee learners with no motivation ...... 183 ―I crawled. Now I walk‖: North Korean refugee learners‘ warm-up ...... 195 North Korean refugees‘ L2 learning as recovery from the loss ...... 203 Conclusions ...... 216

6. Conclusions and implications for future research ...... 220 Introduction ...... 220 Research questions revisited ...... 221 Implications of the study ...... 227 Limitations and future research ...... 233

Appendix A: Human subjects permission...... 237 Appendix B: The British Council Korea permission ...... 239 Appendix C: The British Council‘s English for the Future Programme proposal ...... 241 Appendix D: Student consent form ...... 244 Appendix E: North Korean refugee student consent form...... 246 Appendix F: Teacher consent form ...... 248 Appendix G: Examples of student interview questions ...... 251 Appendix H: Participants‘ graphs of happiness ...... 255 Appendix I: Transcription conventions ...... 258 References ...... 259

List of Tables

2.1. Basic demographic information of participants ...... 52 2.2. The birthplace of North Korean refugees in South Korea ...... 53 2.3. Participants‘ educational and occupational background ...... 55 2.4. Participant information related to English learning ...... 57 2.5. Summary of interview database ...... 64 2.6. The participants‘ formal EFL instruction apart from the British Council ...... 69 3.1. A chronicle of English language teaching in Korea ...... 91 3.2. The demography of North Korean refugees in South Korea ...... 95

List of Figures

1.1. Kachru‘s (1985) categories of English and the focus of this dissertation ...... 5 1.2. Yano‘s (2001) model of English as a global language ...... 8 1.3. The spectrum of English speakers by country ...... 12 1.4. Instruction for international applicants to Grand Rapids Community College ...... 13 1.5. North Korean refugees in countries other than South Korea ...... 17 2.1. A monthly schedule of the British Council‘s EFL program ...... 43 2.2. A participant‘s textbook cover and its table of content ...... 44 2.3. An interactive whiteboard in the observed classroom ...... 45 2.4. New English File series displayed on the Oxford University Press‘ website ...... 45 2.5. The course levels displayed on the British Council‘s website ...... 46 2.6. The research participation period by participants ...... 50 2.7. A graph of happiness throughout a participant‘s life ...... 62 2.8. A class at the British Council...... 65 2.9. A field note taken during the classroom observation ...... 66 2.10. Class observation data ...... 68 3.1. The Koreas at night ...... 79 4.1. The development of logic in the body of Chapter 4 ...... 122 4.2. TY‘s perception of English proficiency as a qualification of educated South Koreans ...... 156 4.3. North Korean refugees‘ four phases of life ...... 173 5.1. SN‘s textbook example ...... 197 5.2 Smart phone chat log with SN ...... 198 5.3. SN‘s composition about his best friend ...... 206 5.4. SN‘s relative trajectory of learning English...... 218

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List of Excerpts

3.1...... 110 4.1...... 134 4.2...... 139 4.3...... 144 4.4...... 148 4.5...... 154 4.6...... 165 4.7...... 169 5.1...... 184 5.2...... 188 5.3...... 190 5.4...... 192 5.5...... 199 5.6...... 204 5.7...... 204 5.8...... 210 5.9...... 211 5.10...... 213 5.11...... 214

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Chapter 1: Situating the Study

Introduction

In an increasingly interconnected world, learning a new language is a common experience, but one with profound implications for a person‘s identity. This is especially true when learning a second language (L2) occurs as an adult, stems from migration to a new country, or when knowledge of the new language is an important or unexpected source of social capital. My dissertation examines the confluence of these factors in the lives of North Korean transmigrants with little or no L2 learning experience and who are learning English in South Korea. My work is grounded in Interpretivism and sociocultural theory that address the relationship between identity and L2 learning

(Norton, 2006). In this research tradition, identity refers to individual histories, beliefs, and behaviors that people are aware of in relation to the world and within intergroup situations. This dissertation ethnographically examines the relationship among transnationalism, identities, and the practice of English as foreign language (EFL) learning.

As newcomers to the host society, migrants‘ language learning is inseparable from their social positioning and legitimacy, in terms of both individual benefits derived from

L2 learning and also the access migrants have to L2 learning in the host community.

One‘s improved language skill legitimizes her membership in a community and 1 influences her social status. However, the language ideology and power structure in the host community mediate the learner‘s access to language learning opportunities.

Regardless of individual motivation, language learning requires material and symbolic resources that only a limited number of people enjoy in a given community. Therefore, many people lack the opportunity to learn a new language because of circumstances outside of their control (Norton, 2013), such as an uneven distribution of resources or the perception of migrants by the host society.

Aware of this inequality in language learning, L2 sociolinguists have examined immigrant and refugee populations who have been socially marginalized in the host countries and hence largely underrepresented in generalizations about L2 teaching and learning (Bigelow, 2010; Cooke, 2006; De Costa, 2010; Duff, 2002; Menard-Warwick,

2008; Skilton-Sylvester, 2002; Warriner, 2007). One implication of these studies is that the immigrants and refugee learners‘ vulnerability does not result from who they intrinsically are but from the complex constraints in the process of identifying and negotiating who they relatively are in relation to the receiving community and its dominant ideologies. Freire (1970) explains that

The truth is that the oppressed are not ―marginal,‖ are not people living ―outside‖ society. They have always been ―inside‖—inside the structure that made them ―being for others.‖ The solution is not to ―integrate‖ them into the structure of oppression, but to transform that structure so that they can become ―beings for themselves‖ (Freire, 1970, p. 55).

My dissertation project started from the question of how adult refugee learners are included in or excluded from the practice of EFL learning and use in the destination community.

Modernizing Kachruvian circles of English speakers

Based on a joint report of the UN and the OECD (2013), about half of all international migration from 1990 to 2013 occurred in ten countries. Four out of these ten countries speak English as their first language (the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia). In 2013, the United States hosted the largest number of international migrants, 45,785,000, or 20% of the global total (Migration Policy Institute, 2014). The large number of immigrants and refugees in English-speaking countries and the status of

English as a global language have led a situation in which native English speakers are outnumbered by non-native speakers. Indeed, Crystal‘s (1998) 16-year old observation regarding globalized English is still valid today: ―no language of such socio-historical prestige has ever had its mother-tongue speakers significantly outnumbered‖ (p. 11). At the same time, researchers have increasingly attended to L2 learning by immigrants and refugees over the past decade. Most of these scholarly works address L2 learning in (1) the classroom setting, such as English improvement programs in K-12 schooling

(Bigelow, 2010), citizenship preparation courses (Griswold, 2010), or community-based

English classes (Frye, 1999), and (2) non-classroom settings such as entrepreneurial contexts (Collier, 2010), all in Anglophone countries.

When this mainstream setting (i.e., the Anglosphere) in second language acquisition (SLA) research is placed in Kachru‘s (1985) three concentric circles of

English (Figure 1.1),1 inter-circle migration generates a need for English language education. That is, migrants moving from a larger to a smaller circle are likely to have an immediate need to learn English in the host country for social inclusion. One example is

Somali refugees, who form a recent and growing population in the United States because of a prolonged state of anarchy in their home country (see arrow (A) in Figure 1.1). The vast majority of them require basic literacy as well as language education for everyday life in the host country (UNHCR, 2014). Their social position on arrival depends on their existing English knowledge, and English proficiency determines their action radius—job, peer group, information network, education, and leisure—and even their social advancement (Baynham & Simpson, 2010). Following conventional usage, I refer to

English learning by these migrants in the United States and other Anglosphere countries as learning English as a Second Language (ESL) for domestic communication arising from their inter-circle migration.

1 Kachru‘s (1985) model views the old English-speaking colonies as the Inner circle at the center, where English is spoken as a first (native) language in almost all functions. Two other groupings are presented as moving away from this center; the Outer circle includes the countries where people speak English as a postcolonial second language, an institutionalized language of education, administration, and mass media. In the Expanding circle of countries, on the other hand, English is used as a foreign language for global use in highly restricted domains such as trade or international interaction. 4

Figure 1.1. Kachru‘s (1985) categories of English and the focus of this dissertation

Given the present status of English as a lingua franca (Firth, 1996; House, 2003), transmigrants who make an intra-circle migration may begin to learn English as a

Foreign Language (e.g., see arrow (B) in Figure 1.1) because the social importance of

English proficiency varies even among locations within the Expanding circle. For instance, an Ecuadorean who immigrates to Mexico may find that learning English is more important in Mexico due to its vicinity to the United States and Canada, even though English is not a primary language in either country. The importance of English

5 proficiency can also vary within a given country. In China, a mass rural-urban migration of up to 400 million farmers predicted within the next 20 years due to the governmental promotion may provoke in those migrants ―English shock,‖ precipitated by an urgent need of EFL education from the beginning level (Lo Bianco et al., 2009). Finally, the constant inflow of foreign workers for cheap labor in highly industrialized countries within the Expanding circle drives a need for EFL learning in the host countries.

Despite the global importance of English, even in those countries where it is not a primary language, transnational English language learning has been addressed at a systematic level almost exclusively in the Anglosphere. It is important, however, to know how border-crossers understand the social meanings of EFL and join the community of

English users in the destination country. Only 60 out of 185 nation-states recognized by the United Nations use English as a dominant or official language (Nettle & Romaine,

2000). To put it differently, English is a foreign language to 50% (750 million) of English speakers worldwide (1.5 billion) (Graddol, 1997).

Exploring this transnational EFL learner group also benefits an effort to modernize

Kachru‘s concept of the English Diaspora. In the quarter century since Kachru (1985) developed the categories of English (Figure 1.1), this classic study has received criticism on a number of points. Diachronically speaking, the departure point of his inquiry itself,

―speech fellowship of English, phases of the spread of the language, and particular characteristics of the uses of the language and of its acquisition and linguistic innovations‖ (Kachru, 1985, p. 122), has dramatically changed in the past two decades.

Transnationalism is everywhere today, providing ―an umbrella concept for some of the

6 most globally transformative processes and developments of our time‖ (Vertovec, 2009, p. 12). In particular, the notion of the Inner circle has been questionable in light of revolutionary advances in telecommunication, transportation, and information technology since Kachru‘s original study. The inflow of immigrants, foreign residents, tourists, and users of smart phones and the Internet has loosened the tie between a geographical region and its native language. The Kachruvian model neglects today‘s synchronic diversity within a circle (Bruthiaux, 2003; Jenkins, 2003). It needs to be revisited and updated by considering how the acquisition and use of English has changed in the past quarter century.

Yano‘s (2001) modification of Kachru‘s circles is one effort to modernize the theory. Yano‘s alternative model, presented in Figure 1.2, has three distinctions from

Figure 1.1. First, Figure 1.2 replaces Figure 1.1‘s concentric circles with a bundle of equal-sized cylinders, which symbolizes that there is not one ―correct‖ form of English and that speakers of different varieties of English can all claim to be native speakers

(House, 2003; Prodromou, 2006). Second, Figure 1.2 depicts the looseness of the distinctions among varieties of English by dotted lines. People frequently move in and out of different cylinders, communicating with one another in mutually intelligible dialects. Thirdly, Yano‘s model distinguishes two divergent roles of language; international interaction (acrolect or English as a global language (EGL)) and domestic interaction (mesolect and basilect). In Figure 1.2, the international use is drawn at the top in dotted lines, which indicates the looseness of the cross-dialectic demarcation due to its formality. The domestic use is drawn at the lower part in solid lines, which signify its

7 indigenous and colloquial forms and meanings. The arrow from the upper part to the lower part of a cylinder indicates that EFL speakers in some countries may feel comfortable and confident enough to use English in their daily conversation (for example, in Denmark, the Netherlands, and Sweden), whereas in other countries EFL is strictly an acrolect (for example, in Japan).

Figure 1.2. Yano‘s (2001) model of English as a global language (p. 124)

Figure 1.2 provides an updated dimension of the multifaceted ownership of English over the world in the new millennium. However, this figure can be problematic in two ways. First, it underrepresents varying degrees of need for using English in flux on a cylinder by cylinder basis. Figure 1.2 depicts only three kinds of length: (1) a full length

(English use in all domains in the U.S., India, Nigeria, and Singapore), (2) a half-size length (English use in Europe), and (3) a dotted-top length (English use in Japan). This

8 simplification does not reflect the progressive status of English in each nation over time and situation. The intranational significance and spread of the English language is bound up with a country‘s economic, political, cultural, and demographic characteristics. For instance, the U.S. prevents its citizens from traveling to Cuba, merely 90 miles distant, and Martin (2007) notes that this ban influences post-1990 English language teaching policy in Cuba. The policy emphasizes the communicative function of English as an international language that should reach far and wide to ―Canada, Britain, the English- speaking Caribbean, and [to] many countries in Asia, Africa, and Europe where English is a lingua franca‖ (p. 555). In this respect, the length of the cylinder for Cuban variety of

English may have to be drawn in Figure 1.2 as longer than English in Japan but shorter than English in the Netherlands.

Secondly, Figure 1.2 overlooks individual differences in language performance resulting from people‘s different accessibility to linguistic resources within a cylinder

(nation). For instance, although English is an official language and medium of instruction in schools in Anglophone Africa, English ability is still a source of social differentiation due to the high illiteracy rate among students. (Kamwangamalu, 2013). The fact that those students cannot use their own indigenous language in a written medium leads to a widening gap between the elite and the masses. Bamgboşe (2003) aptly illustrates this linguistic inequality as follows:

Nigeria is credited with 43,000,000 speakers of English out of a population of 95,000,000. As someone who is professionally involved in language studies, I do not know where these millions of speakers are to be found! It is truer to say that in Nigeria, as in all other former British colonies, English

remains a minority, but powerful, language used by an elite. Given the fact that literacy in English is acquired through formal education, and that a sizeable percentage of children have no access to formal education, it is not surprising that the English-using population is not a large one. However, what English lacks in numbers, it makes up for in prestige, status, and functionality (Bamgboşe, 2003, p. 420).

The state-level statistics about English language speakers may be wrong, but more importantly they do not tell us much about how people‘s English learning opportunities are mediated by unequal power distribution and educational stratification. Considering that the sociopolitical, sociocultural, and sociolinguistic climates of the countries where

English is used and learned are unique, each nation will have a different sized gap in

English competence between various groups of citizens. In addition, the lines between

Kachru‘s Inner, Outer, and Expanding circle, and thus the boundaries of English as a native language (ENL), ESL, and EFL have become permeable (Phillipson, 2003;

Seidlhofer et al., 2006). In order to better reflect how diverse both the international and intranational adoption of English is around the globe, a Cartesian coordinate system may be helpful (see Figure 1.3). The example countries in Figure 1.3 are those listed in Figure

1.2 and my own illustration in this section.

The Cartesian grid allows for a more nuanced view of English language use in a given country. A wide spectrum of the language ownership exists even within a country.

For example, 19.16% of Americans speak a language other than English at home, and only 58.2% of them identify that they speak English ―very well‖ (Ryan, 2013). The other

41.8% are spread over the second and the third quadrants of Figure 1.3, where they speak

English as an additional language. In contrast, the spectrum of English use in Rwanda is 10 relatively dense within the second quadrant; although English has been a co-official language with French there since 1996, it is the language of the educated minority.

Accordingly, their use of English largely remains an acrolect (Kamwangamalu, 2013).

On the other hand, as Yano (2001) states, some EFL speakers in Western Europe and Scandinavian countries use English for their everyday conversation. Although they may identify themselves as EFL speakers (therefore positioned across the first and the fourth quadrants in the figure below), the vertical range of their English use along the y- axis is much longer than, for example, South Koreans‘ EFL use. Also, those Europeans are moving into the ESL territory, i.e., toward the center of the x-axis in Figure 1.3, by localizing their English. As Cuba‘s language education policy aims at teaching English as an international language rather than as a foreign language, its scope of English use will be likely to move from the right end of the first and the fourth quadrants to the center of the graph (see a dotted left direction arrow in Figure 1.3). In sum, the composition of

English language speakers varies by country—the total number of English speakers, the degree of diversity, the degree that the current population structure is affected by the external factors such as diplomatic relations.

Figure 1.3. The spectrum of English speakers by country

Diversity and transnationalism within the EFL context

Notable in Figure 1.3 are the different distances of three EFL contexts, labeled as (C),

(D), and (E), from the axes. (C), (D), and (E) are similar in that they are largely spread over the first quadrant. Figure 1.3 includes only eight countries on its right side by way of example, but it is certain that many other countries that recognize, use, and teach English as a foreign language will have a variety of shapes and areas across the first and the

12 fourth quadrants. In spite of this variety, those countries are often lumped together simply as the EFL population. For instance, the British Council conducts a worldwide survey of

EFL teaching and learning in 42 countries including Argentina, Croatia, Malaysia,

Tunisia, to name a few (Rixon, 2004). A variety of institutions require international candidates‘ official scores of Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL), with some notable exceptions presented in Figure 1.4. Beyond those in the 40 countries listed in italics below, test-takers are initially considered as EFL speakers, as the name of the test indicates. Likewise, the EFL population by country is quite explicit and visible in the dominant discourse of Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL).

Figure 1.4. Instruction for international applicants to Grand Rapids Community College (2014)

However, as explained before, (C) differs from (D) and (E) in Figure 1.3, as it moves to the left (i.e., the ESL area) and broadens its vertical scope of usage from international use to domestic use. (D) and (E) are also distinguished from each other, by the extent to which English is foreign and acrolectal. Likewise, the foreignness and formality of English varies not only among ENL, ESL, and EFL contexts but also among the sub-contexts within the EFL context. To restate this point in the context of transnationalism, one may feel the need to learn English not only to move from EFL to

ESL or ENL contexts but also to move among sub-contexts within the EFL context.

Unlike the newcomers to the Anglosphere, immigrants within the EFL context may not be aware of the need of English in the host society before or right after migration. One can more easily guess the significance of English in Canada than in, say, Japan unless one has lived in the latter. Thus, intra-circle transnational EFL learners (i.e., arrow (B) in

Figure 1.1) often go from little to no experience of learning English before migration to a slowly emerging awareness of the importance of learning English after migration. They are contrasted in this regard to people who learn English at refugee camps because they hope to be assigned to settle in English-speaking countries (Wachob & Williams, 2010) and people who are immediately exposed to English upon arrival in the destination country.

In spite of this distinction between ESL and EFL, the interaction of transnationalism with L2 learning has been almost exclusively discussed in ESL settings such as Canada (Dumas, 2010), Australia (Howie, 2006), Scotland (McMillan, 2008), and the United States (Choi, 2009). There are some works on transnational EFL teachers

14 and their identity construction (Fichtner & Chapman, 2011; Menard-Warwick, 2008), but to my knowledge no study has been conducted on learners, except for Ellinger‘s (2000) comparative research on Russian immigrants in Israel who took EFL courses with their

Hebrew colleagues at universities. My dissertation sheds light on this blind spot—the many border-crossers whose sending and receiving countries are outside of the

Anglosphere and who discern a new or increased need to learn English. My dissertation focuses on North Koreans ((E) in Figure 1.3) who immigrate to South Korea ((D) in

Figure 1.3). Chapter 3 will explore why these two states are located in different places in

Figure 1.3. The following section explains how this investigation of EFL learning by

North Korean refugees can contribute to the field of TESOL.

Significance of North Korean refugees as a subject of inquiry

UNHCR‘s High Commissioner António Guterres (2007) once said that the twenty-first century is ―the century of people on the move‖ with five main causes: poverty, climate change, environmental degradation, conflict, and persecution. He focused on the involuntary or forced migration that occurs in different regions, excluding voluntary migration or temporary visits (O‘Reilly, 2012). According to the UN Refugee Agency‘s report (2011), more than a half of these 10.5 million involuntary migrants worldwide are in Asia, facing three possible futures: repatriation, local integration as an uprooted state, or resettlement. Teitelbaum (2009) lists four Asian countries with large outmigration in the twenty-first century due to political, religious, or ethnic persecution or human rights abuses: Afghanistan, Myanmar, Turkey, and North Korea (p. 57).

Given the significant number of refugees spread throughout Asia (all in the

Expanding circle of Figure 1.1), it is a pressing need to investigate their EFL needs and discursive practice in the host countries. My dissertation deals with North Korean refugees. This selection primarily results from my linguistic and ethnic background; however, this population merits attention as a subject of study because of the following characteristics: (1) the considerable size of the population, (2) the transition from an undereducated status in the homeland to an L2 learner status in the host country, and (3) the large percentage of adults over 19.

In terms of the refugees‘ country of origin, North Koreans have been understudied in the literature of refugees‘ English language learning, compared to those learners from

Africa (Bigelow, 2010; Dooley & Thangaperumal, 2011), the Middle East (Morrice,

2013; Waxman, 2000), or Southwest Asia (De Costa, 2010; Lin et al., 2009). This may result from the perception that North Korean refugees are rare or foreign. As shown in

Figure 1.5, however, the number of North Koreans who obtain refugee status and settle in countries other than South Korea has been on the rise since the 2000s (Migration Policy

Institute, 2014). Note that Figure 1.5 merely counts official numbers; nearly 200,000 stateless North Koreans wandered around the mainland China in the late 1990s (Lankov,

2013b), and in October 2010, South Korea‘s Unification Minister Hyun In-Taek estimated that around 100,000 North Koreans lived in hiding in China (Yonhapnews,

2010). Although stateless, they are more likely to be exposed to English language and feel the need to learn English in order to make a living in more open economy countries than North Korea. Therefore, the number of North Korean escapees around the world

16 with or without the refugee or asylum seeker status is hard to estimate but significant enough to contribute to the strand of research on the refugee groups who learn English as a new language in different host nations.

Figure 1.5. North Korean refugees in countries other than South Korea2

Furthermore, North Koreans are of particular interest for TESOL research, where interest has recently increased in newly-arrived refugee learners with little or interrupted schooling experience and limited literacy (Bashir-Ali, 2003, 2006; Bigelow, 2010;

Bigelow & Tarone, 2004; Fennelly & Palasz, 2003; Ruffin, 2004; Strube, 2010). Chapter

2 Based on UNHCR population statistics (http://popstats.unhcr.org), top ten countries other than South Korea that accepted North Koreans as refugees or asylum-seekers are as follows: the United Kingdom (4068), Canada (2817), Germany (2655), the Netherlands (423), Belgium (367), the United States (307), Russia (295), Australia (273), Norway (244), and Denmark (120). Numbers in parenthesis indicate the total number of refugees and asylum-seekers in each country from 2000 to 2013. The numbers will be much bigger if North Koreans who obtained permanent residency in above countries are included. 17

3 discusses North Koreans‘ language education background in detail. Bigelow and

Tarone (2004) note the challenge of conducting research with ―undereducated, transient, or refugee populations‖ who often distrust outsiders and tend to work longer hours (p.

697). Moreover, even if one succeeds in accessing the population, the cultural barriers make it difficult to guarantee success in obtaining informed consent and collecting data.

Despite such procedural difficulties, Bigelow and Tarone urge SLA researchers to explore this particular learner group, and thus enlarge the influential scope of SLA theories to a much wider L2 learner population. My research can contribute to this expansion by examining how North Koreans‘ educational histories (or lack thereof) influence their current practice of learning in South Korea.

Finally, this dissertation is concerned with adult English language learners in the beginning level, where SLA research is inadequate due to lack of funding and the attitude towards adult learning. In Anglophone countries, English language instruction is provided in a number of sectors for adults—associations for adult literacy, vocational education, community colleges, and community-based organizations (Murray, 2005, p.

68). Despite such channels, the relative lack of funding has been identified as one of the reasons why so little is known about how language is taught to and learned by adults

(Sticht et al., 1998). The neglect of adult L2 learning materially constrains educational practice. Crandall (1993) cogently describes this reality:

Large multilevel classes, limited resources, substandard facilities, intermittent funding, limited contracts with few benefits: This is the context in which ESL literacy practitioners work. Adult education is a stepchild of K-12 education and an afterthought in U.S. educational policy. That fact is

made obvious each time a public school which is no longer needed is reassigned to adult education (often with the same small, children‘s desk inside) or when adult education classes are conducted in inappropriate facilities that during the day have other function as elementary or secondary classrooms (Crandall, 1993, p. 497).

The description above also describes for adult refugee education in South Korea, even though 83.4% of North Korean refugees in South Korea are over 19 (Ministry of

Unification, 2014). More rigorous research should be conducted in order to understand adult L2 learning, which will inform programs for teacher training and curriculum development and provide a basis for requesting additional financial support. My dissertation research will be one such endeavor.

Theoretical framework, assumptions, and definitions

This study draws upon the Interpretivist paradigm (Brown et al., 1989; Bruner, 1986;

Hanks, 1991; Lave, 1990; Moerman & Sacks, 1988) and sociocultural theories of identity

(Firth & Wagner, 1997; Norton, 1997, 2000, 2006; Norton & Toohey, 2011; Ricento,

2005). Interpretivism, as the name implies, assumes that knowledge is intersubjectively constructed through one‘s experiential interpretation of how the self is related to the world. Meanings and understandings developed from this interpretation are particular and difficult to predict. Therefore, researchers informed by this paradigm want to know ―the specific structure of occurrences rather than their general character and overall distribution‖ (Erickson, 1986, p. 121). This epistemological stance results in the

19 researchers‘ meaning-perspectives of the particular actors in the naturally-set locations and situations.

In educational research, Lave (1990) theorizes the Interpretivist paradigm with the following assumptions:

(1) Learning is socioculturally constituted and engaged in ―doing something.‖

(2) Schooling is based on everyday practice in the lived-in-world.

(3) Instruction is dependent on situations whose specific characteristics are part of

practice as it unfolds.

(4) Experience is transmitted through activity in relation with the world.

I took up these assumptions for my dissertation, where learning, schooling, instruction, and experience were predominant themes. In this perspective, meanings of the refugees‘

EFL learning are socially constructed and negotiated through their situated actions in the lived world.

One of the popular academic concepts that those Interpretivists have paid attention to is identity. Moving away from a structural viewpoint on stability and regularity, these researchers focus on contingency, fluidity, and individual agency as studying identity with rather ―demographic categories such as […] race, ethnicity, nationality, migration, gender, social class, and language‖ (Block, 2007, p. 3). In light of Interpretivism, identity can also be discussed in terms of identity work (Sveningsson & Alvesson, 2003; Watson,

2008). In organization and management studies, identity work is defined as ―dynamic aspects and on-going struggles around creating a sense of self and providing temporary answers to the question ‗who am I‘ (or ‗who are we‘) and what do I (we) stand for?‖

(Sveningsson & Alvesson, 2003, p. 1164). People constantly revise who they are and who they might become in particular and complex contexts, or do identity work, especially while ―handling a personal predicament‖ (Watson, 2008, p. 139) or ―during crises or transitions‖ (Sveningsson & Alvesson, 2003, p. 1165).

As the Interpretive approach to identity is adopted in the field of SLA, identity has been framed in different terms and definitions depending on the researcher‘s disciplines and emphases. Norton (2000[2013]), for instance, conceives language learner identity as multiple, contradictory, and constantly changing. According to her definition (Norton,

1997, p. 410), identity refers to:

(1) how people understand their relationship to the world,

(2) how that relationship is constructed across time and space, and

(3) how people understand their possibilities for the future.

In this framework, identity holistically involves one‘s past experiences, present practices, and future imaginations of the social world.

Further examples of different labels for language learner identity are found in the special issue (1997) of TESOL Quarterly, where researchers investigate learners‘ social identity (Morgan, 1997), sociocultural identity (Duff & Uchida, 1997), voice (Thesen,

1997), cultural identity (Schecter & Bayley, 1997), and ethnic identity (Leung et al.,

1997), respectively . Whatever terms are used to describe language learners, these labels stress the learners‘ continuous identity work, which includes their ―complex experiences and their very mixed feelings and ambivalence about themselves as a consequence of

21 their L2 learning, and loss of aspects of their L1 and former identities‖ (Duff, 2012, p.

413).

As noted in the first section of this chapter and Duff (2012) also points out in the above quote, language learners‘ identity work quite often occurs as a consequence of their migration to a new country. Migration is an important event that relates migrants to both their home and host communities. The term transnationalism explains this dual connectedness. Vertovec (2005) defines transnationalism as follows:

When actual exchanges of resources or information, or marriages or visits, take place across borders between members of a diaspora themselves or with people in the homeland, we can say these are transnational activities; to be transnational means to belong to two or more societies at the same time (Vertovec, 2005, p. 3).

Adopting Vertovec‘s understanding to Interpretive research on identity and identity work, my framing of identity in this dissertation includes, but is not limited to, transnational identities. I define transnational identities in light of Norton‘s (1997) conception of identity; in my study, transnational identities refer to how migrants understand their relationship to their homeland, transition, and host communities and how this understanding evolves with time and location of residence.

De Fina and Perrino (2013) point out that the latest surge in transnational movements urges us to redefine the relationship between language and identity, with the following momentous shifts in socioculturally-oriented linguistics (p. 510):

(1) Complication of the dualistic ‗micro-macro‘ distinction, through the introduction

of finer scalar distinctions and dynamics. 22

(2) The critique of a view of speech communities as relatively homogeneous, sharing

in cultural repertoires and beliefs, and bound to specific locations.

(3) An emphasis on the tension between homogenization and differentiation in

language practices, language ideologies, and identities.

(4) The critical re-assessment of a default conception of languages as well-defined

codes that can be easily separated from each other and that are anchored to

distinctive and bounded speech communities.

De Fina and Perrino‘s conception is in the same vein of what I discussed in the second and third sections of this chapter, regarding English as a global language across a range of contexts. The four shifts listed above have also been a guideline for the analysis and discussion of my research, reminding me that transnational identity is a changing and negotiated process through participation in communities across national boundaries.

Accepted, contested, and changed by context, migrant learners‘ identity in this sense is thus multifaceted, contingent, and co-constructive (Ricento, 2005). Based upon this developmental and context-sensitive perspective on language learner identity, my dissertation focuses on the various identities that adult transmigrants may automatically gain, actively accept, negotiate, resist or ignore in the process of establishing themselves as EFL learners in a new environment.

Overall, both notions of identity work and transnationalism are instrumental in my study. The notion of identity work highlights the research participants‘ ongoing identity constructions found in my data, based upon their specific acts of self-identification at the personal level. As will be explored in detail in the following chapters, my participants do

23 identity work, seeking temporary answers to questions of who they are and who they might become in the phase-by-phase processes of escape, resettlement, and learning

English in the host community. Their identities are therefore viewed as verbs rather than nouns, continuously evolving in the dynamic and challenging situations that they move through as adult refugee EFL learners in an urban area of South Korea.

On the other hands, although North Korean refugees in South Korea are not allowed to travel or exchange resources across the North-South border openly, they are transmigrants in that they do exchange resources and information by privately sending remittances or hand-written letters and making undetected phone calls to their families in

North Korea. This continuous connectedness to the North is important because it affects the refugees‘ physical safety and emotional stability in South Korea.

Research questions

With the above concerns in mind, the overarching research question addressed by this dissertation is: how do identities of adult North Korean refugees evolve as they come to learn English as a foreign language in South Korea? Specifically, I ask:

1. How do adult North Korean refugees understand and come to understand the practice

of EFL learning in South Korea, and what are the consequences of such (developing)

understandings?

2. How do adult North Korean refugees, in the course of transnational and settling

experiences, construct, modify, or preserve their EFL learner identities in South

Korea?

The answers to these questions are intriguing in their own right (as described in the previous sections, North Korean refugees are an interesting population for SLA research), and will contribute to a more holistic understanding of EFL learners‘ participation in their target language communities. To address these questions, I was informed by a number of conceptual frameworks including language policy (Spolsky, 2004), imagined community

(Anderson, 1991), habitus and forms of capital (Bourdieu, 1977, 1990, 1991), investment and L2 identity (Norton, 2000). I conducted a year-long ethnographic field research, where I took field notes, audio-recorded in-depth interviews and EFL classroom conversation, and collected artifacts. These data were qualitatively analyzed in light of ethnography of communication (Hymes, 1972) and presented through thick description

(Geertz, 1973).

Structure of the dissertation

This dissertation consists of six chapters. In the next chapter, I describe the methodology adopted for this study. Chapters 3 to 5 present my data analysis and discussion with a review of literature relevant to the key themes of each chapter. Chapter 3 focuses on the divergent foreign language education policies and practices in North Korea and South

Korea since their national division in 1945, and how such educational backgrounds

25 characterize the landscape of EFL learning by North Korean refugees in South Korea.

Chapter 4 examines North Korean refugees‘ preconceptions about South Korean society before the migration and in transition, and how it is reimagined and leads them to learn

English in South Korea, which reconstructs their North Korean refugee identity. Chapter

5 investigates North Korean refugees‘ pre-investment period of English learning, and illuminates the role of English learning in recovery from past hardships. A final chapter reviews the findings of this study, examines its limitations and implications in pedagogy and policy making, and suggests directions for future research.

Chapter 2: Researching, Analyzing, and Constructing the Data

Introduction

Chapter 1 provided the background of the research gap that my study intends to fill with regard to transnational English as foreign language learners. This subject of inquiry was situated within an Interpretivist approach and the theories of identity as sociocultural construct. Chapter 1 also presented the research questions that I address in this dissertation.

I open Chapter 2 by locating my study within the qualitative-methodological tradition of ethnography of communication (Bauman & Sherzer, 1974; Farah, 1998;

Gumperz, 2003; Gumperz & Hymes, 1964; Hymes, 1962, 1974). In particular, ethnography of communication enabled me to approach my research questions about

North Korean refugees‘ language learning mediated by sociohistorical contexts in an adaptive and responsive way. In addition to discussing the methodological foundation, this chapter also examines how I gained access to the research site, the British Council in

Seoul, South Korea, and describes the research site and research participants. Moreover, I explain how I as a researcher was positioned during the fieldwork within the adopted methodological approach and in relation to the participants. Then, I detail the methods of data collection and data analysis in light of ethnography of communication. Finally, I briefly examine how trustworthiness is assured in my data analysis. 27

Research concerns in ethnography of communication

There exist a variety of qualitative approaches for the analysis of spoken language (e.g.,

Erickson, 1986; Lazaraton, 2002; Levinson, 1983; Mills, 2004; Poole, 2002; Rampton et al., 2002; Zuengler & Mori, 2002). Whereas quantitative discourse analysts primarily seek to determine how often something happens in the narratives or interactions, qualitative analysts pay attention to why and how things happen. The qualitative microlevel analysis of language in society has been developed as a subfield of sociolinguistics under such names as ethnography of communication, interactional sociolinguistics, conversation analysis, or discourse analysis (Erickson, 1986). In this strand, conversation entails more than observable verbal exchanges or behavior.

According to Shotter (1993), ―we constitute both ourselves and our worlds in our conversational activity‖ (p. vi). It is our personal understandings and representations that make our conversation intelligible. Of the subfields that Erickson (1986) enumerated, ethnography of communication (henceforth EC), or the study of ethnography of speaking

(Hymes, 1962), stemmed from an effort to locate language in culture and society

(Gumperz & Hymes, 1964). Exploring language in context of situation, EC combines macro- and microscopic perspectives on the use of human language.

While both are studies of language, EC contrasts sharply with formal linguistic analysis. First, in EC, description itself is a theoretical task. Linguistic theory has been extensively developed in the abstraction of language and linguistics proper outside the context where language is used; an ethnographic approach to language, in contrast, entails a commitment ―only to descriptive methods‖ (Streek, 2002, p. 323). In Hymes‘

28 words (1974), linguistic description in EC is ―a system of cultural behavior; a system not necessarily exotic, but necessarily concerned with the organization of diversity‖ (p. 89).

In other words, descriptions of interaction and narratives are not mere complements to linguistic theory but are essential for theorizing the multifaceted use of language in context. This describing aspect of EC is in the vein of an idiographic feature of

Interpretivism, which offers ―a detailed account of specific social settings, processes, or relationships‖ in the social world (King & Horrocks, 2010, p. 11).

Another contrast between structural linguistics and EC can be found in Hymes‘ criticism of Chomsky‘s linguistic theory (Hymes, 1974). Citing Chomsky and Halle

(1968), Hymes makes the point that the authors left the concept of ―performance‖ (the production of actual utterances) largely unexamined compared to that of ―competence‖

(an idealized linguistic capacity) that they laid most emphasis on. As adopted and developed by cognitive linguists for the past half century, Chomskyan theory (1965) of generative grammar investigates an ideal form of language, i.e., competence, which is unaffected by ―grammatically irrelevant conditions‖ (p. 3) such as a speaker‘s life story or speech errors. What Hymes is interested in, however, is the very external factors around the formal grammar that makes one‘s hands dirty. He argues that Chomsky‘s interest is too hypothetical, intuitive, and abstract because, to Hymes, the deviations from such linguistic postulates are the most ―interesting features‖ in human nature to be investigated (p. 93). Overall, Hymes suggests recognizing the usefulness of observing linguistic performance, appraising the dynamic functions of the social organization in and around the actual speech events.

Hymes‘ (1972 [2003]) book provides a schema of what to examine in EC. The major proposition is that the speech community, not the language, is the natural unit for the analysis. This unit can be explored either from an individual‘s speech or from a whole community‘s communal consensus about language use. By establishing speech community as the cardinal unit of sociolinguistics, Hymes underscores the diverse and complex relations between the linguistic means and meanings upon which culture is based, and in consequence creates a theory which is inseparably connected to ―the ways of life of mankind as a whole‖ (p. 33). He defines six social units of sociolinguistic analysis: (1) speech community (the community that shares how speech is conducted and interpreted), (2) speech situation (the general or particular context where people speak),

(3) speech event (the speaking activity itself), (4) speech act (the purpose or the type of speech), (5) speech styles (how people express and become stylistic), and (6) ways of speaking (the general communicative behavior).

My study uses five of these analysis units (i.e., (1), (2), (3), (5), and (6) above), examining the North Korean refugees‘ target language learning community in South

Korea, learning situation in the past and the present, English learning activities, learning styles and what kind of English speakers they would like to be, and ways of speaking in and about the English language, respectively. I believe these five units are necessary for the scientific inquiry on the relationship between the participants‘ transnational journeys and multiple and contingent identities in the EFL learning community. The participants‘ speech acts, listed as (4) in the previous paragraph, can be best explored through the analysis of how they actually coordinate their L2 talk in the language classroom setting.

As will be described later in this chapter, the primary concern of my study is to situate the language learners‘ changing vantage points on their L2 learning practice in the broader social context. For this reason, this study deals with five out of six of Hymes‘ units of analysis.3

In summary, EC calls for (1) a descriptive method beyond abstraction of linguistics proper, (2) an emphasis on the social role of speaking, and (3) a consideration of whether implementing linguistic knowledge is feasible in reality. When considering the feasibility of linguistic performance in reality, it is consequential for ethnographers to observe and discuss linguistic inequalities prevalent in the relationship between language and social structures. Even though all languages are inherently equal in the sense that they fulfill the same communicative functions, their statuses in society are not equal. Languages are differently valorized across generations and national borders, as are the legitimate speakers of the languages. These values are likely to be institutionalized, which results in a social hierarchy established by the degree to which speakers are competent in languages or have access to linguistic capital. Saville-Troike (2003) refers to this question of

3 The initial purpose of my research presented in my dissertation proposal was to provide a microanalysis of the refugee learners‘ speech acts in the language classroom setting, drawn from social constructivism and primarily using conversation analysis. While continuing the fieldwork and beginning to analyze the data, however, I found that adult North Korean refugees have been socially marginalized in the EFL learning community in South Korea and that such vulnerability has been reproduced within institutional structures and power. I believed that a search for the underlying mechanisms maintaining these power relations around the refugees‘ English learning and their consequential identity transformation was a priority before the discussion of their classroom interaction, not only to shed light on the influence of ideology and social inequality in the individual language learning practice but also to advance the researched group‘s educational rights and justice in general. Accordingly, this dissertation is not the result that I expected from the early stage; my epistemological standpoint on the research context and participants shifted as the study proceeded, which resulted in a change in my methodological approach to analyzing and presenting the collected data. 31 inequality as one of the important social problems to which the findings of EC should be applied. She explains that:

Power is not only displayed through language; it is often achieved through language. Some of the functions of language which may be included in this category are social control, influencing feelings and shaping thought, determining access to knowledge, and otherwise institutionalizing discrimination. At a macrosocietal level, some of these functions are enacted in official or unofficial policies which privilege some languages or varieties of language over others, and thus privilege their speakers (Italics by Saville- Troike, 2003, pp. 260-261).

I use ethnography of communication as a methodological tool not only because of its primary interest in language in society but also because of its strong potential to unveil the practices and surroundings of not-yet-competent language speakers. EC‘s underlying questions, ―what does a speaker need to know to communicate appropriately within a particular speech community, and how does he or she learn to do so?‖ (Saville-Troike,

2003, p. 2), aptly explicate EC‘s methodological capacity to shed light on the detailed process through which the newcomers come to know when and how to learn EFL in order to function as legitimate members of the host community. This viewpoint fits my research question about how adult North Korean refugees with little experience of English learning become English learners in South Korea with changing identities and worldviews. To use Saville-Troike‘s terminology above, in my dissertation I deal with how the participants feel and think about social power achieved through their English language skills in South Korea over time, how the public discourse about their language learning has been institutionalized as education policies for them, and how such policies

32 enhance or limit their access to learning opportunities and language development.

Saville-Troike (2003) contends that findings in EC can make ethical contributions to the researched speech community as well as expand the literature about it.

It therefore remains central to our concerns to describe what a community has made of its language, and why, and how—not only as part of our scientific inquiry, but because one of the responsibilities and motivations of a socially constituted study of language is the welfare of its human speakers. Ethnographers, who by the nature of their perspective reach beyond the ―facts‖ of observable behavior to interpret meaning/culture, have an ethical responsibility to the ―subjects‖ of investigation (Saville-Troike, 2003, p. 40).

Rampton and his colleagues (2002) have a similar view with the quote above on the social responsibility of ethnographers of communication. The authors argue that:

The ethnography of communication has been committed to demonstrating the linguistic and cultural integrity/rationality of relatively marginalized, non- standard social groups, seeking to rehabilitate and/or raise their status within schools and public consciousness more generally, and this ‗normalizing‘ mission has led to an emphasis on the ways in which ethnography is actually rather close to common sense (Rampton et al., 2002, p. 375).

In this sense, EC is a suitable methodological frame for my study, which eventually aims at raising public awareness of the adult North Korean refugees‘ right for sustainable learning of English in South Korean society.

The British Council Korea and its social actors

This section consists of three subsections that respectively delineate (1) the process of gaining entry into the research site, (2) the English language program as the research site, and (3) people whom I met and/or researched there.

Gaining access to the British Council Korea

In order to obtain access to the research site and participants, I initially contacted nine institutions via email and phone call from March to April 2012. They include two alternative high schools,4 two social welfare centers affiliated under the Ministry of

Unification, two non-governmental and non-profit organizations, the British Embassy, the Canadian Embassy, and the United States Embassy. These institutions are located in

Seoul, the capital of South Korea, except for one high school and one social welfare center in the southern provinces of the country.

The rationale for the selection of these nine institutions for the initial contact is twofold: first, the research site should be a classroom-based environment that provides consistent and systematic education. Secondly, I am interested in foreign language

4 Of 2,254 North Korean refugees who attend primary, middle, and high schools in South Korea in April 2013, 232 students (10.3%) attend nine alternative schools (either public or private) founded specifically for North Korean refugees, while 2,022 (89.7%) are spread over 767 regular schools nationwide with South Korean students (Ministry of Education, 2014). Although my study is concerned with adult refugees, I contacted two of the nine alternative schools because many young adults in their early twenties, and therefore over the normal school age years, enroll those special schools with the object of attaining the primary, middle, and/or high school diplomas before seeking jobs or applying to colleges in South Korea. Indeed, Han (2011) proposes the range of age from 7 to 24 to define the term talbuk cheongsonyun (North Korean refugee adolescents), considering the young adult refugees‘ unique educational backgrounds with physical and mental changes in the process of migration. 34 education policies, with regard to either governmental or non-governmental support for adult North Korean refugees.

According to Lave and Wenger (1991), newcomers start their social participation from the periphery of the host community, gradually change their position in the community and their perspectives on forms of membership, and finally acquire knowledge to be full practitioners towards the center of the community. In this process of apprenticeship, understanding what old-timers do for a particular practice is an essential task for newcomers who seek to participate more and more actively in the community.

That is, the practice by the majority often becomes their educational goal or the object of imagination and expectation about the community.

The practice of EFL learning and use in South Korea predominantly occurs in the classroom setting, through either public or private education. As mentioned in Chapter 1, informal learning of English at work sites or in mundane conversation is less commonly observed in this society. This local L2 learning culture is likely to influence North

Korean refugees‘ scope of thinking and choice about the ways to learn English as adults.

In order to explore the relationship between the typical South Korean way of learning

English and that of the newly arrived refugees, the non-classroom-based EFL learning opportunities available to some refugees, such as the church-based informal social gatherings with native speakers of English or the college-based student organizations for practicing English conversation were excluded from the list of candidate research sites.

Another advantage to a classroom-based learning environment is that it offers a more random sample of EFL learners (and thus potential participants) than the church- or

35 college-based environments, where more EFL learners are likely to be Christian or college students.

Another rationale for the selection of the research site stems from my interest in foreign language education policies and supports implemented in particular for adult

North Korean refugees. In 2010, the American, Canadian and British Embassies in South

Korea each launched an English education project designed specifically for North

Koreans over 18. These inaugurations suggest that they have been aware of some special needs of this particular learner group and made an effort to tailor their program- developing/managing and ELT know-how to better help this group join the target language learning community. Although I did not recruit policy-makers or program coordinators as research participants for this study, determining how my refugee student participants understand and exploit such educational supports and the network with sponsors is important to the exploration of my research questions.

Therefore, I limited my list of candidate research sites to education programs specifically concerned with North Korean refugees, as these provided access to a broader pool of refugee EFL learners with a variety of economic situations, learning purposes, and levels of English competence. By the same token, I did not consider private English language academies originally designed for adult South Korean learners that also accepted some North Korean refugee students. These institutes are expensive (with monthly tuitions between $200-$400 USD) and a large fraction of their student body is focused on earning high scores on the standardized English tests such as GRE, IELTS,

TOEIC, or TOEFL. Thus, it is likely that many of the refugees in those academies have

36 already established functional goals with reference to their English learning and possess an adequate command of English to accomplish their short-term goals. For the sake of a more representative sample of North Korean refugees and to examine the evolution of identities mediated by becoming an EFL learner, I only considered the education programs specifically concerned with the North Korean refugee group.

Three out of nine candidate institutes—an alternative high school, the British

Council run under the affiliation of the British Embassy, and the Canadian Embassy— permitted me to visit them and discuss more details of my research agenda. Based on these visits, I decided that the British Council would be the most suitable place for my research. The British Council program is described in the next subsection, but it is worth noticing here how it differs from the other two candidate sites in a way that makes it more suitable for my study.

Firstly, students at the British Council are fully engaged in learning English only, whereas the alternative school‘s primary focus is the students‘ mental stability; although

English is taught in compliance with the education policy in South Korea, the school curriculum gives much weight to arts, sports, music, vocational education, and counseling concerned with the students‘ emotional health. For this reason, the number of hours for which I can observe its English classes is not sufficient for my study.

On the other hand, the Canadian Embassy‘s Inside Canada Defectors Program

(ICDP) is focused on short-term sessions that make it difficult to assess the participants‘ developing perspectives on the practice of learning, which is crucial to my research questions. The ICDP holds classes for eight to twelve North Korean adults with a

Canadian volunteer teacher, which meet twice a week for 90 minutes over a twelve-week cycle (e.g., Term 1 from February 22 to May 25 and Term 2 from June 5 to August 22,

2012). Since the teacher and the students change every twelve weeks, the nature of the learning community is like a ―revolving door‖ (Finn, 2010, p. 589). As will be further described later in this chapter, a critical aspect of my year-long fieldwork was to assess the participants‘ developmental perspectives on the practice of learning. This required having regular access to research participants and their learning spaces over a long time.

ICDP would be an interesting place to investigate, but is unsuitable for my longitudinal study with set research participants.

After deciding to collect data at the British Council, I contacted officials there via face-to-face visits and emails, including (in order) the embassy‘s public relation officer, political advisor, the director of the British Council, and the project manager of the refugee support program. Throughout the data collection, I communicated with two project managers. I followed Hatch‘s (2002) advice for researchers to provide the organization with the research bargain, an outline that has ―elements in common with informed consent forms but is less formal and more flexible‖ (p. 46) so that they could quickly understand what the proposed research would look like. A letter of research permission was issued in the first week of May 2012 (see Appendix B).

Before describing the British Council‘s intensive English language program as research context, I will discuss what happened with the six institutions that rejected my request for conducting research on North Korean refugees who were learning English there.

A stranger‘s first contact is always abrupt and sudden to any recipient. I would be wary, businesslike, and cautious as well if I received this kind of phone call from a doctoral student abroad for a longitudinal research with the refugee students that I took care of. How long would these staffs have been bugged by researchers who only looked out for their own interests or like the fox under the grape vine with little sincerity? How can I persuade them that I am different from those researchers? Am I even different from those researchers? (March 31, 2012)

The excerpt above is the first few lines of my dissertation journal that I wrote after my inquiries about conducting research had been rejected by several institutions that were offering North Korean refugees English education. The foremost reason for their rejection is the refugee students‘ discomfort towards visitors to their classes. Even though the administrators and teachers were sympathetic to the significance and contributions of my study, they acknowledged that the majority of their students had negative memories or feelings towards external researchers in South Korea. According to a secretary-general with whom I exchanged several emails, the students in his welfare center experienced some researchers who had disclosed the refugees‘ personal information outside the research site without explicitly asking their consent.

The rejection of most of my requests is not surprising due to the vulnerable and confidential nature of the refugee population; indeed, becoming research participants can make them more vulnerable and defensive. Block and her colleagues (2013) also find that

―in environments where refugees are rendered particularly vulnerable […] there is a very real risk that mishandled information obtained through research could further compromise their safety‖ (p. 8). Thus, the organizations I petitioned were not predisposed to trust me or assume that my proposed research would not harm the refugee students. 39

My only recourse was to present myself and my statement of purpose as clearly and honestly as possible both in conversations with them and in written documents. My access to the British Council was a result of such effort. The contacts I established at institutions that rejected my request were also valuable. One staff member introduced me to his North Korean refugee friend, from whom I could obtain basic knowledge of the refugee college students‘ lives. Another teacher shared with me her own experience of teaching North Korean refugees, and I was invited to an academic forum on the current issues of North Korea and its refugees.

It is worth noting that the three places that agreed to allow me access to their students did not ask for their students‘ opinions about my research; instead, they let me ask for the students‘ opinions directly. It is possible that the difference results from the institutions‘ different group identities and priorities—how the organizations define the relationship between them and their students, and which humanitarian values motivate them to support the students. Do they aid North Korean refugees? Do they protect the refugees? Do they advocate on behalf of the refugees? Whichever position they take, I believe that all the above values are ethical, as long as they respect refugees‘ personal agency. Gifford (2013) aptly points out that

those working in the community sector are often guilty of unintentionally essentialising the construct of ‗refugee‘ and in doing so, see their mission as protecting and advocating on behalf of these persons who are deemed to be vulnerable because of their assumed identity. In this regard, […] the mandate to protect erases the courtesy to respect. And this in turn removes any possibilities of agency among individuals and communities who once were refugees and who are now their clients. (Gifford, 2013, p. 52).

My experience may be useful for researchers seeking to study refugee populations.

When seeking access to a population with respect to the research site, researchers may not be familiar with the different conventions, structures, and atmospheres of prospective partner institutions. In such cases, it is worth finding out where the refugee agency is located in each institution. It may also be wise to talk with gatekeepers about some possible results of a face-to-face meeting between their students and the researcher in the selection stage—the potential participants can meet the researcher and learn about the study, which gives them the opportunity to communicate with the researcher and gives the researcher the opportunity to change the often negative attitude potential participants have toward outside researchers.

The EFL program

The British Council is one of the largest and most popular EFL institutes in Seoul, with a long history and organized system. In 2010, the British Embassy launched the education support program for North Korean refugees aged over 18, which it named English for the

Future Programme (hereafter EFF). According to the program proposal offered by the embassy (see Appendix C), this program started as a trial in the 2010 academic year with

10 students. The program expanded to 50 students in 2011-2012, and to 80 in 2012-2013, the academic year in which I did my fieldwork. This annual expansion was possible because of the well-established English language program run by the British Council for

South Korean adults since the establishment of its first separate office outside the embassy in Seoul in 1978 (British Council, 2014). More than 100 classes are offered for adults every month with different timeslots, levels of difficulty, and specific emphases 41

(e.g., ―English for life/culture/work/study,‖ IELTS preparation, or learning British culture on-screen or through short stories), and with more than 30 certified teachers from various

English-speaking countries.

Figure 2.1 presents the head institute‘s information flyer of the classes offered from

November 25 to December 22, 2012.5 Students enroll in a class after a placement test and attend one to four days a week for a 90- to 180-minute class per day. The typical class size is seven to sixteen students. In addition to the head office (where my research was conducted), a branch institute was located 6.3 miles away in the southern area of Seoul.

5 A Korean sentence on the right top of Figure 2.1 informs that the courses highlighted in dark grey are full since the morning on November 23. 42

The courses under the category of ―Complete English‖ in Figure 2.1 use New

English File as the common textbook. The second edition of these books, published by

Oxford University Press, was used in the period of data collection (see Figure 2.2).

Figure 2.2. A participant‘s textbook cover and its table of contents

The teachers use other class materials, such as handouts, flashcards, and texts and images on interactive whiteboards (see Figure 2.3), but only in relation to the textbook content of the day. Likewise, the classes that the British Council offers are centrally guided and controlled according to the contents and steps of the New English File series. This makes it easy for substitutes to fill in during the temporary absence of a teacher with little disruption of the lesson.

Figure 2.3. An interactive whiteboard in the observed classroom

The series is composed of seven graded readers, as displayed on the Oxford

University Press‘ website (http://elt.oup.com/student/englishfile) (see Figure 2.4). This grade system became a foundation of the British Council‘s organization of the course level presented in Figure 2.1, i.e., Elementary, Pre-intermediate, Intermediate,

Intermediate Plus, Upper-intermediate, and Advanced.

Figure 2.4. New English File series displayed on the Oxford University Press‘ website

The British Council also provides its course level system on its webpage

(http://www.britishcouncil.kr) (see Figure 2.5), which is a simplified representation of the course levels displayed in Figure 2.1. Each of the Elementary, Pre-intermediate,

Intermediate, and Upper Intermediate levels are divided into ―A‖ and ―B.‖ It takes twelve weeks to complete a level, and the students are expected to pass the final examination in the twelfth week and transition to the next level of the class.

Figure 2.5. The course levels displayed on the British Council‘s website

North Korean refugee students have joined this highly organized EFL program every year since 2010 with full financial support from the embassy. Courses are offered year-round, but the selection of refugees for the EFF program occurs once per year in the late summer. Although the program proposal indicates that the EFF is a one-year award

(Appendix C), recipients are allowed to re-apply for the support in the following years.

Once selected, the EFF students are treated like other South Korean students and their

North Korean identity remains confidential (they are known within the British Council administration as ―EFF students‖). Like their South Korean counterparts, EFF students take the placement test, register for one or more courses, purchase a textbook, comply with the English-only policy in the class, participate in class activities, do homework, take exams, and often socialize with their teachers and classmates after the class.

The teachers are notified before the first day of every month whether there are any

EFF students in their classes and given their identities. I did not find any notably different treatment of the EFF students by the teachers in their classes. The only distinction that I detected during a year of data collection was a teacher‘s tiny note in red by his EFF student‘s name on the roll book, jotted down as ―North Korean student (secret).‖

Accordingly, South Korean students do not even imagine that some of their classmates are from North Korea.

This is a very unusual learning environment for North Korean refugees. There are two ways that English is taught to adult refugees who arrived in South Korea with little experience of L2 learning: (1) by creating a new method and a space for them and (2) by inviting them to an established learning space. Of the nine institutions that I contacted for research permission, only the British Council‘s program was the latter case. Its EFF proposal specifies the embassy‘s understanding of the resources they already have that they believe will be useful to help the refugees (Appendix C):

We have noticed that English language ability and career experience can be a real barrier for ‗new settlers‘ who strive to access the skilled employment and higher education opportunities that South Korea has to offer. The British Embassy, British Council and business community have resources that can help people overcome that barrier. Together we can help people skill-up, access equal opportunities and determine their futures (Emphasis added).

In practice, this meant that the only change the British Council made to its existing program was the addition of a Starter level before the Elementary level (see Figure 2.5) in order to accommodate the EFF students, who did not have enough basic knowledge for the ―Elem(A)‖ course (see Figure 2.1). For instance, one of my participants had to wait for a few months after the placement test until this Starter level was founded in October

2012. The impact of this structure on the refugee learners will be investigated in Chapter

3. This Starter class, offered at 8:10 to 9:40pm in the evening from Tuesday to Friday, was the place where I met the majority of my research participants. The next subsection describes the participants and their relationship with one another.

Study participants

My proposal for this study was approved by the Institutional Review Board (IRB) on

May 15, 2012 (see Appendix A). The EFF project manager called the refugee students in the first week of May 2012.6 The manager introduced me and explained my research to them and asked if they wanted to take part in my study. Three students were willing to see me in the following week, and the project manager informed me of their names and

6 I previously stated that 50 students were recruited as the EFF awardees in the academic year 2011-2012. It is certain, however, that the project manager did not call all 50 students to solicit their participation in my research. She did not tell me how many students she had contacted, but she said that she chose those who had regularly enrolled and attended the language program since the past year. 48 the times and room numbers of each student‘s class at the British Council. She also notified the teachers of the three students that I would be in their classes. I had first requested a full EFF student list including contact information so that I could explain my research and save the manager‘s time, but this request was denied owing to the internal security regulations, and I only gained access to three North Korean refugee students in different levels and classes.

The way I met the students in my study is described presently. On the first day I visited each class, the teachers briefly introduced me to their students in English before the classes started. Then, I explained in Korean in front of the students that my research was about adult L2 learning, and distributed the student consent form to them (Appendix

D). While they were reading the form, I talked with the teachers (in English) about my research and asked for their signatures on the teacher consent form (Appendix F). While the students signed the consent form, I quickly located the EFF students and memorized their faces. When the classes ended, I approached the EFF students and exchanged greetings. I also explained to them the outline of my research plan over lunch or tea near the British Council to avoid identifying them as the true research participants, and asked for their signatures on the North Korean refugee student consent form (Appendix E). That is, Appendices E and F presented my intention to study refugee students, whereas

Appendix D did not.

One of the three students notified me on the next day that she would discontinue her research participation due to her busy schedule. In consequence, I worked with two

49 participants, TY and HK, from May to September 2012.7 In October 2012, a new Starter class was offered, where six out of sixteen students were North Korean refugees. I followed the same process as above, and three out of six refugees in the Starter class, SN,

ZO, and DN, agreed to participate in my study. In November 2012, three additional refugee students registered for the Starter class, and two of them, KM and BH, volunteered to be research participants. Therefore, I had a total of seven participants between May 2012 and June 2013. Figure 2.6 summarizes the seven students‘ different periods of participation in my study.

Figure 2.6. The research participation period by participants

The duration of my observations was limited by a preset limit of twelve months for any given participant and a deadline of June 2013 for completing my dissertation research. Of the participants, I was only able to observe TY and HK for the full year.

Data collection with SN, ZO, KM, and BH was limited by my dissertation timeline.

7 In this dissertation, all names are pseudonyms in order to protect the anonymity of the participants. 50

Research with DN terminated in late April 2013 because she travelled to the United

States from May to July 2013.

TY had attended the British Council since August 2011, when she was originally placed in the level of ―Intermediate Plus A.‖ When I met her in May 2012, she was in

―Upper-intermediate B.‖ HK had also attended since August 2011, and moved up from

―Elementary B‖ to ―Intermediate A,‖ the class where I met her in May 2012. TY and HK graduated from the same South Korean university in different years, and had known each other well. TY had an even more intimate relationship with DN, whom I met in the

Starter class in October 2012. They were born in the same city in North Korea (although they did not know each other in North Korea), entered South Korea at about same time, and received the three-month resettlement training offered by the Ministry of Unification together. SN, ZO, DN, KM, and BH first met and became friends in the Starter class.

They often had time to socialize as a group outside the British Council, although they did not identify themselves as North Koreans in the class. Since I describe each participant‘s detailed personal backgrounds and learner episodes in the analysis chapters of this dissertation, here I will summarize their basic demographic information based on the information presented in Tables 2.1, 2.3, and 2.4.

Age Years in # of Family # of Family Name Sex Place of birth Entry (2012) China in SK in NK TY 29 F Pyongyang 2007 3.5 0 3 HK 27 F Northeast (Hambuk) 2006 4 4 0 SN 25 M Northeast (Hambuk) 2005 4 0 0 ZO 24 F Northeast (Hambuk) 2009 2 0 2 DN 33 F Pyongyang 2007 3 2 1 Central North KM 23 M 2012 0 0 3 (Ryanggang) BH 23 F Southeast (Gangwon) 2009 3.5 2 1

Table 2.1. Basic demographic information of participants

The participants had lived in South Korea (shortened as SK in Table 2.1) for between six months and seven years when I first met them in 2012. As shown in Column

2 and Column 5 in Table 2.1, all the participants entered South Korea at or over age 18.

Their cities or provinces of birth vary and can be compared to the Unification Ministry‘s statistics (2014) about the birthplaces of all North Korean refugees who entered the South up to February 2014 (see Table 2.2). More than 75% of the refugees are from the two

Northern provinces that border China, Hambuk (64.3%) and Ryanggang (11.6%). Of my research participants, three are from Hambuk and one from Ryanggang, which matches the population as a whole.

Although my sample size is small, it is worth noting that the two participants I have from Pyongyang are overrepresented in my sample relative to the fraction of North

Korean refugees from Pyongyang (1.96%). This is probably because of personal connections among refugees: one of my participants from Pyongyang, TY, influenced the

52 other, DN, to participate. Schilling (2013) notes that ―along with the trust you

[fieldworkers] gain as a friend of a friend (and increased responsibility to maintain ethicality) is a lessening of the power asymmetry‖ between the researcher and the researched (p. 197). To DN I was first introduced as a friend of TY, which I believe might have resolved a conflict between the power asymmetry that Schilling (2013) points out above and an age gap between DN and me; she is the only participant who is older than me, and was often positioned as an ―elder sister‖ of mine during her research participation.

Gangwon Nampo Ryanggang Jagang Pyungnam Pyungbuk Pyongyang

M 206 59 917 61 399 334 309

F 306 65 2,144 112 523 374 208

3,061 517 Total 512 124 173 922 708 (11.6%) (1.96%) Hamnam Hambuk Hwangnam Hwangbuk Gaeseong Misc. Total 7,994 M 719 4,465 249 154 44 78 (30.3%) 18,374 F 1,666 12,493 158 215 25 85 (69.7%) 16,958 Total 2,385 407 369 69 163 26,368 (64.3%)

Table 2.2. The birthplace of North Korean refugees in South Korea (February 2014)

Two participants are male and five are female, which is in agreement with the male-female ratio of 3:7 among refugees in South Korea (see Table 2.2). The number of years that my participants temporarily stayed in China (see Column 6 in Table 2.1) is important because during this transition period the refugees experience almost complete 53 interruption of their social activities, including schooling, due to their stateless and fugitive status. All of the participants except for KM (who received help in leaving North

Korean from an international relief organization, which is rare) experienced an extend sojourn in China for two to four years, longer than they had expected. The final two columns in Table 2.1 list the number of immediate family members (parents, siblings, and spouses) who live in South Korea with the participants or who remain in North

Korea. The family situations of the participants are discussed in later chapters.

Table 2.3 presents the participants‘ formal schooling and work experiences in

North and South Korea. An acronym (D) signifies their dropping out in the middle of each education presented on its left. The timing of this drop-out does not necessarily correspond with that of escape; SN, for example, left school early for family reasons. BH was forced to quit her college when her grandfather was accused of a political crime. The other two, HK and DN, left school at the moment of escape. The majority of my participants received or are receiving higher education in South Korea, except for SN and

KM. SN took a qualification examination for a middle school diploma in 2007, which is denoted as (Q) in Table 2.3. ZO and BH were college students throughout the period of data collection, majoring in economics and theatre, respectively. TY, HK, and DN graduated from South Korean colleges, majoring in international management, Chinese language and literature, and piano, respectively. KM, the most recently arrived among my participants, was not involved in any form of formal education during the period of research participation.

Education Occupation Education Occupation Name before entry before entry after entry (2012) after entry (2012) Hotel worker (Another) Economically TY Bachelor in China Bachelor inactive Middle school Economically HK Bachelor Intern at a bank (D) inactive Primary school Economically Middle school SN Full-time barista (D) inactive (Q) Economically Economically ZO High school In college inactive inactive Economically DN Master (D) Master Freelance pianist inactive Factory Economically KM High school management No experience inactive assistant Several BH Bachelor (D) Child actress In college part-time jobs

Table 2.3. Participants‘ educational and occupational background

TY and KM each worked at a full-time position before coming to South Korea. BH was trained by the local government as a stage actress from the age of 7, although she did not earn enough to support her family. The rest of the participants were economically inactive in North Korea, largely supported by their parents. When I met the participants in 2012, HK was working as a full-time intern at a national bank (March-September

2012). SN was working six days a week at a café. DN was a part-time piano accompanist.

BH was working at a restaurant, babysitting, and tutoring preschoolers, while attending college as well. The other participants, TY, ZO, and KM, had other financial sources: adoptive parents (TY), boyfriend (ZO), and the resettlement fund provided by the government after the resettlement training (KM).

Table 2.4 describes the participants‘ changes in their occupation and course levels at the British Council (shortened as ―BC‖ in the table) throughout the research participation from 2012 to 2013. The reason for ZO, DN, and KM‘s delay in moving up to the upper course level compared to SN and BH is their absenteeism. TY started working as a full-time banker in January 2013. Afterwards, she did not attend the British

Council anymore but kept studying English independently. HK served as a full-time intern at a local branch of the Ministry of Employment and Labor from February to

November 2013. While working as an intern, she continued searching for regular jobs, studying English, and taking the TOEIC and an English speaking test. SN quit working as a barista and started preparing for the qualification exam for a high school diploma in

May 2013. Lastly, DN was employed as a part-time piano instructor at a private institute in July 2013. All this occupational change was indirectly related to the participants‘ practice of and attitude towards learning English. It often hindered them from attending the British Council regularly, or motivated them to study English intensively with multiple resources in a given time.

EFL level at BC EFL level at BC Name Change of career (2013-) (November 2012) (April 2013) TY Upper Intermediate B IELTS Prep class Full-time banker HK Intermediate A Intermediate plus B Intern at a public agency SN Starter Elementary B Economically inactive ZO Starter Elementary A No change (In college) DN Starter Elementary A Half-time piano instructor No change KM Starter Elementary A (Economically inactive) BH Starter Elementary B No change (In college)

Table 2.4. Participant information related to English learning

Situating myself as the researcher

In qualitative studies, researcher influence is not treated as a bias that undermines the validity and the reliability of findings. Rather, the researcher‘s self that emerges in the research site generates knowledge and becomes relevant data in collaboration with the participants‘ multiple ways to represent themselves (King & Horrocks, 2010). Three points can be made to explain how I was situated in my research site and in relation to my research participants: (1) a dual role of insider and outsider, (2) a learner, and (3) an interlocutor.

First, I positioned myself as insider and as outsider at the same time during the fieldwork. It is quite common to describe the researcher position either as insider or as outsider according to whether or not the researcher shares any commonalities with his or her participants (e.g., age, gender, class, mother tongue, nationality, ethnicity, occupation, and experiences in the same time or space) and belongs to the participants‘ community

(Adler & Adler, 1987; Kanuha, 2000). I was an insider researcher in terms of my ethnicity, first language, age group, and experience of border-crossing and being a newcomer as an international student in the United States. These characteristics enabled me to obtain more rapid and more complete trust from and intimacy with my participants.

I was an outsider, on the other hand, considering the participants‘ identities of North

Korean refugees and beginning English learners. From the beginning of my study, I acknowledged my outsider status with candor and openness. This helped me to observe objectively new and unfamiliar phenomena in the field.

I also made it clear that as a researcher I saw myself as a learner rather than as an expert (Gay & Airasian, 2003; Glesne, 1999) in the course of investigating my research questions about North Korean refugees‘ EFL learning. I introduced myself to the participants as a (co-)learner not to condescend to please them but because I really knew little about their ―world within.‖ This awareness also impacted how I designed and framed the interview questions and conducted interviews; I tried to minimize any a priori knowledge or personal opinions about L2 learners, identities, transnationalism, or the practice of language learning in South Korea. Finally, positioning myself as a learner even influenced how I dressed for the research site. I usually dressed informally enough not to be distinguished in appearance from the participants at the British Council. One of my participants indeed once told me that ―you look so casual today, and I talk to you so frankly.‖

Last but not least, I situated myself as an interlocutor with each of my participants.

All human research has a dialogical unity (Mulhall, 2007). I spent a considerable time

58 talking about myself to the participants in and out of the research site. By doing so, my position was situationally emergent in each phase of the fieldwork, rather than normatively fixed as an ex parte researcher who asks participants a set of ready-made questions. This bidirectional collaboration helped me establish rapport with my participants, some of whom were at first not sure why I wanted to talk with them.

Although the participants understood my research interest and had agreed to take part in my study, they seemed defensive about my intentions, especially in the early phase of the study. One of them even asked me whether I was a North Korean spy. In retrospect, although our conversations were initially dominated by my efforts to respond to their questions about my identity, their comfort with answering questions that I asked about their lives and experiences gradually increased over time.

Performing an ethnographic study at the British Council Korea

This section explains how I collected data for my ethnographic study in and around the

British Council. Drawing from various methods used by ethnographers of communication

(Saville-Troike, 2003) and ethnographers in educational settings (Eisenhart, 2001;

Toohey, 2008), I interviewed and audio-recorded the interview conversations, observed and audio-recorded classroom interaction, observed interaction outside the British

Council, and gathered some artifacts.

Interviews

Marshall and Rossman (2006) explain three key themes that can be applied to qualitative interviews (p. 55): (1) individual lived experience, (2) language and communication, and 59

(3) society and culture. Since all three aspects were critical to answer my research questions, I conducted multiple, staged, and in-depth interviews with seven participants.

Each interview was conducted in Korean, and on a face-to-face and one-on-one basis.

The interviews helped to determine the participants‘ understandings of the practice of L2 learning and their identity work in the host community, which are located at the intersection of the micro- and macroscopic perspectives. The participants chose to attend the British Council for different reasons that were situated in their broader social context.

Accordingly, my interview approach focused not only on their individual experiences but also on their personal thoughts on communities that they belonged to, communities that they did not belong to, communities that they used to belong to, and their assigned identities and asserted identities in those communities.

Brinkmann (2013) argues that qualitative interviews are on ―a continuum ranging from relatively structured to relatively unstructured formats‖ (p. 18). My interviews had both a relatively structured phase and a relatively unstructured phase across time and participants. Although I did have preset interview questions (see Appendix G), I did not and could not read them exactly as written to every participant. The standardized way of asking questions, or structured interviews, was hardly appropriate for my participants because their personal backgrounds and experiences varied drastically. Their individual histories influenced their ways of participation and narration and quite often became unanticipated conversation topics by themselves during the interviews. This is in line with what Holstein and Gubrium (1995) explain about a unique interactional outcome that can rise from less formal interview research, which is ―not predefined but is instead

60 constructed in relation to the ongoing communicative contingencies of the interview process‖ (p. 14). For these reasons, the same questions could not always be asked across participants.

In addition, a highly structured interview was inappropriate in my study because the participants had traumatic memories of intensive and one-way interrogation that took place for one to three months at the South Korean security agency right after their entry. I did my best to make a natural, relaxed, and friendly atmosphere, in which I was positioned not as an interrogating stranger but as a co-contributor to the conversation with mutual interests. Figure 2.7 displays an example of how my interview was minimally structured. In order to let the participants frame their own life stories with autonomy and hence keep a priori categories to a minimum, I asked them to describe their happiness throughout their lives in graph form. They verbally outlined each phase of their lives while drawing the graph, which were explored in more detail in the later interview sessions. This interview task led the participants to talk about small episodes, feelings, and circumstances with excitement and frankness, foregrounding their knowledge-producing agency in the interview session.

Moreover, each participant‘s graph provided me with a rudimentary idea of what I refer to as the four phases of North Korean refugees‘ lives in this dissertation (see Figure

4.3). In addition to Figure 2.7 below, which was created by my participant BH, Appendix

H presents the graphs of happiness that the other six participants drew respectively during the interviews. Integrating all the seven graphs and the participants‘ descriptions along

61 with the graphs, I conceptualized the common phases of their lives in the stage of data analysis.

Figure 2.7. A graph of happiness throughout a participant‘s life

One of the fundamental principles of my interview research was the flexible use of interview time. As mentioned in the previous section, I often shared my personal stories with the participants. The interviewees and I sometimes talked for almost equal amounts of time in a session. At other times, my main role was to listen, in particular when the interviewees shared their life stories and their sequels spontaneously. Moreover, following Herzog‘s (2012) advice, I sometimes asked my participants to decide where to meet for the interview. By doing so, I was invited to ―their territory‖ (Herzog, 2012, p.

210), including their houses, schools, and favorite bookstores or cafés. This controlled the degree of comfort and often the interview topics in interesting ways.

Although all the participants agreed with an hour-long interview session per week in principle, the interview day and the amount of time per session were not regular. The use of an audio-recorder varied across situation and participants as well; DN, for example, did not agree to be audio-recorded for the first five sessions for security reasons. After building a closer relationship with me, she allowed me to partially audio- record the interview conversation, so I had to turn on and off the recorder several times in the session in progress.

Parker (2005) points out that ―people always say things that spill beyond the structure, before the interview starts and when the recorder has been turned off‖ (p. 53).

Whether audio-recorded or not, I took field notes by hand in every interview session in an effort to catch the details of the participants‘ narration. When I came back home after the interview, I took notes of what happened before and after the audio-recorded interview session on the day. Table 2.5 summarizes the numbers and the hours of interviews conducted with each participant. In the right column, numbers in the parentheses indicate the hours of interviews that were audio-recorded and note-taken or note-taken only.

Number of Hours of interviews Name interviews (Audio-recorded and not) TY 25 21 (19.5 + 1.5) HK 25 20 (18.5 + 1.5) SN 20 20.5 (17.5 + 3) ZO 20 22 (17 + 5) DN 15 15 (5 + 10) KM 18 20 (12 + 8) BH 18 20.5 (16 + 4.5)

Total numbers and hours 141 139 (105.5 + 33.5) Average per participant 20.14 19.86 (15.07 + 4.79)

Table 2.5. Summary of interview database

Observing classroom interaction

In addition to the semi-structured or informal, open-ended life story interviews, I regularly observed the participants‘ EFL classes offered by the British Council. The classroom context is an attractive research site in particular for those who explore language learners‘ social identity. van Lier (1988) makes the point that

classroom does not occur in a vacuum: before the lesson the learners come from somewhere and after the lesson they go somewhere else. What happens in those other places inevitably has important repercussions on what happens in the classroom […] even in foreign-language settings the L2 classroom has a certain role in society and a certain place in the learner‘s life (van Lier, 1988, p. 86).

I chose classroom observation as one of my research methods because the classroom context is the most conspicuous but natural hub where foreign language learners reveal

64 and enhance their language skills both in speech and in writing. Furthermore, as van Lier spells out, classroom participation is an extension from and to the refugee participants‘ social adjustment in South Korean society. Their regular presence in the classroom community is a social action through which they understand and negotiate multiple identities in relation to the other members and towards the outside world (both the United

Kingdom and South Korea are introduced and discussed by the culture-oriented curriculum at the British Council).

As shown in part in Figure 2.8, there were four square tables per class at the British

Council, which had 14 classrooms in total on two floors. A maximum of four students occupied a table at random and made a group for the classroom activities of the day.

Students often walked around the room for the activities, thrusting the tables to the wall as in the figure below.

Figure 2.8. A class at the British Council

I sat behind the class and took field notes by hand. As Figure 2.9 shows, the field note included my text and drawings or sketches. In rare cases, students asked me questions about the lesson contents in Korean or the teacher asked me to interpret an administrative notice into Korean for her students. Other than these occasions, I maintained my outsider position in the classes and paid quiet, undemonstrative attention to the tables where the refugee participants joined. An audio recorder was placed at the center of each table (i.e., four in total, two Idam R4s and two Apple I-Pods), turned on a few minutes before the class started and turned off once the classroom was mostly empty. The teachers asked their students to speak English only in the classes, although lots of small talk was informally made sotto voce in Korean.

Figure 2.9. A field note taken during the classroom observation

As noted earlier in this chapter, North Korean refugee students were not distinguished by their appearance or as EFF awardees from their South Korean colleagues. Although the participants‘ Korean accent might sound different from their

South Korean peers‘ in the conversation in Korean before or after the class or in the small talk during the class, few seemed to pay attention to it.

Figure 2.10 provides a summary of my data collection in different classes, at different times, and with different participants. Areas in light grey indicate the classes that I observed, with number of hours of observation and audio-recording in parentheses.

Areas in white indicate that the participants attended the British Council but I did not observe their classes. I did not observe the IELTS class that TY took from August to

December 2012 because she told me that little natural conversation was made there due to its purpose of test preparation. I did not observe HK‘s class from November 2012 to

January 2013 in order to focus on observing the Starter class. I did not obtain the teacher‘s consent on my observation of ZO and KM‘s class from April to June 2013.

Lastly, BH moved to another branch of the British Council in a Southern area of Seoul from April 2013. She was advised to skip the level of Elementary A due to her performance in the final exam in March 2013.

Areas in dark grey in Figure 2.10 indicate the period in which I continued interview research with the participants but they were no longer enrolled in the British Council. TY, as mentioned before, worked full time from January 2013. HK moved to another language institute in February 2013, in order to prepare for TOEIC. DN worked as an intern at the British Embassy for four weeks in April 2013. In sum, I observed, took

67 ethnographic field notes about, and audio-recorded 174 hours of classroom interaction.

Each session was 90 minutes, and all the classes met four days a week from Tuesday to

Friday.

Figure 2.10. Class observation data

The British Council was not the only place where my participants received formal language instruction during the period of data collection. Table 2.6 displays what other institutes each participant attended to learn English besides the British Council in 2012 and 2013. Their experiences in those institutes were a key topic in the interviews. Of the institutes listed below, I visited an English conversation meeting that a non-governmental organization (NGO) offered for a group of eight to ten North Korean refugees once a week for two hours. TY attended it from June to August 2012 and SN from February to

May 2013, and I went to the meeting with them twice each with permission from the

NGO. I did not audio-record or take field notes there, but joined in conversation with

68 some other refugees, volunteer teachers, and NGO‘s administrators. A more detailed description of their experiences in these institutes is provided where relevant in the analysis chapters.

Name Instruction A weekly English conversation meeting run by an NGO TY A private institute P (for IELTS) HK A private institute P (for TOEIC) A weekly English conversation meeting run by an NGO SN A weekly meeting with a conversation partner ZO None DN None KM None BH A private institute Y (for English grammar)

Table 2.6. The participants‘ formal EFL instruction apart from the British Council

Observing interaction outside of the classroom

Even after my recorder was turned off at the end of each interview or class, the conversation between me and my participants or the conversation among my participants naturally continued because I had become familiar to them and, over the course of my lengthy research, generated trust and rapport among the participants and between each participant and me (cf., Grinyer & Thomas, 2012). At times we had lunch at my house, watched a movie, went shopping, and went to the library. I also often found chatting on the way to or from the interview session or the class, casual conversation outside the

British Council, phone calls, emails, and online chats through a smart phone interesting

69 and relevant to my research concerns. I kept in mind any key terms or phrases used by my participants that had struck me that day, and when I came back home I took notes on them along with what I felt about them. When necessary, I recorded phone calls with my participants and saved our online chats and email exchanges as image files with their approval.

Artifacts

Chiseri-Strater and Sunstein (1997) define artifacts as ―material objects that represent the culture at site‖ (p. 78). I collected artifacts from the British Council and the participants throughout the fieldwork, in order to complement or support my understandings of the participants‘ culture at the language learning site. It includes official documents such as the EFF proposal, the British Council‘s monthly schedules, flyers, notices on the bulletin board, and the roll books in the classes that I observed. I also collected and photocopied the participants‘ writing samples, statements of purpose, textbooks and class handouts, test sheets, homework, and notebooks that I thought would be helpful to my investigation. The official documents gathered from the British Council provided me with insight into what the institute valued and highlighted in their educational service. The students‘ materials showed me ―another self‖ reflected in their writing, which might not be visible in the interviews and in classroom participation.

Data analysis

Ethnographers of communication use a variety of qualitative research methods for their data collection and analysis (Hailemichael, 1995; Rampton et al., 2002). Qualitative researchers emphasize that their analytic task begins from the first moments of data collection (Glesne, 1999; Hatch, 2002; Marshall & Rossman, 2006). In the research site, I tracked not only my immediate observations but also my tentative interpretations and impressions about them. This record of immediate reflections served as the groundwork for a more structured analytic phase in my study. This section reports my systematic methods for analyzing both the participants‘ language use and the content of what they said.

I followed Hatch‘s (2002) guidelines for inductive analysis and used King and

Horrocks‘ (2010) coding strategies to code and categorize my data. Induction, the most widespread approach to qualitative analysis, begins with investigating particular pieces of evidence within data, which later on formulate a meaningful pattern when viewed as a whole. In order to be familiar with what is included in my data, I read my field notes and artifacts and listened to audio-recorded interviews (105.5 hours) and classroom interaction (174 hours) for four weeks. With this big picture of my dataset in mind, I re- read and re-listened to the data and wrote down anything that came to my mind.

Brinkmann (2013) explains this task as a data-driven coding, in which ―the researcher starts out without codes, and develops them upon reading the material‖ (p. 62). This strategy helped me have a fresh and accurate sense of events and ideas in my data beyond

71 my familiarity with the participants and the research site owing to the extended period of my study.

Starting from this informal set of ideas from the whole data, I created five domains with sub-categories that were identified most saliently and supported by the entire data without any counter-evidence: (1) membership in community, (2) learning situation, (3) learning episode, (4) individual action/reaction/taste, and (5) metalinguistic discourse.

My understanding of domains fits with Hatch‘s (2002) definition as categories that are

―understood by large numbers of people with common cultural understandings‖ or

―developed within smaller groups with specialized interests and needs‖ (p. 165). The five domains also fit with Hymes‘ (1972) units for sociolinguistic analysis that I examined earlier in this chapter: speech community, speech situation, speech event, speech style, and ways of speaking. In contrast to the aforementioned data-driven coding, Brinkmann

(2013) calls this approach with domains a concept-driven coding, which is ―developed in advance by the researcher, either by looking at selected portions of the material or by consulting the existing literature‖ (p. 62).

Based upon these domains, I selected data excerpts to support each sub-category.

The data were extracted from my field notes, audio-recorded and digitalized class conversations and interview sessions. The artifacts were analyzed with regard to their reflection of or impact on what participants did in the class or what they said in the interviews or in casual conversation.

I transcribed the selected audio data using GoldWave v5.70

(http://www.goldwave.com). As for the transcription of classroom interaction data, where

72 the participants code-switched between English and Korean, I adopted Jefferson‘s (2004) conversation analysis conventions (see Appendix I). As for interview data, I first transcribed them in Korean as heard and then translated them into English on the right side of the Microsoft Word document, following King and Horrock‘s (2010) transcription system (p. 145). Although the analysis chapters in this dissertation present interview extracts that were translated into English only, I put Korean and English transcripts side by side and re-read them back and forth while analyzing the data. By doing so, I minimized misrepresentation of the participants‘ own expressions and intentions due to translation. I identified (1) descriptive codes and (2) interpretive codes that King and

Horrocks (2010) suggest (p. 157) within the transcribed texts with the five domains above. I used Microsoft Excel to compile and sort out the set of codes.

As a result of this search for patterns of meaning that emerged from the set of codes and within domains, I created four master outlines that reflect the relationships within and among the codes: (1) the divergent sociohistorical and sociopolitical backgrounds of foreign language learning between North and South Korea, (2) the expectations that emerged and were held by the North Korean refugee participants based on such backgrounds and how they change with time or context, (3) the challenges that the North

Korean refugees encountered that forced them to re-evaluate such expectations, and (4) the way their identities changed by reacting to or overcoming such challenges within the target language community. The first outline is mainly discussed in Chapter 3 and the rest in Chapters 4 and 5. However, the boundaries of these outlines are not clear-cut but interdependently situated in chronology.

Conclusions

In this chapter, I examined methodological concerns in the tradition of ethnography of communication and situated my research questions within it. I also explained how I obtained access to the British Council, how I collected my data, and how I integrated and analyzed the data.

I made three efforts to ensure the trustworthiness of my research. First, I collected as many data as possible within a planned time frame so that themes in the analytic domains could be raised recursively across cases and developed as individual ideas.

Secondly, I pursued ―thick description‖ in the course of data analysis and write up

(Geertz, 1973):

doing ethnography is establishing rapport, selecting informants, transcribing texts, taking genealogies, mapping fields, keeping a diary, and so on. But it is not these things, techniques and received procedures that define the enterprise. What defines it is the kind of intellectual effort it is: an elaborate venture in, to borrow a notion from Gilbert Ryle, ―thick description‖ (Geertz, 1973, p. 6).

Geertz (1973) believes that ethnographic writing is ―really our own constructions of other people‘s constructions of what they and their compatriots are up to‖ (p. 9). In order to make my interpretation trustworthy, I strove to provide rich and detailed descriptions of the phenomena that I studied and to identify the contexts within which such phenomena had meaning.

Thirdly and lastly, as presented earlier in this chapter, I kept writing my dissertation journal in the stage of research design and throughout the fieldwork. Following

Schilling‘s (2013) advice that field researchers ―need a private space into which they can 74 pour their emotions and immediate reactions‖ (p. 258), I kept notes on my informal perceptions and feelings about the research procedures, site, and participants. Although the diary notes were not formally included as a source of data analysis, they helped me keep in mind my own perspectives on this study and how they shaped my interviews and observations over time.

Chapter 3: North Korean Refugees as English Learners:

Past Policies and Current Landscape

Introduction

The issues that North Korean refugees (hereafter NKRs) face in their marginal relationship to English-learning communities in South Korea have a sociohistorically complex origin. Understanding these border-crossers‘ life trajectory necessarily precedes discussion of what their learning activity in progress looks like or how to teach them

English. What North Koreans learn before entering the South, when, where, with whom, why, and how together wield a potential influence over their social action of learning

English in the host nation. However, research on this population has been conducted in two strands: in one, researchers focused on North Korea and its language education (e.g.,

Lee et al., 2005), while in other, they examined the NKRs‘ general language adaptation in

South Korea (e.g., Jung, 2002). Since these questions have been discussed separately, what the refugees bring as their sociocultural heritage and how it interacts with local resources in South Korea is an area that remains understudied.

To address this lacuna, this chapter examines English education policies and practices in North and South Korea and their impact on NKRs‘ English learning in South

Korea. Using Spolsky‘s (2004) concepts of language policy, this chapter provides a landscape of English as a foreign language (EFL) management, ideology, and practice in 76 the two states. Also, drawing upon the practice of hidden identities in second language

(L2) learning, the final section of this chapter investigates why the NKR identity is largely hidden and how such concealment can impinge on the refugees‘ circumstances and on their process of L2 learning. Reviewing scholarly journals, books, news articles and mass media, this chapter integrates the diverse perspective of each resource on the tie among the foreign language education policies of the two Koreas, NKRs, their migration process, and current policies supporting their EFL education.

Within the 5,000 years of Korean history, there were not always two Koreas.

English has been taught on the Korean Peninsula for 131 years, since the establishment of the royal school of interpretation and translation in Seoul in 1883 (Kim, 2009). That being said, foreign language learning as a broader goal was not pursued for the next 80 years, given domestic rebellions and subsequent political unrest, the struggle among the surrounding superpowers, and the Japanese occupation from 1910 to 1945. In spite of this chaotic state of affairs, the late nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries saw the flowering of modern civilization in Korea. The elite and the rich had the benefit of learning English, among other subjects, at governmental institutes or private high schools run by foreign missionaries (cf., Kim-Rivera, 2002). After 1945, the nation was politically divided into North and South Korea under the temporary trusteeship of the

Soviet Union and the United States, but the two states have the same ethnic and linguistic background. Since the national division was formalized by the establishment of separate governments in 1948, however, all traffic and communication have been blocked between the communist North and the capitalist South.

Within this historical context, over 26,000 NKRs who fled to South Korea hitherto are a symbolic group, embodying the partial North-South reunion. Often described as

―the future that came in advance,‖ NKRs have been expected to adopt the role of sociocultural mediators when inter-Korean communication eventually resumes.

Lamenting North Korea‘s despotic control over its people, Lankov (2013a) asserts that

―hope, therefore, should be pinned on the refugee community in South Korea‖ for future improvements of the North-South relations (p. 230). In this light, it is of keen importance to explore how NKRs adapt to their new surroundings, which can foster their potential for key roles if North-South reconciliation occurs. Evidently, learning English is one area of adaptation, considering that the demand for EFL skills drastically increases as NKRs enter South Korea. Indeed, the political and ideological polarization of the North and

South that resulted in a divergence in level of development (which Figure 3.1 reveals plainly) also resulted in divergent routes of English language teaching (ELT) for the past

60 years. This chapter focuses on these two ELT histories, which can then explain the liminality of NKRs as EFL learners in South Korea. To start with, the following section examines South Korea‘s modern history of English education.

Figure 3.1. The Koreas at night (NASA, 2014)8

English education in South Korea

English was positioned as a language of irrefutable importance from the very beginning of the restoration of postcolonial South Korea. During the U.S. military occupation

(1945-1948), South Korea included English in the national secondary school curriculum and in college entrance exams. It also developed the national syllabus and textbooks, revitalizing extant Departments of English in universities (Kim, 2011). The American

8 This astronaut photograph was taken on January 30, 2014 and released to public online on February 24, 2014 by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) (http://www.earthobservatory.nasa.gov/IOTD/view.php?id=83182). It shows that North Korea is almost completely dark at night compared to neighboring South Korea and China except for its capital city Pyongyang, due to its power shortages. 79 intervention continued after the Korean War (1950-1953). American non-fiction books were imported; several Pro-American organizations and academic societies were founded, arranging scholarly exchanges between the two states; and the American Peace

Corps dispatched English teachers to South Korea (Kim, 2009). As more and more South

Korean scholars who studied abroad came back to the country with improved English,

English was acknowledged as a stamp of privilege in the mid-1960s (Song, 2001).

The South Korean economy, politics, and military showed a tremendous advancement toward the country‘s improving global standing in the 1970s and 1980s.

Although South Korea gradually reduced its reliance on the United States during those decades, the superpower was still its primary trade partner and military ally. This relationship, among others, made English proficiency important for hiring and promotion in corporations as well as in college applications and grades. In the 1990s, English learning became even more rampantly popular from early childhood through the working years. Researchers have paid attention to this social phenomenon, often translated as

English frenzy. They have documented the extensive scale of the private English- education market, including intensive English camps in and out of the state, early overseas education (Park & Bae, 2009), English-only villages set up by regional governments (Lee, 2011), and standardized English proficiency test scores required from white-collar job seekers (Park, 2011).

According to Tsui and Tollefson (2007), a country‘s management of foreign language education is achieved in two ways: ―starting learning at a younger age or increasing the number of class hours‖ (p. 6). South Korea saw both in the 1990s. As a

80 result, today‘s students learn English for an average of 730 hours over ten years at school, from Grade 3 to Grade 12 (Song & Kim, 2013). 67.2% of them learn it at private institutes in early childhood (Kim, 2013), and 89.9% during the primary school years,

Grades 1-6 (Kang, 2009). It is difficult to estimate the average number of hours of

English education outside formal education institutions due to individual and regional differences. Nonetheless, there is a widely cited case in which an interviewee in a television documentary calculated 15,548 hours of her English learning from Grade 7 to college, both in and out of school, (i.e., 4 hours and 15 minutes per day) (MBC, 2006).

For this long journey as EFL learners, South Koreans spend 6.2 billion dollars per year, which is 47.4% of the entire private education market scale (Statistics Korea, 2013).

English learning even continues in the workplace. According to the Federation of

Korean Industries (2007), 88% of the South Korean corporations run an internal English- learning program for their employees. In addition, English communication skills have been on the top of corporations‘ list of hiring and promoting standards since the mid-

1990s.

In terms of pedagogy, starting in the 1970s, South Korea‘s national English curricular reform began to emphasize pragmatism, colloquialism, the suprasegmental aspect of pronunciation, and the suprasentential level, following the global trend moving away from the grammar translation method and toward communicative language teaching

(Kim, 2009). Since the 1990s, few Presidents failed to announce ELT policies in the early phase of their term, including plans to establish English education cities, employ more

81 native speakers of English teachers at schools, or develop the National English Ability

Test (NEAT), to name a few.

However, researchers have pointed out a gap between such goals on the policymaking stage and most actual classes, which retained an exclusive focus on grammatical rules and their application through translating sentences (Kim, 2003; Lee,

1996). Although corporations began to adopt interviews or group discussions in English to observe applicants‘ oral language skills as early as the mid-2000s (Park, 2011), public education policies and practices have not always been successful in meeting South

Koreans‘ post-secondary EFL needs. One example is the failure of the Korea Institute for

Curriculum and Evaluation to implement NEAT. Developed with $42.5 billion USD of the national budget, NEAT has not gained credibility as a standardized test and was partly abolished in 2013 (Jung & Jung, 2014). Likewise, although a number of South

Koreans spend almost half their lives learning English, from early childhood to adulthood, the ways to learn it are idiosyncratic, multifaceted, and thus not completely predicted by policy decisions.

Several perspectives have been offered to explain this lifelong obsession over

English learning in contemporary South Korea. J. Park (2009) highlights the deep-rooted influence of Confucianism in South Koreans‘ centuries-long enthusiasm for education.

Because the pre-modern class system collapsed in the early twentieth century, their educational attention turned to English language skills in the late twentieth century, a means to increase social standing in modern times. Providing a sociopolitical view, J. S.

Park‘s book (2009) sheds light on South Koreans‘ interdiscursive anxiety that English is

82 eternally unreachable to them despite the long and intensive investment in learning it.

Conscious of the significance of English in this era of globalization, South Koreans denigrate themselves as ―lacking sufficient competence to use English meaningfully‖ (J.

S. Park 2009, p. 26). This self-deprecation spatiotemporally permeates the whole social discourse, including the language policy debate (J. S. Park 2009, Chapter 3), casual language play (Chapter 4), newspaper texts (Park, 2010), and television entertainment shows (Chapter 5). Interconnected to one another, these metalinguistic discourses reproduce and naturalize South Koreans‘ self-image as illegitimate speakers of English. J.

S. Park‘s (2009) conversation analysis demonstrates that this self-portrait is reinforced in everyday interactions.

The burden of English learning carried by South Koreans is magnified through parents‘ zeal for their children to be proficient in English. Block (2012) explains this parental intent as ―the fear of an eventuality […] that their [South Korean parents‘] children will be surpassed by other children‖ (p. 278). Also, this specter of English is perpetuated when they drive their children into early education programs that instill the children‘s own English paranoia. In a recent survey, 83.5% of the South Korean parent respondents ―completely‖ or ―generally‖ agree that when learning English, the sooner the better (Trend Monitor, 2013). Indeed, as previously mentioned, most South Korean children begin to learn English before fully acquiring their mother tongue.

In the field of child education, this preschool period is considered critical for family involvement in a child‘s educational advancement (Li & Hu, 2011). One‘s access to

English learning in South Korea usually depends on family social capital, which

83 comprises the resources that family members give one another for social action

(Coleman, 1988). The family intervention is either financial or personal. Parents utilize time, money, knowledge, and connections to search for well-known private institutes or tutors, send their pre-university children to English-speaking countries, and even break up their families to support the educational migration known as the ―wild geese families‖ phenomenon (Lee, 2010). Through these activities, the practice of English education reproduces and is reproduced by what a family values, shares, and fears.

This family-ownedness of English educational practice, however, is not always noticed by South Koreans because it has been so for decades and the patterns are echoed by most classmates and neighbors. As Blommaert (1999) points out, a linguistic ideology is normalized as a ―hegemonic pattern in which the ideological claims are perceived as

‗normal‘ ways of thinking and acting‖ in a society (pp. 10-11). On the other hand, the

―normal‖ South Korean attitude towards English learning can be unfamiliar to outsiders such as NKRs, a large number of whom enter the South with interrupted schooling and alone, experiencing family loss or separation. NKRs also have a linguistic ideology from before their migration, so to provide context to the disjuncture they experience, the following section probes English education in North Korea.

English education in North Korea

The status of English in North Korea has dramatically evolved from being banned to becoming the most prominent foreign tongue. According to Song (2004), three reasons can account for North Korea‘s gradual attention to English education in the 1970 and

1980s. First, English proficiency was crucial for access to the latest developments in science and technology worldwide. Second, North Korea needed English speakers in order to globally propagate and hence solidify its own communist, or Juche, ideology.

Third, North Korean students were indoctrinated into believing that they learned English, an enemy language, in order to beat the United States and its allies in the event of war. In contrast to the family-driven practice of English education in South Korea, English learning is heavily guided by the authorities in North Korea, and people have had little access to English learning that is not sponsored by the government. Specifically, changes in English learning policy in North Korea can be attributed to a change of the Supreme

Leader‘s personal attitude.

The legal routes for English learning available to North Koreans include: (1) primary, secondary, and higher education (Ministry of Unification, 2013a),9 (2) extracurricular education at a national institute (Jung, 2013), (3) study abroad on government scholarship (Lee, 2009), and (4) a 15-minute-long television program about conversational English (Lee et al., 2005). It is hard to estimate how prominent or effective these routes are. Above all, not much is known about what goes on in North

Korea in general, owing to its closed-door policy. For instance, an encyclopedic volume on ELT policies and practices in 16 Asian countries, edited by Kam and Wong (2003), excludes North Korea due to the lack of information for the microanalysis of challenges and dilemmas in relation to ELT there.

9 The North Korean regime touts its 12-year-long free education system (i.e., two years at a preschool, four years at a primary school, and six years at a secondary school before the nominal school reform in 2013). However, foreign news media and the North Korean refugees‘ testimonies have exposed its poor condition. 85

However, there are reasons to believe that the legal opportunities for English learning are stunted by North Korea‘s decades-long shortage of food and supplies, along with the low level of GDP per capita, $783 USD in 2012 (Kim, 2014). Public education takes a direct hit from these dire economic circumstances, as the national treasury cannot afford to provide any operating expenses for schools. Since the government pays nothing but the teachers‘ meager salaries, it is the parents who are in charge of any other expenditures, such as fees for supplies, repairs, heating, or field trips. This financial burden has resulted in a chronically low attendance rate (50-70%) (Kim, 2013), a rising illiteracy rate (Noh, 2011), a growing distrust of public education, and the prevalence of private tutoring among the elite. North Korean authorities, notorious for their discrimination based upon social class, further widen this education inequality by clinging to special education for the gifted. English education is no exception. Although international news media report on North Korea‘s rising TOEFL scores every year or on how English teachers are dispatched from Canada, New Zealand, and the United

Kingdom to North Korea, the situation is not improving for most North Koreans.

Other channels for learning English are, in principle, blocked. There is no freedom of intercity or international travel. The importation of foreign media—books, newspapers, movies, dramas, pictures, music—is prohibited. No Internet access, international phone calls, or text messages are allowed. Most North Koreans have few chances to meet foreigners throughout their lives. Foreign visitors such as business people, journalists, or visiting scholars may walk on the street or speak to people only under a North Korean official‘s supervision.

From a sociolinguistic point of view, English is extremely foreign in North Korea.

As widely examined with Kachru (1985) as the central theory, in Expanding-circle countries, English is a foreign language because it is not spoken in daily conversation

(see Chapter 1). Even so, people in that circle are not necessarily excluded from all

English-related resources outside the language classroom. They communicate with citizens of other countries and access information around the globe through both online and offline channels. This individual activity, taking advantage of advancements in telecommunication and transportation, expands the opportunities for informal exposure to

English, which can impact language development.

In contrast, North Koreans are technically EFL learners but learn ―culture-free‖

English, shut off from mass media, traveling, and native speakers of English. This is similar but distinct from what European linguists call a ―native-culture-free code‖ in the context of English as a lingua franca (ELF) (Pölzl, 2003, p. 5). English in North Korea is similar to English in Europe in that neither activates the culture of a speech community from which English originates. They differ, however, in that the latter is recontextualized for functional communicative purposes. In other words, to Europeans, English is a

―language of communication‖ rather than a ―language of identification,‖ or a cultural symbol of who they are (Cali et al., 2008, p. 133). In North Korea, English fulfills neither role but stays afloat among the affluent elite without being popularized and thus recontextualized as a widespread code. The government‘s dilemma between cultivating human resources to remain an international player and maintaining its obscurantist policy has led to the current precarious status of English among its citizens.

North Korea‘s fear that people may abandon the idolization of Kim Il-Sung and his family has affected its English education in several ways. First, English phonemes, alphabets, and grammar have been introduced to students as if they were merely technical tools without any pragmatic implication. This approach led the nation to adhere to the grammar translation method for over half a century (Lee et al., 2005). Moreover, among the four aspects of language learning—that is, listening, speaking, reading and writing—

North Korean ELT has paid the most attention to reading; through passages in the

English textbooks, the regime tries to perpetuate the precepts of communism into a student‘s mind and legitimize its dictatorship, as it does through other school subjects

(Kim & Choi, 1999).

Textbook analysts have found four characteristic themes to recur in North Korea‘s

English textbooks in all grade levels (e.g., Ahn, 2012; Park et al., 2001): (1) a biography and a revolutionary history of the Great Leader and his family, (2) declamations against capitalism, (3) an emphasis on group activities and collectivity, and (4) the role of

English in acquiring science and technical knowledge. It is also interesting that an overwhelming majority of English-speaking protagonists in the textbook dialogues are

North Koreans; few native speakers of English appear. To sum up, North Korea does not want its students to take an interest in the native or global context that surrounds English, such as who speaks English, in what circumstances, or with what kinds of concerns, sentiments, habits, and relationships.

By most measures, North Korea‘s unorthodox foreign language education policy of teaching culture-free English to isolate its people from the outside world has failed.

Despite the government‘s best efforts to control and seclude its people, more and more

North Koreans do and will recognize a schism between the country‘s ideology and a fast- changing global landscape. 100,000 to 300,000 North Koreans have defected since

1953,10 many of whom retain ties with their former comrades through confidential correspondences and remittances (Song, 2012). It is easily inferred that these escapees often become messengers of what is going on in the world for North Korean residents.

Within the country, one in twelve North Koreans uses a non-smart phone, and even the IP addresses generated by Apple‘s or Nokia‘s smart phones are infrequently but persistently detected from the outside (Ahn, 2013). Video players are smuggled from China to meet the demands of the wealthy, who have acquired a taste for international films and television dramas (Kang & Park, 2011). Advancements in information technology, which have promoted a global exchange of popular culture since the turn of the millennium, have also made North Korea‘s long ramparts of isolation falter.

North Koreans‘ growing awareness of the world beyond the national border motivates them to map out their own future. Self-determinism is a relatively novel idea in this country, whose socialistically planned economy system feeds, lodges, and clothes people for free, at least in theory. However, as they come to understand the country‘s wretched global position and the dominance of neoliberal capitalism in the international community, North Koreans have little remaining faith in the state‘s capacity to preserve its insular national economy. Recent media report a high level of distrust among North

Koreans towards the government‘s welfare and education policies (Moon, 2013). This

10 The number of North Korean escapees is roughly estimated and not always agreed by the researchers because North Koreans conceal their identities in the course of migration. 89 skepticism brings about a brisk private tutoring market for and by the upper middle class, who want to prepare their own or their children‘s future independently from public education. English is one of the most important subjects in the field of private education.

To put it differently, North Koreans‘ English learning today is a type of self- improvement, as they begin to awaken from the ―mass hypnosis‖ in the ideals of communism that has enthralled them for the past half a century. Again, however, the access to this self-empowerment strongly depends on one‘s social class and economic power.

Spolsky (2004) analyzes language policy into three components: management, beliefs, and practices (p. 5). These exist across many different layers, from the enactment of a law to a family‘s beliefs and activities. This chapter so far has investigated ELT management, beliefs, and practices in diverse levels in two drastically different soils:

South Korea, often called ―the Republic of English,‖ with its pan-national enthusiasm for

English learning; and North Korea, ―the last hermit kingdom,‖ with a recent awareness of what English ability means in the twenty-first century. Table 3.1 summarizes and compares their distinct ELT policies in chronological order. The states‘ political, ideological, and economic divergence resulted in their different language policy types that Johnson (2013) delineates (p. 10). While South Korea‘s EFL community has developed bottom-up language policy largely through family involvement, North Korean

ELT has been almost exclusively governed from the top. It is only in 2013 that a non-free

English language course appeared in North Korea, which opened a wider range of choices for individual learning (Jung, 2013).

The first English education in Korea (1883) South Korea North Korea Under the control of the United Under the control of the Soviet 1945 1945 States Union The Korean War (1950-1953) The use of English was banned. American intervention in Russian was the only foreign 1950s (re)constructing public English 1953 language taught at secondary education schools. - Fulbright-affiliated organizations An edict on the promotion of invited Korean and American foreign language education was 1960s scholars for cooperative studies. 1964 issued. Both Russian and English - American Peace Corps taught were taught at schools. English in Korean schools. A gap existed between the Pyongyang University of Foreign pragmatism that the national 1970s 1970 Language Education was school curriculum exhibited and established. the actual English classes. English emerged as the leading The government loosened 1970s restrictions on South Koreans‘ foreign language. 1980s overseas travel after the Seoul English and Russian were taught Asian Games (1986) and Seoul 1980s on an 80/20 basis. Olympics (1988). - Communicative language teaching attained popularity. Primary schools started 1990s 1986 - The era of ―English frenzy‖ compulsory English education. began. - President Kim Young-Sam announced his globalization policy. - The English Program in Korea Following the dissolution of the (EPIK) was established by the Soviet Union, English completely 1995 Ministry of Education to place 1990s replaced Russian in the school native speakers of English in curriculum. public schools throughout Korea. - TOEIC rose as the primary standardized English test for white-collar employment. Continued

Table 3.1. A chronicle of English language teaching in Korea 91

Table 3.1 Continued

Primary schools started Primary schools stopped 1997 1992 compulsory English education. compulsory English education. - The central TV station aired a - Under the influence of weekly program called ―TV constructionism, the English English‖. curriculum stressed learner 2000 agency and creativity for - The Supreme Leader Kim Jong- performing activities, minimizing Il asked U.S. Secretary of State the teacher‘s role as a facilitator. Madeleine Albright to send English teachers to North Korea. 2000s -The notion of differentiated English education was abolished education depending on the 2001 at schools in rural areas. learner‘s level of English appeared. The British Council started - Corporations adopted interviews 2002 running ELT training programs at or group discussions in English three universities. for recruitment. Primary schools restarted - The Presidential Transition 2008 Committee proposed English compulsory English education. Private English tutoring became immersion education policy. 2010s - TaLK (Teach and Learn Korea), popular in major cities. the teaching and traveling scholarship program for English- - The British Council started to 2008 speaking foreigners, was run its training programs at six launched. universities in total. - WEST (Work, English, Study, - The Secondary Education Act Travel), the exchange visitor 2011 underscored the importance of program, was launched based on ELT. the Korea-U.S. summit - The Canada-Democratic agreement. People‘s Republic of Korea (DPRK) Knowledge Partnership Jeju English Education City partly 2011 Program started. opened. NEAT was available for UNICEF supported North Korea‘s 2012 2012 individual taking. English curricular reform. Grand People‘s Study House Levels 2 and 3 of NEAT were 2013 2013 offered a non-free English abolished. language course for adults.

North Korean refugees as English learners

South and North Koreans have developed entirely different EFL practices with different beliefs under entirely distinct governmental efforts for almost 70 years. What happens if a learner moves from one nation to the other? This is not a merely theoretical question. As of June 2014, 26,854 North Koreans have escaped at the risk of their lives and entered

South Korea (Ministry of Unification, 2014).11 How do these migrants recognize and negotiate a new EFL management system? How do their beliefs about English change?

What do they currently do with the English language? To explore these important questions, understanding the North and the South Korean EFL learning contexts is essential, which is why the previous two sections of this chapter were devoted to this topic.

One observation that should not be overlooked, however, is that historical records are inherently biased; history generally tells the story of heroes and what did happen, not the story of ordinary people and what did not happen. This is the case in particular in the hierarchical structure of North Korean society, where the sociopolitical and sociocultural distance between heroes (those with power) and non-heroes (those who display courage to benefit the greater good) is maximal. For example, top universities affiliated with the

British Council‘s training program, English curricula supported by the UNICEF, and the

Grand People‘s Study House are either located or only available in Pyongyang, the capital city (see Table 3.1). Since North Koreans have no freedom of movement, and

11 Other than 26,854 North Koreans who managed to proceed to South Korea, the escapees ended up either settling there illegally or being granted refugee status in over 20 countries around the world (Song, 2012, p. 93). 93

Pyongyang citizenship can be obtained in principle only by the government‘s rare nomination of outstanding scholars, artists, or veterans, these programs are not available to most North Koreans.

The urban-rural education gap is shown in many other ways in North Korea.

Private tutoring is available only in a few cities where prestigious universities are located, as most of the tutors are full-time professors or students there. In striking contrast, as also presented in Table 3.1, English education has been abolished at schools in farming and fishing villages in North Korea since April 2003, guided by the government‘s curricular reform in 2001 (Kihoilbo, 2003).12 The ostensible reason for this abolition was to vitalize the local characteristics that each region had preserved, for instance, by teaching students how to drive an agricultural tractor in a farm area. However, as Lee and his colleagues

(2005) infer, it is probable that the decision was driven by a lack of manpower, buildings, materials, and other operating expenses. It illustrates another way that the history of ELT in North Korea is the history of the socially privileged and academically gifted in urban areas.

In this sense, this select group of English learners in North Korea does not overlap much with the population of NKRs in South Korea; only 1.96% of the latter are from

Pyongyang (Ministry of Unification, 2014), and 69.4% decided to escape due to the economic difficulties (M. Hong, 2010). While 85.2% received at least a secondary school education while residing in North Korea (see Table 3.2), this level of education does not necessarily correspond with an English-learning experience, considering the aforesaid

12 No news media have yet reported if and when English education has resumed in those regions. 94 reality of North Korean education. Jung and Lim (2009) report that 55 out of their 99

NKR respondents had learned English at secondary school in North Korea, for an average of 45 months. This figure, however, tells us nothing about either the quality or the environment of their learning experience. Rather, responses from the remaining 44 participants in Jung and Lim‘s survey seem more revealing. Of the 44 respondents who never formally learned English in North Korea, 14 knew how to read and write the

English alphabets, 6 knew that English was a language used in foreign countries, 4 had heard of several English words, while 16 did not have any kind of knowledge of English from North Korea (Jung & Lim, 2009, p. 102).13 This is indeed a significant gap between the 55 and the 44, both societally and individually. Can it be redressed as refugees cross the border and soon see the necessity of learning English of their own will?

Age at the moment of entry to South Korea 0-9 10-19 20-29 30-39 40-49 50-59 60- 4.4% 12.2% 27.8% 30% 16.1% 5.1% 4.4% Educational level in North Korea Not-yet- Primary Secondary 2-year 4-year college Preschool Uneducated Etc. educated school school college and over 2.8% 1% 6.7% 69% 9.2% 7% 3% 0.5% Occupation in North Korea Economically Art/ Laborer Service Military Professional Managerial Etc. inactive athletics 50.4% 37.7% 4% 2.6% 2% 1.6% 0.8% 0.8% Table 3.2. The demography of North Korean refugees in South Korea (Ministry of Unification, February 2014)

13 The authors categorize one response under ―et cetera,‖ which they do not specify. Three participants had no response. 95

Another notable experience that NKRs have in common before the entry to the

South is an illegal stay or a stopover in one or more intermediate nations. China, bordering the northern provinces of North Korea along two rivers, is the first place to visit for most escapees. Due to China‘s pro-North Korean stance and its police cooperation with North Korea‘s draconian pursuit and repatriation of the escapees, the escapees then sneak into the next neighboring countries if possible: Thai, Laos,

Cambodia, Vietnam, Mongolia, and/or Myanmar, in order of frequency (M. Hong, 2010).

The total length of stay in the intermediate countries varies widely, from a few months to over ten years (see Haggard & Noland, 2011 for discussion of the perils during their escape process).

One circumstance of this transition period between the North home and the South destination is that education almost completely ceases. While fleeing, hiding, and often going through a vicious spiral of repatriation to and re-escape from North Korea, the stateless can little afford to pay attention to their own education or that of children.

According to one of my research participants, some of them are lucky enough to attend a

Chinese school with false identities or to meet a missionary tutor in privacy (HK, personal communication January 9, 2013). However, such a learning environment is volatile given the potential danger of being disclosed, a threat which requires learners to flee to safety.

North Korean refugees as English learners in South Korea

Thousands of North Koreans venture across the border every year, disillusioned with

Stalinism, poverty, tyranny, social discrimination, and the infringement of personal freedom and human rights. Their extended and insecure travel aggravates the education gap with their new neighbors in South Korean society, a gap exacerbated by the different ideologies and practices in the foreign language education policies. For this reason, out of a wide variety of knowledge and skills to acquaint themselves with in the host society, recent news media identify English learning as one of the most challenging tasks for

NKRs, one that demands time, dedication, and personal cost (e.g., Kwon, 2013). As will be demonstrated in the upcoming chapters of this dissertation, this challenge is severely underrepresented. One of the key facts that I learned in the field work for this dissertation is that few South Koreans perceive English learning as NKRs‘ fundamental survival need in the country. South Koreans hardly mention ELT when they talk about the domestic refugee support; English ability is much beyond the scope of the needs that South

Koreans identify as the most basic and urgent for someone living in their country.

The educational program of Settlement Support Center for North Korean Refugees

(also called, and henceforth referred to as, Hanawon) exemplifies this exclusion of

English knowledge from what people believe the fresh refugees need to settle down in

South Korea. Affiliated with the Ministry of Unification, Hanawon runs a three-month- long camp for the new entrants with four objectives (Ministry of Unification, 2013b, p.

169): (1) to stabilize the NKRs‘ physical and mental health, (2) to educate them about

South Korean society (such as South Koreans‘ historical views and language use, and the

97 notions of liberal democracy and the market economy), (3) to provide them with a career guidance service and intensive vocational training, and (4) to cultivate their will to settle and introduce them to the government‘s continuous support for the next five years. Here the only content relative to the English language is a lesson about Western loanwords used in South Korea.14 A remarkable lexical gap exists between the North and the South, whose people have had almost no communication for nearly 70 years; English borrowings are a staple of this gap, with which experts say that NKRs struggle for about a year after the Hanawon period (Joo, 2014a; Jung, 2002).

Regarding this challenge, the principal of an alternative school for North Korean youth once told me that he did not care about the NKRs‘ English learning because what currently matters to them is learning English loanwords. However, learning English has almost nothing to do with learning English loanwords, both linguistically and socially.

Linguistically, English words are adapted into Korean and follow its patterns, such as losing their prosodic location, gaining epenthetic vowels, or replacing a phoneme with another (De Jong & Cho, 2012). The social consequence of this type of education is to reduce vocational opportunities for NKRs; after the Hanawon training, the jobs they are able to seek are limited to positions such as: electronic component assembler, quality manager, tailor, skin care specialist, caregiver, cook, heavy equipment operator, car mechanic, and welder (Ministry of Unification, 2013b, p. 171). No matter what they did in the North, their careers discontinue or are downwardly mobile.

14 North Korea made an effort to purify its language by converting about 25,000 loans into pure Korean words from 1964 to 1986 (Yurn, 2003). However, English borrowings are not uncommon today, as the IT terms are directly borrowed (Jung, 2011) and the language in smuggled South Korean TV dramas and films has become familiar to young North Koreans in the 2010s (Shin, 2014). 98

In an effort to preserve their socioeconomic status, an unknown but considerable number of NKRs learn English. Their learning can be most clearly understood with reference to language educational histories of both home and host societies. That is, individual NKRs‘ habitus as EFL learners is linked to how North and South Koreas have orchestrated divergent ELT policies. Bourdieu (1990) defines habitus as ―embodied history, internalized as a second nature and so forgotten as history‖ and thus as ―the active presence of the whole past of which it is the product‖ (p. 56). The notion of habitus will be discussed in more detail in Chapter 4. It is certain that NKRs are EFL beginners in

South Korea, but most specifically NKRs are symbolic actors with specific expectations about the effect of language ability in the local context. What merits attention here, however, is the relationship between their past in the North and their present in the South.

From this point of view, it is not surprising that NKRs face with a variety of challenges to join and contribute to the existing South Korean EFL community. Once they ―graduate‖ from Hanawon, nobody forces them to do anything, and this sudden and boundless freedom astonishes them. The government interacts with 177 nonprofit organizations that address the NKRs‘ immediate needs against such culture shock, and implement various support policies (Ministry of Unification, 2013b). One such policy is to lower the bar for university entrance. NKRs are relatively easily accepted to universities through a special screening, not in competition with South Koreans, and exempt from paying tuition for eight semesters. Encouraged by this benefit, over 1,000

North Koreans enrolled in South Korean universities in 2012 (Lee, 2012a).

Surprisingly, however, J. Hong‘s (2010) survey indicates that nearly a half of them take an indefinite leave of absence or drop out of school. A more recent report says that only one out of ten NKR university students earn their bachelor‘s degrees (Joo, 2014b).

The lack of English competence for college courses is one of the main reasons for this departure.15 Although one researcher proudly says that ―there can be no problem with our support policy for the NKR college seekers; what is at stake is their own will‖ (translated from Korean, Lee, 2012b), it is problematic to attribute this striking attrition rate entirely to the refugees‘ lack of will. The government lowered the bar for university entrance, but not linguistic barriers to success at university.

According to the interviews with my participants and personal communications with several experts who work in nonprofit organizations for NKRs, five universities located in Seoul currently offer or have offered their NKR students ELT services, as a form of either a general education requirement or a non-credit after-school program. Few students are satisfied with these types of support, however, for three main reasons: first,

NKR students are too diverse to be placed in a class, displaying an enormous discrepancy in levels of English proficiency, depending on their educational backgrounds before and after the migration. Moreover, the programs design and run their own curricula, with little connection to the English-mediated major courses where NKRs actually struggle because of English. Lastly, many NKR students desire to avoid being marked by taking the NKR- only class at the university. The vast majority of NKRs, including my participants, prefer

15 In the trend of globalizing higher education in South Korea, major universities have competitively increased the rate of English-mediated courses, which usually assign imported American books as textbooks. 100 hiding their NKR identity in South Korea in any area of society for complicated reasons.

In short, South Korean universities barely meet their NKR students‘ needs for learning

English. It is even harder for adult refugees who are not university students to find opportunities for English education in South Korea.

South Korea‘s policy approach to and public awareness of NKRs focuses on their immediate needs, but their less immediate need to learn English for economic and social advancement is largely unmet. Perhaps the textbook idea that English is not a first or second language but a foreign language in South Korea excludes them from the practice of English learning. South Koreans have a double standard in which they treat English as a foreign (and therefore optional) language for NKRs while treating it as critical for their own career advancement. Accordingly, the refugees are positioned as college dropouts, blue-collar workers, and those who can be satisfied simply with comprehending English loanwords. Learning English is not unimportant, however, given that they have been accepted as citizens of the country of English frenzy. The decision to provide NKRs with

English education should not be determined by asking whether they will need English skills when buying vegetables at a market, getting along with friends, or welding at a factory; it should be coordinated with the discourse about why the government has supported their college entrance and tuition.

Warriner (2007) points out that when a host nation‘s refugee support produces tangible outcomes in a relatively short period of time, it may in fact perpetuate the refugees‘ marginal and uncertain social status. Beyond and against this social identity reinforced through national policy, NKRs‘ English learning is a prudent decision and a

101 long-term investment in the individual. Quantitatively, it is impossible for them to spend more than 15,000 hours in it, as many South Koreans may (MBC, 2006), before applying for colleges or jobs. Qualitatively, it is reckoned that their habitus, the ―incorporated product of historical practice‖ (Bourdieu, 1990, p. 52), predisposes them to a unique way of learning English. A volunteer English teacher who had taught NKRs once told me: ―At the first meeting with one of my students, he perfectly memorized five types of English sentences: S+V, S+V+SC, S+V+DO, and so forth. So I skipped the first couple of chapters of the grammar book. But I was soon surprised when I heard that he had never known the word were at all. There were so many ‗holes‘ in his English. I didn‘t know where to start.‖ In this teacher‘s view, the be-verbs must be taught before the sentence structure because it has been for a long time a paradigmatic order of ELT in the local setting. In the case of those refugees whose education was severely interrupted in the home country as well as on the way to the host country, however, their tower of knowledge may be markedly porous. For this reason, NKR English learners are often considered, as the volunteer teacher also said, ―more difficult to teach than those with no experience of learning English at all.‖

To address the NKRs‘ needs and unique situation, nine nongovernmental organizations currently provide adult NKRs with English-learning opportunities for free or at low cost.16 Their pedagogical methods vary: (1) one-on-one or cluster tutoring, (2) classroom-based instruction designed specifically for NKRs, (3) incorporation of NKRs

16 In addition to these NKR-oriented educational services, NKRs may choose to attend one of the private English language institutes targeting general adults in major cities in South Korea. Not all of them, however, can afford $300-400 USD for the monthly tuition. 102 into the existing classroom instruction designed for South Koreans, or (4) overseas

English training (1-18 months). Most of the organizations use only one of the four methods, and they operate on a small scale. Implemented in the 2010s, all the programs are in a rudimentary stage with much trial and error. One of their biggest challenges is securing finances and volunteer teachers. There is also the issue of regional equity; eight out of nine institutes are located in Seoul, where only 26.6% of NKRs live (Ministry of

Unification, 2014).

Each of the methods listed above has different strengths and weaknesses. Method 1 can be tailored to NKRs‘ individual needs, but there are usually more students than volunteer teachers. Method 2 solves the student-to-teacher ratio issue while addressing common NKR needs, but some NKRs feel compartmentalized and object to being grouped with other NKRs in this type of educational environment. This emotional issue can be resolved by Method 3, which is, however, often too difficult for them. The most high-priced and valued, Method 4, has been run by the limited number of NGOs, the

British Embassy, and the Ministry of Education, Science and Technology, and by invitation from the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs (ECA) of the U.S.

Department of State. A total of around 20 NKRs have been selected every year since

2011 against stiff competition. However, it is hard to predict the sustainability of these programs, which are heavily influenced by the national and international political situations. Indeed, the Unification Ministry decreased the number of NKR students that it will annually support for its study abroad program affiliated with the ECA in the United

States, from ten in 2013 to four in 2014 (ZO, personal communication, June 20, 2014).

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North Korean identity concealment and its relation to their English learning

In this section, I will describe why NKRs avoid public recognition as NKRs and how it may influence their practice of English learning in South Korea. Chapter 4 also discusses this trait with regard to TY‘s personal background. Prior to the analysis at the individual level, this section provides preliminary knowledge based on my interview and classroom interaction data in relation to why their NKR identity is hidden.

In L2 studies, learners‘ hidden identities have been investigated with regard to their either willing or unwilling invisibility in the classroom setting (e.g., Dumas,

2010; Hyland, 2002). Vandrick (1997) provides some examples of hidden identities of L2 learners: sexual orientation, ethnic or religious minority status, disabilities, illness, and trauma. The author argues that:

all these hidden identities, both objective and psychological, form an iceberg below the surface in the classroom. They are the hidden context that may be much more important than the tip of the iceberg above the surface— the more obvious identities openly revealed. This huge hidden area is all the more potent because it is seldom or only superficially acknowledged (Vandrick, 1997, p. 155).

In agreement with Vandrick‘s emphasis, my participants‘ NKR identity is invisible yet an immense frame that dominates their practice of EFL learning. Three reasons can be examined for their stronger tendency of identity concealment compared to other refugee groups in different places of the world: (1) the risk of forced repatriation to North Korea, (2) the guilt-by-association system that may harm the escapees‘ family remaining in North Korea, and (3) some ascribed stereotypes

104 given to the NKR population in South Korea. Understanding this unique situation is a prerequisite for research on whatever NKRs learn after crossing the border, since their effort to resolve the risks listed above can disrupt their ability to lead a circumspect, orderly, and focused life in the host country.

Depending on their or their family‘s political influence in the past in North Korea, some NKRs who settled in South Korea are still at risk of being threatened to return to the homeland by the North Korean security agency. Consequently, most of them choose a quiet life, which often impinges upon their access to English learning opportunities. DN‘s husband, for instance, has not found a suitable place for him to learn English in Seoul. He is afraid of enrolling in the British Council‘s EFL program, as it requires the students‘ personal information for a semi-publicly available record. DN said, ―If he enrolls in the

British Council‘s program and his name is exposed to public and then likely to be heard by them [the North Korean regime], it‘s like advertising, ‗Take me, I‘m here.‘‖ She was sensitive about security in particular because, in those days of data collection, dozens of

NKRs returned to North Korea after receiving a threatening call from the North Korean security agency. On the other hand, TY, who had given up applying for a prestigious scholarship awarded by the British Embassy in South Korea to an NKR every year, told me what she realized about this relinquishment a few months later: ―It seems right for me not to apply for the scholarship. The recipient has to appear in major newspapers and receive many interview requests. I can‘t do that. I must live in obscurity.‖

In addition to the issue of their own safety, whether NKRs have family remaining in the North and whether they wish to bring the family to the South in the near future

105 affects their lifestyle and daily timetable in South Korea in two ways: (1) again, they seek anonymity in an effort to protect their family in the North. Also, (2) many NKRs cannot afford English classes because their money (and thus time) is being saved to free their families. Although the policy fluctuates at various times in different circumstances, North

Korean citizens whose immediate family member is known to be an escapee suffer from the security agency‘s interrogation and surveillance, prohibition of mobility, confiscation of property, demotion of social class and career, imprisonment, and in some severe cases, public execution (McCurry, 2014). To deliver the family from such danger, many NKRs employ a broker who can bring them out from the North to the South. Brokers demand from $2,500 to $15,000 USD for their services (International Crisis Group, 2011). The fee is hardly fixed and recently on an upward trend, as border controls became stricter after the death of leader Kim Jong-Il at the end of 2011.

To complicate matters, almost all NKRs are economically inactive for a certain period of time in the resettlement process. To earn this steep amount of money, college students work part-time after school, and as a result, spending their after-school time in learning English is a luxury they cannot afford. One of my participants, ZO, worked part- time at a bar for three years while attending the university in order to bring his family in the North. Unfortunately, the broker whom she had employed ran away with her $7,000

USD. What is more unfortunate is that this is not only ZO‘s experience. According to the

NKR Foundation‘s report (2010), one out of five NKRs (23.4%) has been financially deceived by North Koreans or South Koreans since their border-crossing. This is 43 times greater than South Koreans‘ fraud rate (0.5%).

106

These economic and emotional challenges due to the family in the North can prevent NKRs from constant engagement in learning English in South Korea. The relatively low attendance rate and high drop-out rate of NKR students at the British

Council may result from these issues. ZO told me that she found it difficult to concentrate on class activities and homework whenever she heard any serious news about her family from brokers or about North Korea in general on television. Letters or phone calls with news from the family are usually about how badly the family needs money, which in

ZO‘s case motivated her to keep working. A limited number of scholarships are awarded to NKR college students in South Korea every year, but ZO failed to receive either of the two that she had applied for during her research participation. She said, ―The scholarship committees just see two things: [the applicants‘] college GPA and how dramatic their lives have been.‖ ZO does not meet these criteria, which she attributes to her family‘s whereabouts; since all her family members are alive in North Korea, (1) she has to work instead of studying all day for a better GPA, and (2) her story in the Statement of Purpose is less attractive than the stories of those who used to be orphans, street children, or victims of human trafficking after the loss of parents in North Korea.

Language learning is a social activity in nature, so NKRs must do the constant identity work, balancing their desire to conceal their identity with the desire to engage others in conversation. L2 curricula quite often ask the learners to open up about personal matters. Research on L2 production demonstrates that the learners‘ knowledge and emotion about discourse topics contribute to the internal consistency of the production system and conversational dominance (Eisenstein & Starbuck, 1989; Woken & Swales,

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1989; Zuengler, 1989). Even casual topics that commonly appear in L2 classes such as introducing one‘s family, hometown, childhood, or old friends may embarrass recently arrived NKR learners. Observing their classroom participation at the British Council, I found that my participants had a series of well-prepared lies about their background for classroom conversation. For instance, HK identified Chuncheon, a South Korean city, as her birthplace to her classmates. She later told me that she selected that city because it is located in the north end of the country and has an accent similar to her North Korean accent. She was, however, unfamiliar with the city.

The only case where my participants inevitably disclosed their NKR identity at the

British Council was when they met another NKR student. As mentioned in Chapter 2, students are not informed about who is an NKR in their class at the British Council, and the South Korean students are unaware that there may ever be NKRs in their class.

Hence, only an NKR can speculate about another NKR‘s presence in the class. Excerpt

3.1 shows how such recognition is made by accident, in a corner of the class. Regardless of the security issue, their identity concealment seems an implicit agreement among those who wish to blend into South Korean social groups.

In the excerpt below, ZO and BH recognize each other‘s NKR identity. The teacher

(presented as ―T‖ in the excerpt) gives her students a direction to practice in pair a set of question-answer dialogues in the textbook (lines 1-3). ZO reads questions (lines 5, 10,

15), which BH, ZO‘s partner, answers (lines 12-13, 17). They repeat this dialogue pattern for a minute and 17 seconds, which I omitted in the transcript below. The pair activity continues up to line 20. In line 21, BH translates what she just read aloud in English into

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Korean, asking ZO if most people eat a big meal for dinner. After ZO interprets BH‘s turn as a genuine question and replies to it in Korean as well, (line 25), their small talk begins in the midst of the guided classroom activity. Since the class has an English-only policy, the volume of their voice is lower than usual, often reduced to whispering

(marked by ° in the transcript) and mouthing. The small talk continues until the teacher hears their Korean and approaches them (line 59). After BH‘s turn in line 62, the girls return to the ongoing classroom activity, reading the dialogues in the textbook aloud in turn. The other transcript conventions used in the excerpt below were adapted from

Jefferson (2004) (see Appendix I).

One thing worth noting is personal pronouns in parentheses in the English translation lines in Excerpt 3.1. In Korean, pronouns in any grammatical position can be omitted, in casual conversation in particular, when their references are mutually obvious between the speaker and the interlocutor. For instance, ZO omits ―they‖ in line 25 in

Excerpt 3.1 because it is clear to herself and her interlocutor, BH, that the subject of

―don‘t‖ in her turn is a pronominalized form of ―most people‖ in BH‘s turn in lines 21-

22. Thus, the word-for-word translation of Guchi ana? in line 25 is ―so don‘t?‖, which liberally means ―don‘t they so?‖.

Another important point to mention is the meanings of the state name hangug

(Korea) and the nationality hangugin (Korean) that appear many times in Excerpt 3.1.

These two terms are used when South Koreans refer to their country (South Korea) and themselves. When they refer to their country in relation to North Korea, on the other hand, South Korea is called namhan instead of hangug, as a counterpart of bukhan (North

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Korea). Therefore, the terms hangug and hangugin that ZO and BH use in Excerpt 3.1 in fact indicate South Korea and South Korean, respectively.

1 T: Okay. U::m Right. (0.5) Let’s (0.7) speak (.) to: your partner?

2 Okay. °‘Bout° One two- ((Grouping the students by her hands)) yes,

3 together. Three: people here (.) °Okay?° Ask questions.

4 (14.0) ((Multiple students chatting and laughing from a distance))

5 ZO: ((Pointing at a sentence on the book with her finger)) What d’you

6 have for↑ breakfast at the weekend. (3.0) ((Looking at the teacher))

7 Hi Fiona, question. ((Pointing at a sentence on a book page)) Here?=

8 T: =Oh, both both. ((Pointing at ZO’s book)) This one and this one.

9 ZO: ((Looking at BH and pointing at the book)) °Yeogiseobuteo° (1.0)

From here

10 ((Reading aloud)) What d’people have for breakfast?

11 (5.0)

12 BH: ((Reading the next sentence aloud)) Ha:ve for (3.0) sand:wich: a:nd

13 coffee ha:ve for breakfast.

14 (2.5)

15 ZO: ((Reading the next sentence aloud)) Do people? (.) prefer tea (.)

16 orr coffee.

17 BH: ((sigh)) (1.0) In that: (4.0) People (.) people ha:ve tea or coffee.

18 ((1 minute and 17 seconds omitted, for which ZO and BH keep reading

19 sentences in the textbook aloud in turn))

20 BH: So: ((Reading a sentence aloud)) big meal or s- (.) small mea- meal

21 (0.5) for dinner. ((Looking at ZO)) Jeonyug °mani°- Daebubun

Big dinner- Do most

22 saramdeuli [jeonyugeul mani meogeoyo? Continued

Excerpt 3.1. A small talk between ZO and BH in class

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Excerpt 3.1 continued

people eat a big meal for dinner?

23 ZO: [Hmm ((Looking at BH))

24 (1.0)

25 ZO: Guchi ana? Hangug saramdeul- Botong- Nan jeonyug mani meongneunde?

Don’t (they) so? Korean people-usually-I have a big meal for dinner.

26 BH: Nan hanguge daehaeseo jal mola.

I don’t know about Korea well.

27 ZO: Weh? (1.0) °Neo wegugeseo watseo? (0.5) Eodiseo watseo?°

Why? Are you from abroad? Where are (you) from?

28 BH: Wegugeun aninde- (.) Wegugirago haeyadoena. (.)[Naneun- Hhh

Not a foreign country. Should (I) call it a foreign country? [I’m-

29 ZO: [Wegugeseo ongugate.

(You) seem from abroad.

30 (1.0)

31 BH: [Hhh

32 ZO: [Eolguri hangugineun aniya.

(Your) face is not Korean.

33 BH: Eh?

34 ZO: Eolguri hangugineun aningeogate.=

(Your) face doesn’t look Korean.

35 BH: =Aniya Eolgureun hanguginiya. Tojong hanguginieyo.=

No (my) face is Korean. Native Korean.

36 ZO: =Ah, gre?

Oh, is it?

37 BH: Eocheteun hangugeseo taeonaji anatseunika.

Anyway as (I) was not born in Korea.

38 ZO: Uh eodiseo taeonaneunde?

Where were (you) born?

Continued

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Excerpt 3.1 continued

39 (0.5)

40 BH: Jeo buk(hh)haneseo tae(hh)onatseoyo(hh).

I was born in North Korea.

41 ZO: ((mouthing Nado))

Me, too

42 BH: Ah jincha? Ah greokuna. Gohyangi eodieyo?

Really? Gotcha. Where is (your) hometown?

43 ZO: °Chungjin

44 BH: Chungji::n.

45 YM: °Mm.

Yeah.

46 BH: A::::::h Maltuga jom isanghada haeteoni, [gretkuna.

(Your) accent sounds strange, and (you) were so.

47 ZO: [Hmmhhh

48 BH: Gre nan hangug saramd- botong ulungul- icheumeseo saengnyakajo ( )

So mostly with Koreans I stop talking around this point ( )

49 ZO: Hmm. Jeonyug mani meogeo.

(They) have a big meal for dinner.

50 BH: Gre? Myunyun doetseoyo?

Do (they)? How many years have (you) been?

51 ZO: Na? Sanyun.

Me? Four years.

52 BH: Myu- myu- myunyune watseoyo?

What- what- in what year did (you) come?

53 ZO: Yeogi? Icheongunyun.

Here? Two thousand nine.

54 BH: Narang biseutage wanne.=

(You) came almost same with me.

Continued

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Excerpt 3.1 continued

55 ZO: =°Myunyundoe watseo?

In what year did (you) come?

56 BH: ((whispering)) °Gunyun nado.

(Two thousand) Nine as well.

57 ZO: °Myut giya?

What class are (you)?

58 BH: ((mouthing))

59 ((Teacher comes near))

60 BH: ((Looking at the teacher)) [Ah, sorry sorry

61 ZO: ((Looking at the teacher)) [Ah, Hehehe Hehehe

62 BH: Hehehe Hehe Seonsaengnimante deukyutda. […] (We are) caught by the teacher.

Of numerous points that can be discussed in the excerpt above, what is relevant in particular to the participants‘ NKR identity is their use of person reference such as ―I,‖

―you,‖ ―Korean people,‖ and ―people‖ (see shaded words in the excerpt). Person reference in interaction, a range of rule-governed and orderly ways people refer to individuals, has long been a keen interest of linguists, sociologists, human behaviorists, and anthropologists. Stivers, Enfield, and Levinson (2007) explain the nature of person reference as social-affiliative action as follows:

reference is not just, indeed not primarily, about giving and receiving information but about navigating social relations. […] Reference entails a special kind of cooperation unique to humans (Enfield and Levinson 2006; Levinson 2006). This fits with a view that our entire motivation to communicate, and even our very capacity for language, is in the service of managing social relations (Stivers et al., 2007, p. 19).

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In this sense, the use of person reference is both informational and affiliational. In

Excerpt 3.1, BH and ZO refer to ―people,‖ a subject that repeatedly appears in dialogue sentences in the textbook (lines 10, 15, 17), as saramdeul (―people‖) (line 22) in a generic term and, more specifically, as hangug saramdeul (―Korean people‖) (line 25). What is noticeable here is that these students do not affiliate themselves to the social boundary of

―(Korean) people,‖ whom they implicitly refer to as the pronoun ―they‖ (line 25). By specifying ―most people‖ (line 22) and omitted ―they‖ (line 25) as ―Korean people,‖ ZO self-repairs. By replacing ―Korean people‖ with ―I‖ in line 25, she does another self- repair. In doing so, she excludes herself from ―(South) Korean people.‖

Besides, BH‘s utterance in line 26 claims her insufficient expertise regarding South

Korean eating habits. In response to this utterance, ZO shows her understanding that BH is not from South Korea in line 27. By using a general word ―abroad,‖ ZO leaves up to her recipient BH to express where she specifically is from. BH asks a self-directed question (line 28), which shows her view on her ―foreign‖ origin. Although BH argues that she is not distinguished from South Koreans in appearance (see (1) BH‘s turn ―Eh?‖ in line 33, an open-class repair that displays a problem with the prior turn, and (2) BH‘s rejection of ZO‘s claim on BH‘s identity in line 35), she squarely states that she was not born in South Korea (line 37). As ZO responds to her as ―me, too‖ in line 41, BH and ZO share their North Korean identity.

Throughout the excerpt above, the two students‘ self-references na (I) in lines 25,

26 28, 40,17 41, 48, 51, and 54, neo (you) in line 27, and their predicates are excluded

17 Jeo is an honorific of na. 114 from the membership category of South Koreans (Schegloff, 2007). Liebscher and her colleagues (2010) explain that pronouns of address represent speakers‘ perceptions about their identities in local and global contexts. The forms of address that ZO and BH use in

Excerpt 3.1 display their guarded claim on North Korean identity both in and outside the language class. Since the L2 learning task is talking about eating habits of South Korean culture, NKR students are concerned not only about who their classmates or pair work partner are and which Korea they are from, but also about their limited knowledge or legitimacy to participate in the task.

This confidential identity sharing fits with the feature of the speakers‘ current form of discourse, small talk, in which they understand some non-Korean things are allowed to be discussed off the record. Coupland (2000) characterizes small talk as ―aimless, prefatory, obvious, uninteresting, sometimes suspect and even irrelevant‖ social interaction which aims at ―phatic communion‖ (p. 3). Indeed, BH and ZO display their understanding that the teacher suspects whether their conversation is relevant to her instruction or not in lines 60-62. They apologize to the teacher, laugh aloud, and use the expression ―caught,‖ as if they have been conspiring against her. Their NKR communion is embedded in the South Korean EFL learners‘ classroom community. Since this unanticipated digression from EFL classroom talk, they may feel a larger gap than before between, for example, what the reference ―people‖ in the textbook will indicate to their

South Korean classmates in general and what it really means to them as NKRs. Hiding this gap and their shared identity, they undergo a complex process of participation in L2 learning.

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Conclusions

This chapter investigated divergent foreign language education policies in South and

North Korea and the border-crossers‘ transitional practice of English learning. First promoted by political aims, English education in North Korea has long been a luxury of the privileged minority. The thoroughly closed society prevented ordinary people from almost any kind of opportunity to learn authentic English. It is only recently that they have found multiple illegal but high-tech ways to peek into the outside world, little by little. This trend has exposed North Koreans to the English language and Western culture, which aroused their desire to learn English.

Considering this sociohistorical and sociopolitical background, learning English in

South Korea has several significant meanings for NKRs. It means freedom from being passive recipients of autocratic and arbitrary policies on foreign language education. It is the first step in free will toward personal, educational, and social goals. It also means opening a door to communicate with the broader world, as the learners take an interest in who speaks English globally, in what circumstances, and with what kinds of conventions and opinions. Thirdly, it means a better learning environment with a wider range of options and access available to them. Finally, learning English is a key for social and economic mobility in South Korea. Given that 74% of NKRs are in their thirties or younger at the moment of the entry to South Korea (see Table 3.2), learning English is a feasible and essential project that enables them to participate in the national and global economy.

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This chapter examined this last point in detail. Although they spend a considerable amount of time and money in learning it, South Koreans feel anxious about their

―broken‖ use of English and about being surpassed by others at school and in the white- collar job market. This emotional burden influences and is inherited by young children, who memorize dozens of English vocabulary words every day without knowing why. On this subject, I argued that access to and the practice of English education is largely driven by family social capital in South Korean society (Coleman, 1988). The idea of family- ownedness can also be applied to the discussion of NKRs‘ English education, since many

NKRs suffer from complete family separation and thus lack of family social capital. The

NKR case will be instructive in unveiling this relation of L2 learning to what learners do not have, in addition to what they do have. Further examination of this relationship continues in Chapter 4.

The second half of this chapter dealt with some post-migration issues that adult

NKRs may encounter when learning English. Considering that their economic, physical, and mental challenges are an ongoing issue that plays a role in their current practice of learning, it will be promising to study their language learning with regard to the experience of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). The connection of L2 learning to

PTSD is still an incipient effort made by a few researchers (e.g., Finn, 2010; Stone,

1995). Further in-depth studies will motivate improved support policies for them. NKRs‘

PTSD might have resulted from numerous factors, as partly illuminated so far: family death or disappearance; severe starvation and begging and/or theft in North Korea‘s

―Years of Hardship‖ (1994-2000); repatriation and time in prison with torture, forced

117 labor, and/or sexual assault; and extended time on the run and out of sight. Even after entry, many NKRs encounter a traumatic experience of heavy interrogation by the South

Korean intelligence agency. Their experience of adversity is further compounded by their experience of prejudice, unfair treatment, and being inundated by questions and/or interviews from South Korean media, institutions, and neighbors.

To conclude, this chapter provided the sociohistorical background and a current landscape required to address the following questions on language policy: how do NKRs recognize and negotiate a new ELT management system? How do their beliefs about

English change? What do they currently do with English? Each deserves a book-length investigation with ethnographic observation and analysis, which the rest of this dissertation will partly fulfill. However, answering these questions is not merely academic; understanding the transnational challenges and educational history of NKRs is essential to crafting effective policies to support them and promote their integration into society. By these means, we can help today‘s ―future that came in advance‖ contribute to

Korea‘s desired tomorrow.

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Chapter 4: North Korean Refugees’ Imagined Communities of

English Learners in South Korea

Introduction

The previous chapter examined how foreign language education policies have been developed and implemented in North and South Korea since the national division in

1945. Their remarkable distinction causes challenges in border-crossers‘ accommodation to the receiving country. Along with their own will and personalities, the migrants‘ communal past also crosses the border and is negotiated in a new environment, a transnational space with different orders and values (Blommaert, 2005). This transition takes time. For North Korean refugees in South Korea, according to retrospective accounts from my participants, it takes about a week to become a smartphone user or to get their bearings on the Seoul subway map. Then, it takes a year or so to become familiar with most South-Koreanized English loanwords that appear in newspapers or in casual conversation (Joo, 2014a). As Chapter 3 revealed, it takes even more time for

NKRs to realize the importance of learning English and to begin doing so. In this process,

NKRs will gradually become comfortable and confident with the idea of learning English in South Korea, one of the most globalized nations in the world.

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NKRs provide a particularly important perspective for understanding the role of the imagined community in language learning because of the peculiar similarities (e.g., shared heritage) and differences (e.g., political structure and degree of globalization) between North and South Korea. Nonetheless, adult NKR English learners have been understudied. Although 83.4% of NKRs in South Korea are over 19 as of February 2014

(Ministry of Unification, 2014), they are absent from the statistical observations and both public and academic discourses about foreign language education policies and practices.

For linguistic ethnographers who examine the link between the migrant learners‘ past, present, and future, adults are of particular interest because of their accumulated experiences in their layered history. Their experiences inform their conception of the destination community. For example, the role of the imagined community (the conception of the destination community by an adult migrant) in developing literacy or learning a second language (L2) has been the topic of considerable research (Cervatiuc,

2009; Chang, 2011; Cohen, 2012; Dagenais, 2003; Gao, 2012; Honeyford, 2013; Norton,

2000, 2001; Norton & Kamal, 2003; Xu, 2012).

This chapter investigates the role of L2 learning practice when NKRs imagine and re-imagine South Korean society and capital of various types in it. Drawing on

Anderson‘s (1991) concept of imagined community and Bourdieu‘s (1977, 1990, 1991) theory of habitus and capital production and exchange, this chapter explores the nature of imagination (1) rooted in the migrants‘ habitus and (2) disparate from the receiving country‘s reality. Throughout political, social, economic, and personal turmoil, these refugees position themselves as learners of English. Their EFL learning is a reaction to

120 this disjuncture between imagination and the forthcoming reality. By learning English, their habitus is transnationalized (Kelly & Lusis, 2006) and their perception of their

North Korean-ness as refugees living in South Korea is reformulated, either underlined or attenuated. This chapter describes this process in detail, in relation to the transformation of their North Korean identity.

In this chapter, I first outline the concept of imagined communities. I also explain the theoretical framework of habitus based on the literature. In the body of this chapter, I then apply these notions, following the chronology of research participants‘ geographical movement (i.e., from the pre-migration period to the post-migration period). The chapter focuses on two participants in particular, TY and DN, whose stories are examined in several sections. Figure 4.1 summarizes the main argument in each of these body sections. Finally, I discuss how the lessons learned from examining the participants‘ EFL learning are relevant to understanding transnational EFL learning more generally. The interview data analyzed in this chapter are largely, but not entirely, the participants‘ retrospective narratives, in addition to my observations in and around their English classes at the British Council.

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Figure 4.1. The development of logic in the body of Chapter 4

Imagined communities of target language learners

Anderson (1991) claims that every community is ―imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know the most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion‖ (p. 6).

In other words, nations are imagined communities that stem from a common perception of how one relates to other ―citizens‖ that one does not know personally. By

122 understanding and circulating the ways they live and self-position, the members belong to their community, and the visible evidence of the perceived bond among members allows the community to be imagined by non-members as well. However, non-members and newcomers constantly reformulate their image of the community based on their desire sedimented throughout individual histories. This imagination, which Wenger (1998) defines as ―a process of expanding oneself by transcending our time and space and creating new images of the world and ourselves‖ (p. 176), does not depend on direct engagement. Therefore, as Appadurai (1996) contends, the rise of mass media and mass migration since the late twentieth century has accelerated the global circulation of this imagination beyond spatial and temporal constraints.

Imagination critically influences one‘s language learning. The decision to learn a language does not occur in a vacuum. The target language, its legitimate speakers, their community, and their symbolic capital are imagined by the language novices, who also envision their ownership or ―imagined identity‖ in that community in the near future

(Norton, 2001, p. 166). For this reason, to language learners imagined community is distinct from fantasy to the extent that (1) it is founded on this concrete, rule-governed set of images, and (2) the imagining agent is already involved in the community by his or her action of learning. On the other hand, Kanno and Norton (2003) stress that even one‘s nascent, private piece of imagination is the product of societal ideologies and hegemonies. Not everyone envisages the same imagined community with the same types of opportunities and resources. One‘s dynamic relationship with structured social spaces mediates the extent and the direction of one‘s imagination.

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Several empirical studies substantiate this tie among social constraints, imagined community, and L2 learning. For instance, Norton and Kamal (2003) explore two

Pakistani boys‘ educational experiences that develop their imaginations of and hopes for the future in an era of nationwide political instability. The components relevant to language learning that compose the boys‘ imagined society—people‘s literacy, English ability, and technological skills—are interdependent. These images of the future mirror not only their reaction to the current social strain but also their proactive identification of

―what [...] is worth struggling for‖ (Norton & Kamal, 2003, p. 302). In this regard, the learners‘ status quo is important, since it is fundamental to the genesis of their imagined communities.

Xu‘s (2012) research on the evolution of novice English teachers‘ professional identities also provides an interesting picture of the development of imagined communities in the context of language learning. Three out of four participants replaced their once-imagined identity with a new ―practiced identity‖ (p. 569), due to institutional pressures that they faced in the school reality. The fourth teacher, in contrast, kept her initially imagined identity at school through strong perseverance and responsibility.

Although Xu does not explain why she had the two outcomes, evidently people respond differently to the disjuncture between their imagined community and their real experiences.

What Norton and Kamal (2003) and Xu (2012) intimate is that imagined community is an intermediate step between a home community and an approaching reality. Naturally, this process occurs continually as one discovers discordances between

124 the imagined and practiced identities. This framework is useful for understanding the experiences of transnational migrants, who after crossing a border, revise their imagined communities and their own roles and symbolic capital within them. Even after the resettlement, they may keep re-imagining as they move from the periphery to the center of the host community in the process of ―apprenticeship‖ (Wenger, 1998). As Xu (2012) highlights, this negotiation and reconstruction of imagined communities also involves a change of one‘s identity. This relation is consonant with the central argument of socioculturally-oriented L2 studies, in which the learners‘ identity work is viewed as context-sensitive, multiple, intricate, and fluid (Block, 2007; Norton, 2013; Ricento,

2005; Swain & Deters, 2007; Young, 2009; Zuengler & Miller, 2006).

Informed by the interpretive tradition in sociolinguistics and the methodology in ethnography of communication, this chapter inspects how NKR participant‘s habitus and migration experience have formed their desires for membership in the target language- learning community in South Korea. Although drawing from the experiences of all the participants, I intentionally select two focal participants, TY and DN, giving their stories more space than the others in this chapter. This selection was initially made from my recognition of social capital that TY and DN exemplified to me; both participants identified themselves in notably close relation to others. In the later phase of data analysis, I realized that this discussion would be further illuminated by a consideration of the two participants‘ social class in North Korea, which also mediates the way they learn

English in South Korea afterward.

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Songbun: North Korea’s caste system

North Korea is split into five types of songbun, or class—Special, Core, Basic, Complex, and Hostile—with 51 subcategories in total, depending on ancestors‘ ideological purity and achievement of national prestige. Children‘s class is inherited from their parents. In other words, one‘s class is not achieved but assumed at birth with low potential for change throughout one‘s life. Literally meaning ―background,‖ songbun severely restricts

North Koreans‘ choice of education, occupation, domestic or overseas travel, residence, and even spouse.

It is important to note that the English translation of songbun, the class typology, and the ratio of each class have not been agreed on among institutions (e.g., the U.S.

Committee for Human Rights in North Korea), broadcasting programs (e.g., Channel A), news media (e.g., Reese, 2013), and scholarly works (e.g., Haggard & Noland, 2011). For example, Robert Collins (2012), a project director at the U.S. Committee for Human

Rights in North Korea, divides North Korea‘s hierarchy into three main classes: Core,

Wavering, and Hostile. On the other hand, Channel A (2012), a South Korean broadcasting company, reported the five classes listed above in its weekly TV talk show with NKR guests in their twenties. I adopt Channel A‘s taxonomy for my dissertation, since it is more nuanced than the others and has the first-hand input from the NKRs on

Channel A‘s TV show.

Several reasons can be given for this disagreement among different sources on the terminology and typology of North Korea‘s class system. As already discussed, outside analysts do not know much about North Korea‘s social fabric and everyday landscape,

126 because of the regime‘s strict control of information. This restriction has led the foreign analysts to rely significantly on North Korean exiles‘ memoirs and interviews, which might not always be unequivocal, up-to-date, or representative. Moreover, not all North

Koreans are aware of which class they belong to because it is a tacit demarcation with no paper trail. One news article reports the North Korean government‘s apparent denial of the presence of class in the country, quoting a North Korean guard who angrily replied,

―People make up lies about my country!‖ in response to an American journalist‘s question about songbun (Sullivan, 2012).

My NKR participants also support this silent presence of class in North Korea.

Except for TY and DN from Pyongyang, who both come from the ―Special‖ class, the other five did not state their songbun during the interview. Two female participants of those five, BH and HK, displayed en passant their understanding of the structure and complexity of songbun in North Korean society. I did not ask the participants which class they used to belong to in the North primarily because it was not on my original question list. Nevertheless, from TY‘s and DN‘s stories, North Korea‘s class system emerged as one of the intriguing and conspicuous themes in relation to the refugees‘ language learning practice. Even since then, I did not ask the other five participants about songbun—not only because it was ethically inappropriate, but also because their lack of comment on their class itself interested me. Why do only TY and DN frequently talk about their previous class, given that I as a researcher was equally close-knit with all of them and created a friendly atmosphere in each interview?

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Savage, Silva and Warde (2010) note that ―people are generally reluctant to identify themselves unambiguously as members of social classes and [that] class identities do not necessarily seem highly meaningful to them‖ (p. 61). According to this argument, TY and

DN‘s identification of their songbun during the interviews is a marked action. Their reference to their songbun can be attributed to the fact that North Korea‘s class system is not a kind of social stratification commonly discussed in today‘s marketized world with the elaboration of the list such as upper – middle – working class positions. The North

Korean hierarchy is pre-modern given its irrelevance to the individual‘s position in a market as well as its enforced and invariant nature. However, songbun is much more veiled than, for example, the Hindu caste system. In this light, the fact that TY and DN frequently resorted to the description of songbun as part of their response to my question about who they were in the North home implies that their class position is a somehow unobtrusive—but key—element of how their identity was constructed. They found no other way to describe their North Korean lives without referring to social class, although the other interviewees apparently could.

Based on this initial finding, I selected TY and DN as focal subjects of inquiry in this chapter; not because they are from the ―top 1%‖ of North Korean society but because how they articulate class is an important facet of their transitional and negotiated identities. I agree with Block‘s (2014) argument that the tabularization of research participants‘ class (e.g., Special – Core – Basic – Complex – Hostile) ―does not take on board the lived experience of social class, remaining at the level of the statistical aggregate and fixed categories‖ (p. 148). In my dissertation, I investigate what Block

128 describe as ―the lived experience of social class‖ by looking at NKRs‘ prior access to multiple forms of capital in their class positions and how they recognized the value of capital in their extraordinary lives after the escape as well as everyday life before the escape.

Habitus and the forms of capital

Bourdieu‘s sociological theory (e.g., 1977, 1990, 1991, and Bourdieu & Passeron, 1977) rests on the idea that human activities are given meaning by one‘s dispositions, resources, and historicity. Individuals prioritize values with a structured set of evaluation and taste criteria ratified in the course of time and social space. This disposition, what Bourdieu calls habitus, becomes a canvas on which different forms of capital are produced, appreciated, and exchanged. The forms of capital include economic capital (material wealth), cultural capital (knowledge and skills), social capital (networks and affiliations), and symbolic capital (prestige and honor). As can be inferred from Bourdieu‘s (1991) metaphor that capital is like ―trumps in a game of cards,‖ capital is power that defines

―the aggregate chances of profit‖ in the specific context (p. 230). In this sense, capital determines one‘s social position.

Working from this Bourdieusian perspective on people‘s historical dispositions that legitimize the various kinds of capital, what this chapter focuses on particularly is transmigrants‘ foreign language learning histories in both home and host societies. In the case of North Korean refugees, what they learn before entering the South and the context in which they learned it influence their present social action in the destination

129 community. The refugees‘ habitus—―embodied history, internalized as a second nature‖ and therefore ―the active presence of the whole past of which it is the product‖ (Bourdieu,

1990, p. 56)—interacts with local resources newly available in the host community. In this respect, when North Korean refugees learn English in South Korea, they are of a strikingly distinct nature from, say, South Korean adults who have never learned English.

Transnationalism matters to EFL learning.

Specifically, in his theorization of one‘s unconscious dispositions sedimented over time within society, Bourdieu (1991) attributes particular importance to the reproducing role held by both home and school. The family system primarily and the educational system secondarily socialize an individual, inculcating her with a sense of what generates profit and which form of capital is transformed into another. This view on family and education is useful for probing migrants‘ foreign language learning because their learning occurs in the context of their prior home and school experiences as well as their family loss or separation and the disruption of schooling by migration and resettlement.

The family loss and interrupted education are two features common to the experiences of all my participants. Except for TY who graduated from the college in

North Korea and worked abroad, six participants quit the schools in the different levels at some point. Except for HK, whose entire family of five migrated together, the remaining six have family remaining in North Korea. This chapter investigates TY‘s separation from family and DN‘s interrupted education in relation to their EFL learning. By looking at this relationship, this chapter explores how such material conditions interact with legitimized social order of the traditional acquisition process in South Korea.

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The following few sections talk about TY‘s experience only, to describe the social meaning given to each phase of her life trajectory in chronological order. By doing so, as

Kinginger (2004) underscores, I conceive ―language learners not as bundles of variables, but as diverse people‖ (p. 220). In other words, TY‘s story and my discussion of it serve in this chapter as representative of my findings from all the seven participants‘ data, although their stories are equally important and rich. Representativeness in qualitative analysis is established by crosschecking data with evidence from other independent sources and hence having a holistic picture of the salient domains and subordinate themes

(Holstein & Gubrium, 1995). Each theme dealt with in this chapter (see Figures 4.1 and

4.3) is salient enough in different data sources across participants.

To make an example with the title of the section below, all my participants envisioned South Korea as an imagined community for distinction at some point and to some extent, although it is just TY who said the quoted statement ―I wanted to be part of the panorama.‖ TY‘s representativeness stems from the concreteness of her imagination in the data; she is the one who talked about her imagination of the host society the most exhaustively, the most consistently, and the most enthusiastically with numerous intriguing and lively examples. This does not mean that TY was more researched than the other participants, however. It was TY‘s choice to share her life with particular details, whereas the others emphasized other elements of their stories. As explained in Chapter 2,

I did not ask every participant all the same interview questions, and this strategy allowed them to take the lead and choose their own focus and manner to narrate.

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“I wanted to be part of the panorama”: South Korea as an imagined community for distinction

TY was born and lived in Pyongyang for 21 years before leaving the country in 2004 to work in China. I do not identify her parents‘ occupations for security reasons, but both

TY‘s mother and father and their families belonged to the upper crust of society.

The family lived in a luxury apartment provided by the government. Both TY and her sister, who is six years older, went to different prestigious universities in Pyongyang.

After earning her bachelor‘s degree in 2004, she was selected to work abroad as one of four young female employees at a high-class hotel located in China and managed by the

North Korean government. She worked there for three and a half years until she entered

South Korea in 2007.

All this personal background and experience indicate that TY and her family enjoyed the highest status available to civilians in North Korea. Young adults‘ social standing is entirely passed down from their parents in this country, and this inherited status determines their access to educational, economic, and sociocultural opportunities.

What TY described during the interview suggests that her parents were active participants in imparting their status to her. What she ate, wore, and used, where she lived and around what kinds of neighbors, which university she attended, and what she did after graduation are all under the absolute influence of the parental resources. For example, her parents‘ secret donation to TY‘s university contributed to her admission. Her parents also decided which university she would apply to and what she would major in there (Hotel

Management). TY said, ―My parents wanted me to marry a man out of the top drawer

132 soon after graduation. That‘s what a girl from a well-to-do family is supposed to do in

North Korea.‖ Her academic pedigree was a signboard that indexed ―a virtuous bride‖ in the richest district in Pyongyang.

In addition to TY‘s family background, her regional background influenced her socioeconomic status. Her entire surroundings manifested the North Korean high-class status. There are degrees of power and wealth, as suggested by TY‘s distinguishing the

―locally rich‖ from the ―super-rich‖ when talking about her childhood neighbors, but

Pyongyang is the home of the North Korean ruling class. Since no free travel is allowed, there is little geographic mobility and most city dwellers are apathetic to what happens outside their enclave. Their sense of ―othering‖ is unique in that they have little chance to meet the ―others.‖ According to TY, the word ―travel‖ does not exist in North Korea. For this reason, her reminiscence of her first—and, for 21 years, only—trip out of

Pyongyang, a field trip with her class in Grade 8, sounds exceptional.

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1 R: So your class went on a revolution-history field trip in 1996.18 2 TY: Yeah, that was the only travel in North Korea […] I found what the local areas 3 looked like for the first time in my life. We just didn‘t understand local people 4 there. They got on the train without tickets, coming in through windows, 5 stepping on our heads to take seats, and even stealing our purses and bags. 6 [… ] We shouted to the teacher, but she‘s also from Pyongyang. Everyone was 7 in a complete panic. It was also my first time to see Kotjebi in Hyesan.19 I had 8 known them through the book with pictures of the dead piled on the street. But 9 they are in the train with us because they are alive! This is ridiculous. All my 10 friends would have the same feeling. Coming back from this arduous trip, most 11 girls in my class were absent from school almost for a week.

Excerpt 4.1 [TY0620_0001 Translated from Korean]

Excerpt 4.1 illustrates how a two-week-long trip embarrassed and tired those elite children and their teacher. TY vividly remembered how the train had turned into a madhouse with local passengers, fare-beaters, and Kotjebi, and told me (presented as ―R‖ in the transcripts) this story for about twenty minutes in an excited tone. The class and the teacher, described with the pronouns ―we‖ (lines 3 and 6) and ―everyone‖ (line 6), are contrasted with ―local people‖ (line 3) or ―they‖ (line 4). By this word choice, Pyongyang citizens are described as law-abiding (they bought tickets for train), sensible (they entered the train through doors, not through windows), realistic (they exist outside the book), and therefore unmarked (all the friends had the same feeling) in TY‘s view. The contrast also indicates that the class demarcation is region-bounded and cliquish in North Korea. The

18 The North Korean government encourages K-12 students to go on a field trip around some popular battle zones where the former leader Kim Il-Sung took part in the war and made contributions. 19 The number of Kotjebi, North Korean street children, skyrocketed during the North Korean famine in the mid-1990s across the country. They seek food and shelter in groups, mostly by begging and pickpocketing. Concerned with the urban appearance shown off to foreign press and visitors, the government puts Kotjebi in children‘s detention centers nationwide, and strictly forbids their approach to major cities, to Pyongyang in particular. 134 severe lack of interaction and exchange of resources across the state not only perpetuates social inequality but also limits the value of the capital possessed by higher status citizens; in the face of lawlessness on the train, the children and the teacher in Excerpt 4.1 are helpless. On leaving Pyongyang, where their prerogative is grounded and valid, they are likely to find their symbolic capital at risk.

Othering, as embodied in TY‘s narrative as a discursive practice in Excerpt 4.1, is not uncommon in everyday life (Hatoss, 2012; Kubota, 2011; Palfreyman, 2005). It is one of the fundamental and intuitive ways to characterize cross-cultural differences.

However, this characterization is often responsible for cultural segregation and misunderstanding. The field trip was already a privilege granted to the limited number of urban children with wealthy classmates: only two classes out of TY‘s primary school went to the trip described in Excerpt 4.1. And the impetus for the trip did not come from the school, since the school could not afford the travel expenses for anybody at all. The father of one of TY‘s classmates, a high-ranking public official in the national railroad administration, paid for the transportation and accommodation costs for two entire classes, which included his son and daughter, respectively. TY recollected, ―Everyone in my class, even my teacher, had asked him [the official‘s child] everyday, ‗When are we leaving?‘, until his father at last confirmed and notified us of the travel plan.‖ The children continued to be differentiated from the others in the travel destination, as found in the excerpt above, making their first (and perhaps last) experience of cross-regional communication superficial, mysterious, and even ―ridiculous.‖

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Another way for TY to maintain her distinction from her peers, even inside

Pyongyang, was to be like South Koreans. According to her self-designation, TY was a

―fashion trendsetter‖ at her schools in Pyongyang. Watching South Korean soap operas almost every day during the college years, TY enthusiastically modeled the latest South

Korean fashions and was eager to show her look to her friends, ―in the top fifth of the class at the very latest.‖ She even copycatted the South Korean way of speaking that she heard from dramas, which I will discuss in more detail later in this chapter with Excerpt

4.2. During the interviews with TY over twelve months, she used the phrase ―South

Korean TV dramas‖ seventeen times as a marker of her cultural taste.

The government prohibited North Koreans from watching South Korean mass media (cf., Lee, 2014), but TY‘s social and economic status enabled her to enjoy them in privacy. She admired the way the dramas‘ main characters spoke, dressed, behaved, and thought as well as the scenery of South Korea‘s highly developed cities shown in the dramas. She also pointed out an impressive conduct of women found in South Korean soap operas: ―It looks super when women drive. In the North, my father‘s employed driver took me to school and home. South Korean girls do not have to tie their hair back, either. They paint their nails in red, wear skinny jeans, and speak elegantly.‖ In addition to this observation about appearance, TY ―liked that South Korean women had their own careers, independent from spouses.‖

This admiration towards South Korean society and female identity led TY to imitate the Seoul accent and use Seoul vocabulary, which was not always understood by her North Korean colleagues. As will be discussed more in the next section, TY grafted

136 her imagined South Korean community, ornamented with a Seoul dialect, onto her daily discourse in North Korea, where she took a dominant position with knowledge about

South Korea over the peers with no access to or interest in it. As the participants‘ imagination of Pakistan in Norton and Kamal‘s (2003) study stems from their recognition of the current national condition of illiteracy, poverty, and political crisis, TY‘s imagination was also rooted in how she was and wanted to be positioned in her community. Her imaginary world might not have been that concrete and firm without the surroundings that made her distinctive from the others in the ordinary life—her class selected for the field trip, experience of culture shock in the field trip, and classmates who were not as fashion-conscious as she was or who had no access to South Korean mass media. In this context, TY‘s cultural taste to be like a South Korean consolidated her sense of distinction.

Because of her disparate images of North and South Korea, TY was already in between the North and the South before the physical migration. This emotional liminality was further strengthened after moving to China for work against her parents‘ wishes.

Despite the surveillance of a North Korean supervisor for the most of her time there, TY saw enough of a Chinese metropolis during her daily commute to be amazed at and transfixed with the splendid landscape of the foreign city. During this time, she was even more immersed in watching South Korean soap operas and listening to South Korean pop songs than in her undergraduate years. ―I contrived my roommates to take a shower before me every night. Then they fall asleep before I finish my shower. In the dark and

137 quiet room, I pulled my bedclothes over my head and watched dramas through a portable

DVD player.‖

Even though TY yearned to be part of a modernized city like what she had seen of

South Korea through the television monitor, she was not a member of the community in the Chinese city because of the strict surveillance. One day, the following incident occurred: ―My supervisor nitpicked at my hair color one day. I argued that I didn‘t dye my hair, but he forced me into self-criticism in front of all the other workers. I refused it because I didn‘t dye. And from that moment I didn‘t eat anything.‖ She wanted to plead her innocence by rejecting food, which caused acute gastritis. North Korean workers in overseas branches are supposed to return to the homeland immediately in case of serious illness. However, the supervisor neither reported TY‘s health condition to the authorities nor sent her to North Korea; he instead let her be treated in a variety of Chinese hospitals, for fear of future troubles with TY‘s parents, who were politically powerful. TY was exempt from working for three months from that point so that she could receive outpatient treatment, and her increased leave-time with exposure to the outside world at last triggered her escape. She recollected: ―In that stage, I was not satisfied just with peeking in the outside world once or twice a day on the round trip between my apartment and the hospital. I wanted to be part of the panorama that I had seen in soap operas. I was too curious and adventurous to go back to Pyongyang after the contract years.‖

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Aural habitus and imagined command of English in South Korea

Before moving on to TY‘s post-migration experience, I present analysis of another interview excerpt with TY, which illustrates how her community imagined through South

Korean soap operas is also linked to her imagined command of English. In Excerpt 4.2,

TY and I talk about her English skills and some other related topics.

1 R: What do you think of your English? 2 TY: My English. Awful. ((Chuckle)) Very awful. ((Chuckle)) I rarely forget things 3 like grammar because similar patterns appear over and over. The problem is 4 vocabulary. It‘s impossible to speak elegantly with limited vocabulary words. 5 And my pronunciation is also problematic. It sounds dowdy. Young folks 6 pronounce ―L‖ very well. South Koreans basically master English pronunciation 7 at school, if not fluent. But my English sounds awkward. 8 R: It‘s interesting because South Korean schools actually don‘t teach them 9 pronunciation a lot. Why would their English sound better than yours? 10 TY: British English is taught in North Korea. I heard American English here for the 11 first time, like rolling r‘s. Even teachers speak too stiffly there. And let me 12 think. (2.0) North Korean and South Korean sound different. The North Korean 13 way of speaking is too stiff, not only the way to choose words, but also an 14 accent. The Seoul accent first made me cringe. ―Argh! How do they speak like 15 that?‖ Especially girls- when I see announcers who appear on TV, argh- well, 16 ((Chuckle)) but pretty is always pretty. 17 R: When did you first feel the difference between the North Korean and Seoul 18 accents? 19 TY: I found it in North Korea, watching [South Korean] soap operas. So I mimicked 20 a lot. Indeed. And I could talk about the dramas only with those who had ever 21 watched them. Those who do not watch them don‘t know. [...]

Excerpt 4.2 [TY0704_1112]

In Excerpt 4.2, TY‘s story wanders off the original topic with minimal interruption from me (TY‘s command of English  Difference between North and South Korean

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English educations  Difference between North and South Korean accents  TY‘s watching South Korean soap operas). I extracted this messy but dynamic chunk of conversation in order to examine the flow of context in which TY finally talks about her mimicking the South Korean accent (lines 19-21). In response to my question in line 1,

TY briefly but emphatically displays her dissatisfaction with her current English proficiency. Wearing a self-deprecating smile, she self-analyzes her linguistic strength and weakness. She focuses on the difficulty in improving English vocabulary and pronunciation (lines 2-7), lumping the less concerning parts together as ―things like grammar‖ (line 2). Even her knowledge of vocabulary is oriented around pronunciation.

It is clear that her perception of her English as ―awful‖ is primarily motivated by her concern with how her English sounds.

From line 5 where ―young folks‖ and ―South Koreans‖ appear as the target to TY, she indexes herself as a not-young outsider from the South Korean EFL community.

Answering my question in line 9, she moves the standpoint of her narrative further from the self-evaluation to the evaluation of the two societies. By doing so, she situates her microscopic language learning status quo in the broad sociohistorical context. In TY‘s answer from line 10 to line 16, another important narrative change is made: her topic shifts from how North and South Koreans speak English differently to how they speak

Korean differently. By this transition after a two-second pause (line 12), she situates her understanding of English speech in the two countries in a more general concept of ―way of speaking‖ (line 13). We find here as well that North Korean speech and South Korean

140 speech are contrasted at the two extremes, with modifiers such as ―stiff‖ versus ―pretty.‖

Although TY apparently explains ―difference,‖ her bias looks obvious.

The next question of mine spontaneously follows TY‘s changing focus to the difference between North Korean language and South Korean language (line 17). In the part of her response included here (lines 19-21), what is illuminating is that she comes back to the theme of South Korean soap opera in the conversation about her language learning and use. This interview was conducted in July 2012, two months after the first meeting with TY. She had already talked about soap operas several times for those two months, describing their storylines, explaining how she watched them in secret in North

Korea and in China, and so forth. Excerpt 4.2 was my first observation of the link between her thoughts on English (learning) and her imagination that had been formed through the soap operas.

Throughout the series of conversation topics in Excerpt 4.2, a penetrating theme is

TY‘s auditory consciousness. She shows concerns about how to improve her English to sound elegant, or more accurately, to make it sound like English spoken by typical intelligent South Koreans. When comparing two kinds of Korean accents (lines 12-16), she also pays attention to how they ―sound‖ differently. She selectively remembers the acoustically aesthetic speech produced by South Korean female announcers, isolated from other linguistic aspects such as vocabulary, grammar, idioms, or discourse structure.

To trace how this ―sonic habitus,‖ one‘s disposition about sound, has been established

(Feld & Brenneis, 2004, p. 468), it is worth considering what mass media, such as TY‘s

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South Korean movies played on a portable DVD player, bring to their viewers. For instance, Garde-Hansen (2011) argues that media are mnemonic, in that:

Personal and collective memories rely upon media for their production, storage and consumption as they become so complex and differentiated that the passing down of oral histories may not be adequate to conserve them. As such, media function as ‗extensions of man‘ in Marshall McLuhan's ([1964] 1994) sense of the phrase, as technologies (from pens to computers) that mediate our communications, with a focus upon form rather than content (Garde-Hansen, 2011, p. 60).

TY has little oral history about her memory and imagination of South Korean culture in the North home; as presented in lines 20-21 in Excerpt 4.2, she found few people with whom she could openly talk about what she had watched through the DVD player, which always had to be surreptitious. Instead, TY has a strong aural history of learning and imagining South Korean-ness. This is further demonstrated by her interview statement that she enjoyed listening to South Korean pop songs and South Korean radio programs while in Pyongyang, through a smuggled MP3 and an illegally remodeled radio to tune in South Korean FM radio stations. Because of government suppression of foreign media, listening to them is the quietest and the safest way to escape the surveillance, compared with speaking, reading, and writing them. TY‘s imagined community was substantially informed by auditory input, accumulated with layer upon layer of cross- linguistic and cross-cultural meanings.

What Feld and Brenneis (2004) call ―sonic habitus‖ comprehensively means the disposition about sound that individuals both perceive and produce. Therefore, in order to be more precise, I would call TY‘s disposition aural habitus. She acquired a set of 142 sensibilities, tastes, and schemata about how one‘s language sounded by experiencing

South Korean mass media. TY‘s aural habitus has influenced her English language learning and use in that it motivates her to learn English with a particular linguistic focus, i.e., she desires to be ―part of the panorama‖ shown in South Korean movies. Her aural habitus becomes a context within which she evaluates the norms of a legitimate speech style in the South Korean linguistic market.

Post-migration and pre-English learning: North Korean refugees’ identity crisis

For security reasons, I do not describe the process by which TY escaped and entered

South Korea in this dissertation. What I focus on in this section is how TY‘s preconceptions about South Korea in her pre-migration period are relevant to her new identity as an English language learner in the host country. To summarize the previous two sections of this chapter, she craved membership in South Korean culture. Ever since discovering what was going on outside the high walls of North Korea, her sense of adventure became a strong impetus for escaping from the country. To borrow TY‘s own words, she was ―too young to estimate the future and shape a grandiose plan for it

[migration].‖ She also characterizes herself as ―an idea woman with few elaborate plans‖ by nature. To wit, TY focused on what she longed for, rather than on what she might have to give up or worry about along with the entry to the South. This personality and focus are well exhibited in what she did in the first few weeks after the Hanawon training: ―I immediately obtained a driver‘s license and bought a car. I travelled every nook and cranny of the country by car for two months.‖

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After savoring her newfound freedom as a bold and pleasure-seeking explorer for a few months, TY asked herself ―what‘s next?‖ She acknowledged that ―one cannot travel forever.‖ TY was 25 when she began to ponder what she would do with the rest of her life not as an alien tourist but as a member of South Korean society. This overwhelming question filled her with despair. She accounted for this psychological abyss in the midst of answering my question, ―what was the first thing that you did after the Hanawon training?‖ It was a prolonged narrative ranging from the early days she had enjoyed her shopping and travel over South Korea, ―the New Continent,‖ to the coming reality in which she would have to choose a new and thus far unidentified self-sustaining lifestyle.

Excerpt 4.3 partly reveals the latter, the darkest period of her identity crisis.

1 R: What was the first thing that you did after the Hanawon training? 2 TY: […] I was asked where I was from everywhere because my accent was 3 unfamiliar to South Koreans. So I shut up and communicated in signs. Most 4 North Korean refugees first visit churches, where they make personal 5 connections such as the mentor-mentee relationship. But I never met any North 6 Korean refugees for fear of revealing my parents‘ identity. I was a complete 7 stay-at-home for a year. I didn‘t know that it was a social phobia, but it was. 8 About that time, Choi Jin-Sil committed suicide.20 Suicide is an act of treason in 9 North Korea. Life and death are controlled by the country. Nobody can even 10 think about killing himself. But it was exactly what I was doing in 2008. In that 11 year I broke up with my ex-boyfriend, on whom I was emotionally dependent. It 12 was not like I would be out of money right away but- I hated being looked at by 13 people and I couldn‘t get going with North Koreans. I just hated being here. 14 After a year of depression, I would choose between the two: die, or go back [to 15 North Korea].

Excerpt 4.3 [TY0930_1200]

20 Choi, Jin-Sil was a popular South Korean actress who committed suicide in October 2008. 144

The entire response took 35 minutes without a break, except for my occasional expressions of agreement or exclamation. One thing noticeable in the excerpt above is

TY‘s dual isolation; she isolated herself from North Korean refugees (line 6) as well as from South Koreans (lines 2-3) for her first year and a half in South Korea. She was extremely concerned with the security of her family remaining in the North, which might depend on the extent to which her existence in the South remained hidden. This high degree of risk is related to her parents‘ high social standing, which would be forfeited if their daughter‘s ―betrayal‖ came to the attention of the government.

The recurrent experience of being marked by her accent also led TY to retreat from society (lines 2 and 12). While talking about this episode of anthrophobia, she emphatically stated twice, ―That was not what I had imagined.‖ Above all, she resisted being classified as a refugee. From the very first interview, she said, ―I wish they [South

Koreans] wouldn‘t just call me anything—neither a North Korean refugee nor whatever that distinguishes me from the majority.‖ TY‘s resistance to the NKR label originated from a typical image of NKRs that South Korean mass media deployed and is hence shared by the majority of South Koreans. In TY‘s view, South Koreans preconceive

North Korean as ―short, dark-skinned, and ill-dressed,‖ none of which describes TY‘s appearance accurately.

Born and raised in the Special class, TY had always gained the upper hand ―no matter to whom she was compared‖ for 21 years in the home country. Since crossing the border, however, she not only lost such family connections but also was newly associated with negative social stereotypes. She escaped from the top drawer of a class-based

145 society, leaving behind identities such as beloved youngest daughter in a family with wealth and power, educated urbanite, and stylish career woman with overseas experience; and she entered the bottom drawer of an implicitly stratified society, as one of many refugees who all ended up in the same place—provided with a 50m2-unfurnished rental apartment per household, which TY refused to enter for quite a while, staying at a hotel instead.

The immigration literature has explored this loss or devaluation of capital across the borders with the notions of deskilling and deprofessionalization (McKay, 2001; Pratt,

1999). Adult migrants‘ education and career in their home countries do not always easily translate into recognizable skills in the receiving countries; the vast majority of migration worldwide is toward countries that are more knowledge-based, industrialized, and digitized than the sending countries. TY‘s loss does not completely fit this framework, however, because her central issue is the dilemmas faced in migrating from an obviously class-based society to an apparently classless, democratic society (cf., Block, 2014). The most critical force for skilling or professionalization in North Korea, class, vanished as she crossed the border. As previously mentioned in Excerpt 4.1, many pre-modern forms of capital that buttress North Korean society are likely to become useless as soon as people leave its orbit. The following section will explore how TY attempts to establish a new orbit for gaining cultural capital in her life in South Korea, using the social meanings given to the practice of EFL learning.

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The gateway for North Korean refugees to become English learners

Leaving behind her class position in the North, TY started from ground zero in the South.

After finally making up her mind to settle in South Korea after a prolonged period of uncertainty, there were several important changes in her life around the fall of 2008: she met South Korean foster parents,21 attended church, transferred to a South Korean business school as a junior, and started to learn English. She called these events

―milestones‖ because they had never been imagined before migration, and also because they generated new affiliations, networks, access to cultural as well as academic knowledge, and life goals. Furthermore, these milestones were interconnected; the foster parents were devout South Korean Christians in early fifties, who asked TY to attend church with them. She was introduced to a church that was providing scholarships to

NKR undergraduate students who joined and attended its worship services regularly.

Emotionally and financially supported by the church and her foster parents, she majored in business in a university in Seoul. Although her BA degree earned in the North was technically acknowledged in the South, TY felt that it was still undervalued. More importantly, she did ―not want to be a ‗North Korean in South Korea‘ but just a ‗South

Korean‘,‖ as becoming South Korean had been her motivation for migrating.

Learning English was one effort to be ―like South Koreans.‖ It was a key practice that TY found not to be deskilled or deprofessionalized in the new society. With respect

21 No research has been conducted yet on the relationship between North Korean refugees and South Korean mentors. However, experts on NKR issues whom I met during the fieldwork agree that having South Korean foster parents is a very rare occasion among North Korean refugees in South Korea; even rarer among the adults like TY. TY believes that she is lucky to meet them, who were introduced to her when she had suffered from depression, making up her mind to go back to North Korea in 2008. TY‘s foster parents housed her for a year and a half and have sponsored and befriended her up to now. 147 to her identity work, TY‘s English learning played two interrelated roles: (1) to keep her distance from North Korea or NKRs and (2) to be like educated South Koreans. She had barely been associated with English learning activities before 2009, the year of college entrance in Seoul. In Excerpt 4.4, she states that when she remained in North Korea,

English ability was a qualification that was only required for certain occupations and education outside her interests. By this statement, she spells out that different social meanings are given to the foreign language learning practice in her homeland, compared to in the South Korean context. In other words, her description in the excerpt below implies that her present lack of L2 skills is not owing to anything like her incompetence or lapse in judgment. Concisely mentioning what she had to do in the assigned English- focused class, she implies that she could have had foreign language learning experience in North Korea if she had only requested. Regardless of her access to resources, she found little rationale to learn English in the North.

1 R: Did you learn English in North Korea? [We]22 have to learn English if assigned to an English-focused class.23 ―This is 2 TY: an 3 apple,‖ [I] remember this sentence. But nobody cares about English skills when 4 taking a job there. Only those who will be interpreters or diplomats after 5 graduating from the University of Foreign Languages do care. Otherwise, 6 there‘s no need to learn English. I was frustrated, when realizing that I had to 7 take college courses in English and that English was on the top priority of the 8 qualifications for getting a job here.

Excerpt 4.4 [TY0321-1150]

22 A sentence with no subject is commonly accepted in daily conversation in Korean, particularly when the reference is clear in context. 23 The class title ―English-focused‖ was nominally used for the distinction from the classes that learned Russian. 148

According to Hanks (2009), people use deictic expressions to ―individuate‖ objects of reference in relation to the sociocultural context (p. 22). By keeping her distance from the EFL practice in North Korea, TY attempts to be affiliated with the EFL practice in

South Korea. We can see from the word choice in Excerpt 4.4 that TY clearly distinguishes her English learning experiences in the two Koreas, using deictics ―there‖

(line 4) and ―here‖ (line 7). These paradigmatically opposite deictics that TY used frequently in every interview, gugi (there) and yugi (here) in Korean, have more meaning than simply her being in the North yesterday and in the South today. While presenting her current spatial contiguity to the South by ―here,‖ TY kept her distance from the North and neutralized her account of it by ―there.‖

This objectification of the subject experience in the North is also implied in her use of the present tense in line 2 in the excerpt above. Although I had asked about her own experience, hence in the past tense (line 1), she answered in the present tense with no subject, which made the object of explanation distant and static (line 2). The omission of the subject, presented as square brackets in lines 2 and 3, is a common usage in Korean conversation. Because it followed my question with clear references ―you‖ and ―North

Korea‖ (line 1), her immediately following answer did not have to repeat the mutually intelligible subject.

Having said that, it stands out that TY interpreted my term ―you‖ in line 1 as a collective pronoun, which indicates general North Korean middle school students. Unlike

English, Korean distinguishes a singular you from a plural you by adding a suffix.

Therefore, TY must have understood that my question was about her personal experience.

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As analyzed in Excerpt 4.2, here again TY situates herself in the group of North Korean students who are assigned to English-focused classes regardless of their preference or interest. The point is that she does not belong to that group anymore. This omission of pronouns in Excerpt 4.4 contrasted with the use of pronouns with no omission in Excerpt

4.1. In Excerpt 4.1, she explicitly produced and distinguished ―we,‖ Pyongyang citizens, from ―they,‖ country people. Whereas Excerpt 4.1 reveals TY‘s assigned membership by the practice of ―othering,‖ Excerpt 4.4 intimates her desire to be affiliated with the

English learning community in South Korea.

In Excerpt 4.4, TY displays her understanding of the need for learning English in

South Korea with two representative goals: (1) taking English-mediated college courses and (2) having a white-collar job. These practices are indeed gatekeepers that control

South Korean college students‘ social standing. To meet the language requirement, the majority of them pay for and attend private language courses in categories such as

English conversation, debate, interviews, or business English, or high-stakes exams such as the national teacher recruitment examination, TOEIC, IELTS. Note that this practice of learning in adulthood is outside the realm of public education and can take several months to years. Ostensibly this practice is not mandated, but it is hardly seen as a matter of choice in South Korean society, where English mediates local ―relations of class, privilege, and legitimacy‖ (Park, 2010, p. 193). English knowledge not only mediates power and privilege but is also commodified and thus mediated by economic power

(Heller, 2003), leading South Koreans to spend large sums of money to learn it. In addition to thousands of hours of learning at school, South Koreans spend extra money

150 on private lessons and study abroad in order to enhance their English skills. In this respect, learning opportunities are already unequal among South Koreans. And it is even more challenging for newly arrived NKRs to be considered competitive with South

Korean peers in terms of English proficiency.

As shown in Excerpt 4.4, TY acknowledged this unequal starting line between

NKR and South Korean English learners. However, she did not believe that such unequal status was insurmountable. Instead, she criticized some people who sidestepped such academic and/or linguistic challenges because they were NKRs. She named specific examples of NKR human rights activists, politicians, autobiographers, and panelists on television talk shows. In TY‘s view, seven out of ten NKR activists involved in humanitarian organizations in South Korea ―have been in fact not interested in human rights at all and simply want to get a specious title of ‗activist‘ from it.‖ In other words, those NKRs who are fond of the limelight exploit their NKR status, promoting their

―exotic‖ background and uniquely humanitarian life stories as NKRs to build a career.

TY argued that this particular ―way of survival‖ has often made them slothful instead of seeking self-improvement to the level of competing with South Koreans.

One example of such self-improvement that TY mentioned is learning English, which many NKR students give up or do not even attempt. Indeed, according to the coordinator of the English for the Future program at the British Council, only a quarter of

NRK students have continuously registered for its English course after six months from the inauguration of the support program. Moreover, South Korean universities often sanction their refugee students‘ excuse for not learning English: TY‘s university, for

151 instance, exempts NKR students from English requirements for graduation (And TY proudly told me that she had passed them although not mandated). In light of the fact that some South Korean senior students even take a leave of absence exclusively to study

English for graduation requirements such as a minimum TOEFL score, the university‘s decision to exempt NKR students from it is indeed a special favor. However, it is doubtful if such policy benefits them in the long term. Without some English proficiency, they may not be prepared for various jobs or for postgraduate education. The exemption may brand them as much poorer English speakers than their South Korean counterparts, making the value of bachelor‘s degrees granted to NKRs effectively less than those awarded to South Koreans.

In any case, TY did not take the exemption and pursued ―what normal South

Koreans did‖ for their educational, economic, and social goals. By adopting their goals as her own, she uses the practice of EFL learning as a solution of the disjuncture between her imagined community and the actual situation in the host society. As TY‘s cultural taste to be like a South Korean had consolidated her sense of distinction in her early years in Pyongyang, she believed that learning English in South Korea would increase her possibility to gain capital of various types, including the affiliation to the host community and the sense of distinction as intellectual elite.

The familyless as EFL learners: The latest-comer’s struggle

In the previous sections, I explored TY‘s migration process and how the trajectory had led her to learn English. Her reasons for learning English as well as the reasons for

152 migration evolved with her situations and her emotional status. She once seriously considered going back to North Korea in early 2008, which she would orchestrate by visiting a North Korean embassy in any foreign country. However, in the end she decided not to do so because she knew ―things would not be the same as before‖ in North Korea.

TY‘s migration was not simply a spatial relocation, but a decision with irrevocable consequences. Instead of returning home, she decided to pursue an ―intellectual and elegant‖ life in the new community. She once said, ―My boyfriend always teases me that

I‘m fond of the words ‗elegantly‘ and ‗intellectually‘ too much,‖ and English proficiency was essential to her imagination of intellectual and elegant citizens. During her undergraduate years (2009-2012), she could not focus fully on English because of her other courses. It was after graduation that English became her ―only concern‖ (see

Excerpt 4.5 below). In our first meeting over lunch, TY broached the subject of her life in

South Korea with her English-learning routine as follows:

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1 R: Thanks for your time today. So you heard of what we were going to do from 2 the British Council? 3 TY: I did. These days English is my only concern. 4 R: Oh, is it? 5 TY: I graduated from college this February, and I‘m doing nothing but studying 6 English these days. I need an IELTS score by the end of this year for the 7 application to Chevening Scholarship, which the British Embassy awards one 8 North Korean refugee every year.24 9 R: By the end of this year? You must be busy these days. 10 TY: Yes. As you know, I attend the British Council in the morning from Monday to 11 Thursday. In the afternoon, I attend another. And I‘ll take the other course in the 12 weekend from next month. 13 R: Isn‘t the British Council‘s program enough for you to prepare for IELTS? 14 TY: Not really. It teaches general English. Teachers are British and [we] have to 15 speak in English only.

Excerpt 4.5 [TY0509-1210]

TY had heard in general terms about my research interest from the English for the

Future program coordinator before the meeting in Excerpt 4.5 (line 3). Even so, TY‘s ready answer in line 3 surprised me because she looked like she had a lot to say about her concern and her voice sounded desperate. She stated that learning English was the most important task at that point, which was corroborated by her weekly schedule full of private EFL courses (21 class hours and extra hours for homework and review every week). Chevening Scholarship provides one of the few prestigious and competitive opportunities for NKRs to experience graduate study at a university in the United

Kingdom for a year. TY set a goal of becoming the third recipient of this scholarship, following the past winners in 2011 and 2012, respectively. Lines 13-15 in the excerpt above show her understanding of what to focus on and how to learn English in that

24 IELTS (International English Language Testing System) is taken by applicants to academic institutions in Australia, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, to name a few. 154 moment. She believed that the different courses she was taking in different institutes were complementary for the best test result.

Bourdieu (1984, 1986, 1991) highlights the role of language in relation to the different forms of capital. Legitimate speakers are characterized by a certain degree of linguistic knowledge and communicative skills in a particular setting. This cultural capital is ―immediately and directly convertible into money and may be institutionalized in the form of property rights‖ (Bourdieu, 1986, p. 243). TY‘s aim to earn the Chevening

Scholarship can also be explained with this convertible economic metaphor. She established this goal, understanding study abroad as the highest-value-added means to improve English. Her full-time investment in learning English with no affiliation after graduation reflects her understanding of the symbolic power that English ability exercises in South Korea. In her view, English is powerful enough to transform her cultural and economic status not only back to her prior level in the North but also beyond in a new

South-Korean way. This recognition led her to form an image of South Koreans as possessing a good command of English, which became her new goal. I visualized this imagination in Figure 4.2 based upon her description.

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Figure 4.2. TY‘s perception of English proficiency as a qualification of educated South Koreans

TY did not conceal her envy of fluent English speakers, about whom she had heard that they had normally started learning English from early childhood and continued to learn it up into adulthood with little interruption. This observation is presented as the straight line on the left in Figure 4.2. TY entered South Korea when she was 24 and started learning English at 26, when she was about three years older than the average female new university graduates in South Korea (the broken line on the right in Figure

4.2). She took English courses at university and at two other private institutes, worked as an intern at the British Embassy for two months, often watched the English-language news broadcast CNN, and hung out with native speakers of English whom she had met at school, her workplace, and church. At the point of initial data collection, she had learned

English for three and a half years.

Despite this copious and manifold language input, TY felt that the intensity of her

English learning was not high enough to catch up with South Korean learners ahead of

156 her. She believed that she was studying English as many hours a day as her South Korean peers, as displayed by the identical slope of the two lines in Figure 4.2. Those colleagues are, however, ―early starters‖ with whom TY can hardly keep up with existing instructional methods. She was dissatisfied with her progress, saying, ―However hard I try, I‘m the latest-comer here.‖

Although her class level was upper-intermediate at the British Council at the point of data collection (the second highest out of twelve levels in total), she dismissed the significance of this label by claiming that anyone, including herself, automatically went up from one level to the next one as long as he or she sincerely attended the program for two to three months in a row. Representing herself as ―one of the students who have been here [at the British Council] for the longest time,‖ TY felt that she was the least competent English speakers in her class. Her nine classmates, all South Koreans, were either immediately assigned to the current upper-intermediate class after the initial screening test or promoted from the intermediate class one to two months ago. TY was the only student who had stepped up from the much lower level since the past year. She often felt apologetic to anyone who became her partner for classroom activities, fearing that her relatively poor English might irritate them. She said, ―They might ask themselves, ‗Am I spending time and money here for conversation with this kind of a low-level partner?‘‖

Likewise, TY constantly compared her English with that of educated South

Koreans, and disagreed with a common piece of advice not to compare her English with theirs. ―My South Korean friends often tell me, ‗Hey, don‘t compare your English with

157 ours. You‘ve just started it.‘ But what bothers me is simply the fact that they have what I do not.‖ Notably, TY never compared her English proficiency to that of other NKRs during the entire period of research participation. Although learning English was the major issue in her life during the period of data collection, it was seldom a subject of conversation when she met her NKR friends like DN or HK. Regardless of the fact that they were also English learners, to TY the discourse about learning English and what could be achieved through improved language proficiency seemed something to be discussed only with South Koreans. In spite of being at the highest class level among 60

NKRs at the British Council, she never expressed a sense of accomplishment or pride in terms of her English. Rather, she always sounded insecure, anxious, and frustrated when talking about her English and English learning.

TY said, ―I must jump up,‖ as represented by the skyrocketing slope on the right in

Figure 4.2, a leap to join the pool of ―intelligent and elegant South Koreans.‖ And the way that she was considering to reach it was through a year-long study abroad in the

United Kingdom, receivable through a financial award from the British Embassy in South

Korea (see Excerpt 4.5; see also Appendix C). Notably, TY did not express an immediate, discrete purpose for such dramatic language enhancement, such as working in a major corporation or applying to graduate school. After spending a year in the United

Kingdom, she was thinking to go to the United States through an F2 VISA (which is given to a student‘s spouse), following her South Korean boyfriend who would start his doctoral study there. Nor did she draw a detailed picture of what might result from the

158

Chevening program. She only obscurely understood that she would have ―more opportunities to do whatever South Koreans do‖ by improving her English.

However, TY failed to improve her IELTS score enough to apply for the scholarship. The award competition itself is not stiff because only NKRs are eligible to apply. Nonetheless, the minimum English test score that the embassy believes to be necessary to study at a British university is too high for most NKRs, including TY. I asked her who then has been selected so far, and she said, ―Those who came here in their early years with their families.‖ Compared to TY, who fled to the South alone in 24, they have long been involved in the South Korean educational system, where many parents identify themselves as ―educational managers‖ for their children (Lee, 2010, p. 253).

Among South Koreans, 12% have experienced study abroad and 7% have earned a degree abroad (Trend Monitor, 2013). Although the statistics do not specify how they could afford the expense, there are some other revealing figures: 71.4% of South Korean undergraduate students are economically dependent on their parents (Kim, 2014), and

72% of South Korean job seekers believe that one‘s family‘s socioeconomic status is one of the strongest qualifications for white-collar jobs in the country (Trend Monitor, 2013).

In contrast, TY did not find any other way to afford the tens of thousands of dollars needed for study abroad than the British Embassy‘s program.

Researchers have investigated how immigrants‘ habitus is validated in their language learning and use outside the home, such as in the classroom or in the workplace

(Adamuti-Trache, 2012; De Costa, 2010; Norton Peirce, 1995). Positioning their family heritage as a counterpart of the dominant, institutionalized culture of the host country,

159 however, we often consider that the migrant language learners always have their family besides them. The stories of my participants substantiate that their material conditions and subjective experiences of familylessness influence the intensity and sustainability of their English learning in South Korea. The cultural freedom that they admired from the

North does exist in the South, but access to it is determined by one‘s English skill. And this linguistic capital has been acquired by South Korean ―children of well-off families, who decisively consolidate their advantage by investing their actual capital in the sections most likely to secure it the highest and most durable academic profitability‖ (Bourdieu &

Passeron, 1977, p. 82).

North Korean refugees’ English learning as resistance

Concurrent with Anderson‘s (1991) use of the phrase ―imagined community,‖ TY‘s imagination has been adjusted even after participating in the community of the target language learners. To her, the discourse about and the practice of EFL learning are very

South-Korean. She won the ownership of English language by stepping up to the upper- intermediate level from the bottom of the latter for three and a half years, which is rare for NKRs, and by trying to win an award that would result in even higher proficiency in the future. Through this effort to become like an educated South Korean, TY has built a new orbit where symbolic capital could be enjoyed with newly given meanings in the host society. Observing and analyzing this process, I often wondered where her North

Korean identity is located in her English learning trajectory. Does she always have to keep distance from her background and NKR status in order to be a competent English

160 speaker and increase cultural capital in South Korea? The investigation of what DN, another former Pyongyang citizen in her early thirties, experienced as an English learner can provide an answer for these questions. Overall, DN‘s story complements TY‘s, since

DN learned English to reveal her NKR identity in particular situations.

TY and DN first met in Hanawon in 2007. They are sworn sisters since 2008, sharing a sense of nostalgia for home and supporting each other during hard and lonely times in South Korea. Both of them said that this sisterhood was possible because they were from the same background—their class position, college education, people in

Pyongyang with whom they were acquainted in common, and so on. In this sense, DN‘s life story concurs with TY‘s, with her privileged access to resources and capital in the homeland.

However, DN‘s experience is more exceptional than TY‘s in a way, as she is a pianist who received state-run special education for gifted children since her preschool years. She told me what follows with a laugh: ―I had to practice the piano every morning for an hour before going to school; otherwise, [Mom‘s] breakfast menu of the day changed. And this routine lasted for ten years until I graduated from college.‖ It was her mother who directed her education in general including her piano training up to her graduation of a college of music in North Korea. DN took pride in how the North Korean government diligently discovered and educated talented children, and in how her mother fulfilled her role as an educational manager of DN with responsibility and assiduity. Here is one of the anecdotes that she provided me: ―They [the North Korean government] even sent a gifted musician to Italy by a chartered flight to offer him a regular private lesson

161 from an Italian virtuoso.‖ To me it sounded like a folktale. While describing such elitist practices, DN used the term ―Spartan education system‖ three times. In the third use, she said, ―I know people here say the Spartan education system is not the best way to educate kids. But I believe that such hard-core pedagogy has enabled North Korea to foster many great artists.‖

As also explored in TY‘s episode of the elementary school field trip (see Excerpt

4.1), North Korea‘s arts education distinguishes its exclusive recipients from those who have little chance to play any musical instrument throughout their lives. DN‘s access to classical music as cultural capital strongly points to her economic and social status, which enabled her to privately import foreign sheet music, to continue her profession by entering the only Graduate School of Music in the state, and to afford fine clothing and bags commensurate with her social position. The tie among these forms of capital was tight, and their beneficiaries were not resented. This coalescence of capital has side effects, though; for not only is it symptomatic of an unequal distribution of capital among the citizens, but it also prevents these selected few from looking beyond the narrow career path that the country assigned to them. This is why neither TY nor DN learned

English in North Korea; the resources in their hands were more than enough to live in plenty there. Their future had been pre-planned in way that boded well for them.

According to TY, there are North Koreans just as encouraged in their foreign language abilities as DN was with music.

DN fled from the country in 2005. One day, beaten by two police officers who picked on her clothing and hair style on her way back home, she had to be in the hospital

162 for a month. Her family was furious and hunted down one of the police officers who had attacked her, and visited his house. What her family found there was a father with three little children, subsisting on rations, from whom they could not and did not want to demand any reparation. This accident led DN to have serious skepticism with regard to

―where is this country heading to?‖ She believed that the whole society was full of aggression, which resulted from the state‘s infringements upon personal liberties and rights.

In return for seeking freedom and human dignity, DN gave up most of the economic capital that she enjoyed in the hometown. Responding to my question about what she had left behind in her house in Pyongyang on the day of escape, she said with a smile, shaking her head: ―Hey, don‘t ask me that! All my books, musical notes, clothes, handbags, furniture were European luxuries. I carried nothing but a backpack when crossing the river.‖ This relinquishment was possible on the one hand because her imagined community (one with greater freedom) had been formed in response to the irrationalities and corruption of North Korea society. On the other hand, she had a firm belief that her piano skills would be valid anywhere in the world. She crossed the border between North Korea and China with this expectation.

However, she and her mother had to stay in an underground lair for three years due to the risk of disclosure to the Chinese police and forced repatriation to North Korea.

Living in a dark, small room with some other North Korean escapees, DN practiced playing the piano every day without a piano, tapping on the desk with her fingers. This unexpectedly lengthened stopover in China made DN crave the fundamental human

163 rights and freedom to play the piano far more. On entering South Korea in 2007, she did not want to waste her time anymore. In order to take a performance test for a graduate school, her finger, dulled during the three years in China, first had to be recovered in a brief space of time. She played the piano for many hours every day for six months, until she was accepted to a graduate program in 2008. This immoderate practice caused permanent hand nerve damage a year later, which is fatal to a pianist‘s career. During the time of data collection, she was working as a part-time piano accompanist for a college choir, which was not overtaxing for her physical strength.

Excerpt 4.6 presents DN‘s first English learning experience. After her entry to the

South, DN soon found that learning English was essential for every college graduate, including pianists, to ensure their expertise. She pursued a Master of Music on arrival to

South Korea, and the school required a minimum TOEIC score of 585 out of 990 as one of the thesis qualification requirements.

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1 R: Did you have any idea how this English requirement would be relevant to what 2 you were doing as a pianist? 3 DN: That‘s just how they earn a degree. To make the test score, I attended XXX 4 from 7:30am, took graduate coursework from 9:30am, and gave some little kids 5 piano lessons in the evening, every weekday for two years. I also met a 6 professor who tutored me [in English] in his house four times, before taking 7 TOEIC. It was good to get advice on my weak points. But unfortunately, he was 8 so sure that I would not meet the minimum score 580. His attitude really 9 stressed me out. I was feeling lacking in some sense. ‗Well, she‘s a poor North 10 Korean woman. I‘ll assist her just a couple of times.‘ I met the professor at the 11 church, and he was simply curious about a North Korean who learned English, 12 with a ‗let‘s see‘ attitude and out of compassion. My English back then was at 13 the bottom. And he quit teaching me before long, saying that he‘s busy. So I 14 said, ‗Oh, are you? Okay then.‘ I self-studied from that moment. And I got 700! 15 R: Wow. Did you tell the professor that you made it? 16 DN: Yeah. I told him, ‗Thanks to your help, I got 700.‘ He was really surprised. It 17 seems that he looked at North Koreans a bit differently since then. North 18 Koreans face such a stereotype everywhere, looked down upon as unintelligent, 19 slow-witted, and uncultured people from the world‘s poorest country. 20 R: Which is not always true? 21 DN: It‘s true that they‘re from a poor country but there is a broad distinction 22 between the educated and the uneducated. People don‘t know North Korea well. 23 I thank the professor, whose doubtful eyes and words incited me to study 24 English hard out of spite. I thought to myself, ‗I‘ll show you something!‘ 25 R: You tried really hard. 26 DN: Yeah, I memorized at least 100 English words for eight hours a day to the max 27 for four months. Without submitting a TOEIC transcript, I can‘t graduate. I 28 can‘t take a leave of absence, either, because I have no money. It was a last- 29 ditch effort. A few days ago, I opened the English textbook that I had used in 30 that period by chance. And I thought, ‗Gosh, how did I do all this?‘ ((Laugh)) I 31 forgot quite a lot there!

Excerpt 4.6 [DN0201-0001]

DN was tolerant and passionate enough to accept that she had to learn English to become a South Korean graduate student (line 3). She describes her weekly schedule during this period with three routines: learning English, taking graduate courses, and 165 earning money (lines 3-5). Since NKRs‘ post-graduate education is not financially supported by the South Korean government, DN worked as a part-time piano tutor to pay for the tuition. In fact, this financial situation also propelled her English study (line 28); she had to graduate in order to work full-time. All of her colleagues took private English courses for graduation. However, DN could not afford any paid English lessons.

Fortunately, XXX (line 3), one of the biggest private language institutes in Seoul, supported dozens of NKRs every year by paying 90% of their tuition.25 DN attended its introductory grammar course for two years.

In addition, she was introduced to a tutor from her church, the person she called

―professor‖ in Excerpt 4.6. Although the lessons did not last long (line 6), DN acknowledges that her ―weak points‖ (line 7) were resolved by this one-on-one help.

Here the weak point signifies a practical skill to earn high marks in TOEIC, by analyzing and memorizing the limited patterns of the multiple choice questions (Mundy, 2014).

Along with this intensive instruction, DN spent a great amount of time enlarging her

English vocabulary for her own (line 26). She had a sharp grasp of the nature of TOEIC, wherein high mark largely depended on one‘s vocabulary skills. Interestingly, she thanked her mother who had sternly disciplined her piano practice in North Korea, which was ―definitely helpful for my strategic self-study of English here.‖ DN‘s organized, inquisitive, and patient personality had been ingrained from her early years, which resulted in her current success in TOEIC, with a much higher test score (line 14) than the graduate school‘s requirement.

25 XXX, a pseudonym, is the institute TY also attended and where she met a mentor. 166

To DN, because of the graduate school graduation requirements, learning English was essential for sustaining her identity as a pianist in the host country. While studying the English language, she displayed strategic concentration and perseverance during a given period—and her success surprised the South Korean professor in Excerpt 4.6. In a calm tone, DN recounts the professor‘s bias towards NKRs and her reaction to it.

According to her interpretation, the professor deems that the practice of learning English is beyond what most NKRs are supposed to or able to do in the South; studying English is a dominant action of South Koreans, not of outsiders or newcomers. DN was aware that this unconscious ―othering‖ was not uncommon among South Koreans who were ignorant of North Korean society (line 22). In this regard, DN‘s ―last-ditch effort‖ to learn English was a stroke against any disconnection between North Korean-ness and membership in the EFL learner community. Submitting an English test score was a puzzle piece that DN needed in order to complete her qualification as a pianist in South

Korea. It was a new type of personal investment, an effort to continue in the host country what she had done for her entire life. At the same time, learning English was a symbolic action that resisted South Koreans‘ stereotyped image of ―slow-witted and uncultured‖

NKRs.

Since her hand nerve damage in 2010, DN had to revise her plan to apply for a doctoral program and to become a full time pianist and professor. After a time, she got married, started working part-time as an accompanist, and, notably in 2012, re-started learning English at the British Council. Unlike two years ago when she aggressively studied to pass the qualification exam, the DN whom I met in 2012 was a calm, pleasant,

167 and affable student to her teacher and classmates. As the oldest in the class, she cheerfully took up the role of networker who kept in touch with the teacher and classmates outside the classroom by phone or online chat. She also actively helped some classmates who did not often understand the English teacher‘s direction (who was a native speaker) or the class situation.

As recounted in the last two lines of Excerpt 4.6, she forgot most English knowledge that she had saved in her short-term memory in 2010. Although enrolled in the Starter‘s class, the lowest of the twelve levels at the British Council, her English was outstanding there in my opinion. Nevertheless, DN was well-content with being at the

Starter‘s level for six months, as her aim was ―to be familiar with a native speaker teacher‘s pronunciation‖ and ―to overcome fear and speak out in English, though not perfect.‖ In contrast to her limited focus on vocabulary and grammar in 2010, this time

DN turned her attention to communication skills. This change corresponds to what her imagined membership in the English-speaking community looks like, which is presented in Excerpt 4.7.

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1 R: […] and what led you to come to the British Council? 2 DN: You know I lived in the United States for two months right after the marriage. 3 I wished I could speak something there! Ever since I was young, I‘ve been 4 interested in language. I taught myself Chinese since I was 13. No one forced 5 me to do so, but I memorized 8,000 Chinese characters. My Dad is Chinese, so 6 I was also curious about where he had come from. I liked to work hard, but at 7 the same time many things stuck in my head without a desperate effort. That‘s 8 how I was selected as a gifted child for special education. (1.0) Anyway, I 9 wished to communicate in English better, since the stay in the U.S. And my 10 ultimate goal is- I expect that an opportunity will be arranged for us in no 11 distant future to appeal for what North Korean refugees feel about the 12 reunification of Korea. For example, in the United Nations, or international 13 organizations. It‘s been five years since I entered South Korea, and I see that the 14 world ―closes the attention up‖ to North Korean refugees and North Korea. If I 15 speak [English] fluently, if such an opportunity comes, I want to tell [people] 16 my mind and interact in English. It‘s a perfect timing, as I‘m at a loose end now 17 since getting married. I just keep house, not as busy as the graduate school time. 18 There‘s no such chance again to study English in comfort like these days. I have 19 no baby yet. It‘s a golden opportunity. I don‘t want to lose it. And as you know, 20 it‘s not good for married couples to spend time together all day long. ((Laugh)) 21 We need some distance. ((Laugh)) The more I study, the happier married life! 22 That‘s how I decided to study.

Excerpt 4.7 [DN0530-0001]

DN‘s imagined community described in the excerpt above concurs with her experience in Excerpt 4.6 in that both efforts were oriented to specific goals. She explains five background reasons for her return to be an English learner: (1) her natural interest in and capacity for language (lines 4-8), (2) the U.S. trip (lines 2, 3, 9), (3) her wish to speak for NKRs on the international stage someday (lines 10-16), (4) her plan to spend her not- busy-time wisely (lines 16-19), and (5) her preference to stay away from her husband for a few hours a day (lines 20-21). I will discuss the complexity of the refugees‘ reasons for learning English in detail in Chapter 5. 169

However, one thing worth noticing here is how DN‘s habitus and cultural capital works for new goals in the host community. Despite, in my view, the hapless situation with her hand nerve injured, DN unfalteringly turns her eyes to alternative careers, creates meanings, and modifies the vistas of the future with the resources that she had taken with her from the North and developed in the South. By doing so, DN resists the devaluation of her North-Korean-ness, or habitus. Learning English is a step in this resistance; by adding this language skill as cultural capital to equip her for her imagined communities of present globalization and hopeful future North-South reunification, DN establishes the dignity of her North Korean identity. This is contrasted to TY‘s view on the practice of English language learning, which TY expected to facilitate her assimilation into ―normal‖ South Korean society.

Conclusions

This chapter shed light on NKRs‘ changing perspectives on and dynamic experiences of

English learning for gaining cultural and symbolic capital in South Korea, after they find a disjuncture between their imagined community and their actual experiences in South

Korea. According to the findings so far, NKRs believe that the practice of L2 learning can either underline or attenuate their North Korean-ness in South Korean society. In either way, their habitus is transnationalized, forms of capital are revalued, imagined community is re-imagined, and in consequence they make an accommodation of their past (when they did not need to learn English) to their present situation (which places a

170 central emphasis on English proficiency). This finding provides empirical evidence of what Kelly and Lusis (2006) state:

economic, social, and cultural capital do not simply transfer to a new setting in which they are evaluated within a new habitus: instead, a process of valuation and exchange continues through transnational social fields well after settlement has occurred. Thus the habitus itself is transnationalised (Kelly & Lusis, 2006, p. 837).

The role of L2 learning to increase cultural capital and its consequential effect of either promoting or hiding their North Korean identity are well documented in the other research participants. For example, the NKR participant HK made a lot of effort and achieved a decent TOEIC score to apply for a full-time position at a national bank in

South Korea. However, in the final round she lost to another NKR candidate with a lower

TOEIC score. Aware that both candidates were from North Korea, the employer was more fascinated by their non-South-Korean experiences in their employable skills.

Learning English was one of her efforts to attenuate her North Korean identity and to prove that she was qualified as average South Korean job seekers. Realizing that she had to be ―an outstanding North Korean refugee‖ rather than ―a North Korean refugee similar to South Koreans‖ to be marketable in a certain field, HK quit learning English in the middle of data collection. However, without an impressive TOEIC score she may not have been as highly considered by the bank. Her English proficiency will give her more employment opportunities in South Korea, in particular if she meets an employer who is well aware of how challenging it is for NKRs to learn English in South Korea. In that

171 situation where HK receives her credit for her hard work on English that started after her school-age years, her NKR identity will be promoted.

BH, another female participant in her early twenties, was proudly selected as one of ten NKR college students whom the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs of the

U.S. Department of State invited to Washington, D.C. for an eight-month-long study abroad and internship. However, she was disappointed in her hope to learn English with a spirit of freedom and adventure in the U.S. While I talked with her on the phone, she complained about her life in Washington; the South Korean agency that mediated between the invited NKR students and the U.S. project team meddled in her life too much. ―[The agency] seems to consider us as potential runaways or outlaws. They keep watching and control us wherever we go and whatever we do. One of the officers even said that we must have been satisfied merely with the fact that we were in the U.S. for free—which means ‗so you guys shouldn‘t want anything further.‘‖ In this case, BH was compulsorily reminded of her North Korean identity while learning English.

Figure 4.3 displays the four phases of my participants‘ lives in common: (A) Pre- migration, (B) Transition, (C) Post-migration and Pre-English learning, and (D) Post-

English learning. As noted in Chapter 2, this figure was informed by the graphs of happiness that my participants drew during their interview sessions (see Appendix H).

The participants imagined what South Korean life would be like while in (A), yearned even more for South Korean membership during (B), tumbled down with identity crisis, solitude, and depression in (C), and modified their original imagination and re-evaluated their capital, which resulted in the movement to (D). This division does not intend to

172 generalize the life episodes of the refugee population; rather, it highlights the importance of border-crossers‘ historical disposition, which is primarily developed at home and school and unwittingly influences their multicontextual decisions about what to value.

Figure 4.3 also reflects the impact of English learning on refugees‘ material, sociocultural, and emotional well-being, as a cornerstone for fitting into the target community. What is more, the phases demonstrate that foreign-language-learning transmigrants need to be studied distinctively from second-language-learning transmigrants. This chapter finds that my participants, EFL-learning migrants, experience a much longer, more dynamic, and more frustrating Phase (C) than ESL learners in the

English-speaking countries. And their decision to move on to Phase (D) is a complex, developmental, and ideological practice, which deserves rigorous investigation with sociopolitical, sociolinguistic, and sociocultural perspectives on adult refugee learners outside the Anglosphere.

(A) (B) (C) (D)

Born in Left Entered Started to North Korea North Korea South Korea learn English

Figure 4.3. North Korean refugees‘ four phases of life

These considerations are important even after entering Phase (D), as noted by the arrow on the right end of the graph above. TY was, at least in the period of data collection, struggling and overwhelmed by the significant barriers as an English learner.

DN, on the other hand, judiciously used her knowledge and resources to learn English.

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DN also resisted South Koreans‘ stereotype of NKRs and wrestled against adversity by learning English. Park and Wee (2012) describe the notion of habitus as a driving force to make us ―follow particular courses of action on the basis on our moral, affective, and aesthetic judgments about the world‖ (p. 35). My participants‘ moral, affective, and aesthetic judgments form the basis for the important decisions in their lives, each phase of which influences how they learn English.

On the other hand, such judgments do not always lead the participants to cool- headed and systematic decisions about escape, settlement, and language learning. Border- crossers undergo trial and error, facing numerous unexpected obstacles in the new environment. For instance, the initial culture shock is enormous when they—not immediately but gradually—discover the need for English in the host country. North

Korean refugees in South Korea, the primary example in this dissertation, usually arrive with little to no experience of learning English due to poor educational policies and practices in the homeland. The secondary and longer-term frustration comes when those over 18 realize that they need extra money over the minimum cost of living provided by the South Korean government; when those who migrated alone recognize the role of the nationwide enthusiastic family involvement in a child‘s educational advancement, especially English competence; and overall, and finally, when they become aware that access to a good command of English is socially stratified in their new country. As is commonly known, EFL is predominantly acquired in the classroom setting. This implies a closer tie between linguistic capital and economic capital than in the ESL context, an affiliation which maintains English as a class marker and the exclusive property of the

174 haves. Continued research is needed on how these migrants‘ membership in the EFL community can be ensured, so necessary to their access to capital over time in the host society.

The appreciation and imagination of symbolic capital such as the sense of distinction, educational qualifications or personal expression led NKRs to enter South

Korea and to persevere in South Korea despite material, relational, and emotional challenges. However, it turns out that they only partially gain the membership of their imagined community, qualified with a new label (e.g., they are not categorized as

―university students‖ but as ―NKR university students‖). Disappointed with this unexpected labeling, even after achieving their apparently equal status with South

Koreans as university student, intern, pianist, actress, or boy(girl)friend, NKRs gradually come to believe that English proficiency may facilitate success. By learning English, they aim to either reveal or hide their North Korean identity in order to increase cultural and symbolic capital. In this respect, the practice of EFL learning is an essential element for many NKRs in the process in which their identities are reconciled and reformulated.

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Chapter 5: Learning Foreign Language as Recovery:

North Korean Refugees’ Pre-investment in EFL in South Korea

Introduction

Chapter 4 dealt with two focal participants, TY and DN, who learned English with specific purposes and expectations. Leaving behind different forms of capital that were not always transferrable outside the hometown, the participants constantly reconstructed their image of the destination community with imagined cultural freedom and social mobility. While their habitus was being transnationalized, learning English was one of the most symbolic and ideological breakthroughs that represented their acceptance of or resistance against the reality, re-imagination, and negotiation of the meanings given to

NKR identity as well as North Korean identity situated in South Korea.

This chapter continues to explore the vicissitudes of how NKRs become English learners, as in Chapter 4. What this chapter foregrounds is twofold: (1) the refugee learners‘ pre-investment period, before they have any aspiration of learning English, and

(2) their understanding of EFL learning as recovery from past hardships. Analyzing interviews with the participants and their language class materials, this chapter addresses how their initial lack of motivation changed into an investment in learning English in a piecemeal way, as a means of recovery. The following section reviews the literature on the concept of investment, an alternative to L2 learner motivation. 176

Pre-investment and investment: The heads and tails

L2 learning at first blush appears to be a voluntary and autonomous action. Learners envision access to new resources, spending the existing resources such as time and network. Not everyone, however, successfully converts such expectations into an actual decision to learn, since L2 learning is socially mediated. The learners‘ multiple roles and dynamic situations affect the extent to which they can concentrate on learning. This idea is anchored in the body of literature that concerns L2 learners as social beings (Block,

2007; Firth & Wagner, 1997, 2007; McKay & Wong, 1996; Norton Peirce, 1995;

Pavlenko, 2002).

For example, Norton (1995, 2013) argues that second language acquisition (SLA) is inseparable from the learners‘ situated sociohistorical contexts. In the strand of poststructuralist theory (McNamara, 2012), Norton problematizes the traditional discussion of L2 motivation as an internal, unitary, and ahistorical characteristic that drives learners to acquire L2 (e.g., Gardner & Lambert, 1972; MacIntyre, 2002). Binary notions such as field-independent vs. field-dependent or extroverted vs. introverted do not take into consideration power relations in the social world, where some vulnerable learners are marginalized from access to learning. To conceptualize this relationship between the language learners‘ affect and the wider social context in SLA studies, Norton

Peirce (1995) claims that ―affective factors are frequently socially constructed in inequitable relations of power, changing over time and space, and possibly coexisting in contradictory ways in a single individual‖ (p. 12).

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Based on this belief, the notion of investment is an alternative that Norton deploys in order to probe what actually leads language learners to join communication in the L2.

Inspired by West (1992, cited by Norton, 2000) and Bourdieu‘s (1977) discussions of the relationship among identity, desire, and symbolic power, Norton finds that material and social resources mediate adult immigrants‘ ESL learning. Defined as ―the socially and historically constructed relationship of learners to the target language and their sometimes ambivalent desire to learn and practice it‖ (Norton & Gao, 2008, p. 110), investment complicates our understanding of what really happens in a socially mediated agent‘s language learning. As each learner‘s sociohistorical and sociocultural background holds sway over her participation and identity formation, SLA does not come into play simply by his or her invariant aptitude or attitude traits. The learner‘s participation is mediated by numerous situations outside the classroom, which thus makes it consequential ―to examine these lives with as much complexity as possible‖ (Skilton-

Sylvester, 2002, p. 110).

In this view, investment as a theoretical construct enables L2 researchers to look at multiple, sometimes conflicting, and constantly transforming social identities that language learners manage in addition to their psychological willingness to learn. And as

McKay and Wong (1996) argue, such complexity and fluctuation of their identities are not ―accidental deviations from a ―pure‖ or ―ideal‖ language learning situation‖ but critical desires ―constituting the very fabric of students‘ lives and as determining their investment in learning the target language‖ (p. 603).

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The construct of investment has informed L2 researchers who looked at different objects of inquiry, such as form-focused instruction (Tomita & Spada, 2013), dual immersion programs (Potowski, 2004), immigrant families (Chao, 2013), and international graduate students‘ language socialization (Ortaçtepe, 2013), to name a few.

As for research methodology, ethnographers, among others, have found the notion of investment a useful template to explore how L2 learners attain ownership of the target language (e.g., Chen, 2010; Clark, 2008; Ibrahim, 1999; Wu et al., 2014). In that the majority of those L2 learners experienced geographical movement and settled in a new environment featuring cultural and linguistic diversity, ethnographers delve into how the learners reposition themselves and are engaged in language learning across historical time and social setting.

Norton‘s (2000) theorization of investment is underpinned by her empirical study of immigrant women in Canada. Since then, L2 researchers have studied migrants‘ pasts, presents, and futures with two fundamental questions about their common affect: when do they decide to learn a language? When do they actually attain the right to learn a language? The former is about willingness, and the latter is about legitimacy and achievement. Structuralists ignore the latter and deem that the former is always a definite foothold of learning. Poststructuralists, on the other hand, deny this assumption, arguing that language learners are legitimized by people in the community in which the language learners wish to interact (Bourdieu, 1991). Although a learner himself is motivated, it is the interaction between him and his social world that authorizes him to join the target

179 language community. Accordingly, to poststructuralists, willingness to speak is one thing and right to speak is another.

This chapter subscribes to this latter point of view on language learning, analyzing the relationship between the social context and the migrants‘ commitment to the language learning practice. What this chapter intends to add to Norton‘s (2013) conceptualization is as follows: (1) the immigrant L2 learners‘ pre-motivation period, and (2) the intricacy of their reasons for migration and their relationship with L2 learning. Firstly, the construct of investment pays primary attention to the social constraints that discourage the immigrant learners‘ motivation. Norton (2013) dwells on her participants‘ learning environment as follows:

All the participants in the study were highly motivated to learn English. They all took extra courses to learn English, they all participated in the diary study, they all wished to have more social contact with anglophone Canadians […] Despite being highly motivated, there were particular conditions under which the women were most uncomfortable and unlikely to speak (Norton, 2013, p. 157).

Here the uncomfortable conditions that undermined the women‘s motivation to learn English include a working environment with little chance to speak English and

Canadian co-workers who were unwilling to engage them in conversation. In a workplace that was a site of struggle and identity transformation, the women participants claimed both their right to speak and their desired identity such as a multicultural citizen.

Norton‘s approach and her findings helped me formulate my research questions to begin with, as my study also highlights how social conditions interact with the refugee learners.

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The evidence from my data counterpoints with her findings, however, with regard to the learner characteristics inherent to the population of refugee EFL learners; some of my participants had no to little motivation to study anything even while attending the language course and participating in my research. Connecting this not-yet-motivated status with the participants‘ life trajectory and current social network, I found that they did not learn English in order to increase cultural capital but for some other reasons that I will analyze throughout this chapter.

Through this analysis, I argue that Norton‘s (2013) statement above that ―despite being highly motivated, there were particular conditions under which the women were most uncomfortable and unlikely to speak‖ can be updated with another statement as follows: ―Even when unmotivated, there are particular conditions under which the learners are most comfortable and likely to speak.‖ Before they are motivated, they can be already included in the L2 learning practice, setting them up to be good language learners, who use the newly available social resources in the host community. In this way, I argue that the learners‘ experience in the phase of pre-investment is in relation to their upcoming investment.

On the other hand, Norton (2013) underscores the close relationship between the immigrant language learners‘ reasons for migration and their investment in language learning in the host country. The author quotes five immigrant women‘s words about why they came to Canada and relates them to their negotiated identity, which has weighty implications in their investment. For example, Martina, one of Norton‘s participants, migrated for a ―better life for children.‖ This formulates Martina‘s identity as primary

181 caregiver in the family, which is ―implicated in her investment in the target language and her interaction with target language speakers‖ (p. 125). This connection is illuminating, taking every move and moment with multiple roles that the migrants carry out into account for examining their language learning. Their tiring, fluctuating, and contradictory life itself is a backdrop where the practice of L2 learning occurs.

However, I realized that some of my participants had not had explicit reasons for migration. Considering that they are more often classified as refugees than as immigrants, my participants‘ reasons for escaping and resettling were not always easily and clearly describable. When the term immigrant is used distinctively from refugee, the former refers to those who immigrate of their own will, interest, and plan, often with a job offer in the host country. They can also expect to return to the homeland, if needed. In contrast, one usually becomes a refugee unwillingly and is never back home. Moreover, most refugees are part of a group exodus (O‘Reilly, 2012). Within this physically and emotionally overwhelming condition, the refugees‘ first and foremost reason for migration is safety from death threat on a number of accounts. And this observation led me onto the following question: How does the refugees‘ migration under duress influence their English learning?

I explore my participants‘ stories to present that North Korean refugees do not always cross the border with a specific agenda, confidence, and financial or social resources. NKRs‘ escape is almost completely driven by external reasons, which this chapter will explore in detail. In addition, the refugees‘ perceived reason for entering the host country may not be fixed from the beginning; it may become clear or adjusted in the

182 course of their new life. More importantly, the saga of migration and adaptation affects the process by which they find reasons for learning English in South Korea. Unlike the findings of the existing literature on L2 learner motivation (e.g., Dörnyei, 2000, 2001;

Shoaib & Dörnyei, 2005), this chapter shows that adult refugees‘ L2 learning does not always have explicit reasons such as academic or career goals. By considering refugees with traumatic experiences, this chapter argues that the practice of learning English plays a role in compensating for the loss.

“Study is meaningless”: North Korean refugee learners with no motivation

When I first met SN in October 2012, he was 25 years old and was working as a full-time barista at a café owned by another North Korean refugee in Seoul. Since entering South

Korea in 2005 with no family, he was living in an apartment with members from his church, a pastor, the café owner, and four other South Korean adults. Throughout the interview, SN was calm and reminiscent, describing fragmentary memories about his life.

He was accustomed to speaking about his experience, saying: ―I like talking to people.

It‘s good if my story touches and amazes them.‖ Since losing three siblings and both parents before turning 11, SN remained homeless and obtained food from begging in the

Northeastern Province of North Korea and in several Chinese towns near the border with

North Korea along the river, until entering South Korea at the age of 18. The province in which his hometown was located, like most other provinces in North Korea in the mid-

1990s, suffered from serious crop failure for multiple years and the collapse of the

183 national food rationing. His father was an acupuncturist but barely made ends meet for his family of six.

In Excerpt 5.1 below, as a response to my (presented as ―R‖ in the excerpts) question about his early years in North Korea, SN identifies the period with a single word, ―Kotjebi‖26 (line 2). He affirms this identity by saying it twice, omitting the subject

―I‖ and with no further explanation. With this decisive and concise word choice, he distances himself from his history. The fact that he was Kotjebi in North Korea was not new to me in Excerpt 5.1 because he had already mentioned it in the previous interview.

Thus, the purpose of SN‘s turn in line 2 is not to convey new information; SN understands that the term Kotjebi contains acute implications. Placing himself under this specific membership category, he allows anything that the term may connote in order to account for who he used to be. Though the use of a generic term ―childhood‖ in my question in line 1 does not necessarily zero in on SN‘s Kotjebi period, which only ranges from his age 11 to 18, he immediately links my term with the most miserable years in his childhood.

1 R: How was your childhood? 2 SN: [I] was Kotjebi, Kotjebi. 3 R: Can you tell me some oldest memories in your childhood? 4 SN: The memory that my Dad played with me after work. The memory that my Continued

Excerpt 5.1 [SN1121-1844]

26 As briefly explained in Chapter 4, North Korea has seen thousands of Kotjebi, young begging wanderers, since the years of economic hardship (1996-2000). News media report that in spite of the better harvest in the 2010s, about 330,000 have died of hunger for the past fifteen years (Statistics Korea, 2010). SN‘s family went through this agony as well. 184

Excerpt 5.1 continued

5 Mom gave birth to the youngest one at home by the neighbor women‘s help. It 6 was amazing. [He was] ten-year younger than me. I also remember when Kim Il- 7 Sung died. Was it 1994? I saw my Mom leave home with a bunch of flowers in 8 her hands. Back then I had the second younger sister, who died in 1996. 9 R: Oh, no. 10 SN: Ah- (8.0) After the second younger sister‘s death, my family had more serious 11 financial difficulties. And she died because we were poor. It was not from any 12 illness but from something she had eaten wrong outside. (6.0) I just know the 13 first younger sister‘s name and haven‘t seen her because she died at birth at the 14 hospital. I was close to the second sister. I always teased her and then got 15 scolded by Mom. Only rich families had water pipes at home, so I teased her a 16 lot on the way to the town‘s well to draw water from it. She was also a girl of 17 many talents. I‘m shy but she‘s outgoing. And my Dad is really handsome, 18 although my Mom is kind of pretty, too. If alive, she [the second sister] would 19 have received a lot of love. And people had a great interest in zodiac signs 20 because there was no god to believe in those days. My Dad was Cow and born 21 in the Spring, which was said to be a good fortune because Spring is a good 22 season to work. The second younger sister was born in the Year of the Rat, and 23 [people] said of her that she should be able to make a living anywhere with such 24 agility. The youngest- When he‘s only six-month old- One can‘t walk at his six 25 months, right? 26 R: No. 27 SN: Hah- What I regret now is- if I had brought him up, we could have lived well 28 together, no matter how starving. (1.0) You haven‘t experienced this thing, have 29 you? Geez. I have nobody with me. What if I had a brother? (3.0) Flesh and 30 blood is really- I regret [it] now. Having bad times, like many others, [parents] 31 put [the baby] on the doorstep of a rich-looking house. If only I had brought him 32 up. 33 (5.0) 34 R: You may wonder how he‘s doing now. 35 SN: Yes. But how do I find him now? I don‘t remember the baby‘s face. By asking 36 hundreds of millions of people for a gene test? ((Chuckle)) When he later hears 37 that he‘s abandoned, he‘ll be hurt and looked down on. (16.0) That‘s how it all 38 started. […]

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As I elaborate my question in line 3, SN recounts fragments of what he did with his family before the homeless years. He later called this early childhood ―the happiest moment‖ in his life in the North (lines 4-8), which did not last long due to the following grievous experience as presented from line 10 to line 38. He starts from the memory of his second younger sister on the day his mother mourned the former Supreme Leader

Kim Il-Sung (line 7). However, he does not forget to mention his first younger sister, describing when she was born and died (line 13). Then SN resumes introducing his second sister, with three short episodes (lines 14-23): her being teased (lines 14-16), her talents (lines 16-19), and the meaning of her zodiac sign (lines 19-23). Finally, he talks about his brother, the third sibling, from line 24. Introducing his family chronologically

(father – mother – first sister – second sister – youngest brother), SN situates himself in familial historicity and culture, which is inextricably linked to his action-in-the-world and present condition (Bourdieu, 1990).

SN sometimes switches the tense of his narrative from the past (default tense) to the present, when relating his current characteristic or feeling to the past event or figure that he recounts. For instance, SN thinks that he, past and present, is shy (line 17). To set this personality parallel to his second sister‘s extroversion and his parents‘ good looks, he temporarily uses the present tense. Another instance appears in SN‘s empathy with how his abandoned youngest brother might have felt afterwards (lines 35-36). To SN, all these past events remain traumatic. Graeber (2001) emphasizes that the notion of family

―carries a certain emotional load‖ and is ―essential to one‘s sense of oneself, one‘s

186 allegiances, what one cares about most in life‖ (p. 13). Family, whether alive or dead, is an important anchor for SN‘s present-day identity work.

SN was forced to struggle for survival from a young age and did not have enough time to mourn his family loss. His speech was generally seamless, but it often broke with emotion, in the forms of pauses (lines 12, 28, 29, 33, 37) and a sigh (line 27). He was regretful that he had not taken care of his sibling longer (line 27). He felt extremely lonely, not only because he had no blood relationship anymore (line 29) but also because, to borrow his words, he found that such ―troubled life‖ was ―something out of the way‖ in South Korea. Note that he asked me, ―You haven‘t experienced this thing, have you?‖

(line 28). I was asked this question by him at other times as well. SN had been aware that his past and present conditions were something uncommon among South Koreans in general. As mentioned before, he did not mind talking about his family background to

South Korean friends; at the same time, however, his retrophilia often set himself apart from those amazed listeners.

Interestingly, SN‘s attention to his wretched past became a reason for him to reject schooling and other kinds of learning in South Korea. He was literate in Korean as he left school in Grade 3 in his hometown. Since then, he never experienced formal schooling.

Excerpt 5.2 and Excerpt 5.3 are the only two episodes where I could find SN‘s reference to any type of school knowledge or experience in the pre-migration period throughout the interviews (see the underlines in the excerpts).

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1 R: You went to Onsung and crossed the border there? 2 SN: Yeah. In 2001 for the first time. The width of the river is the smallest there. 3 R: Why did you cross the river? 4 SN: My home base [for begging] was near the Chinese border. I went over the 5 border as I was getting hungry. [North Korean] children who had been caught in 6 China and returned to North Korea looked chubby, which meant they had eaten 7 well over there. It‘s always hard to step off on the right foot, you know. I made 8 a team with several friends and soon habitually crossed the border. Sometimes 9 we got nothing to eat there, and got caught and returned. ((Chuckle)) 10 R: But in general you guys could eat better there. 11 SN: Yeah, many South Koreans visit the area for sight-seeing. Over 90% of them 12 come to look over the North Korean territory across the border. Most of them 13 are willing to help us if we say that we‘re from North Korea. 14 R: Had you ever wanted to travel to China before you got hungry? 15 SN: I hated different cultures. I often found Chinese who visited North Korea for 16 sight-seeing. They screamed harshly like women. I didn‘t really like it. They 17 also had bulging bellies. I‘ve never seen such full bellies in North Korea. I 18 didn‘t like to have difficulty in communicating, and above all I had friendship 19 with my country. I didn‘t like to be caught too many times and finally sent to 20 jail- Although, at last, it was not my choice to go there [to China] anyway. I 21 rummaged through everywhere to eat in North Korea, and at some point there 22 was no more to eat. I did everything that I could. It‘s better in Autumn, when [I 23 was] treated things like corn and radish at least. It was an uncomfortable life 24 with no home, no way to wash myself. I couldn‘t brush my teeth throughout the 25 winter. 26 R: Didn‘t you think of going to your relative‘s house in Hwasung? 27 SN: They cannot afford to welcome me. My uncle was a landowner, and he doesn‘t 28 spare us a look at all. It is said in North Korea that neighbors are better than 29 relatives. Isn‘t it the case here, too? I think so. ((Chuckle)) What I want now is 30 not going to my relative‘s house but to North Korea again. All my friends must 31 have grown up. I had two best friends. The school facility all changed now. The 32 four-year Inmin school is now called Soh school. I quit in Grade 3, when I 33 learned to multiply. Grade 3 learns to multiply, doesn‘t it? No?

Excerpt 5.2 [SN1228-0001]

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As presented above, SN crossed the border to look for something to eat, even though emotionally not inclined to do so. International Association for the Study of

Forced Migration classifies SN‘s border-crossing as a type of forced migration, a migration as an effort ―to escape famine‖ (http://www.iasfm.org). Placed in an extreme situation, he had little opportunity to express his aversion towards ―different culture‖ of neighboring Chinese and to take any action based upon his feeling (lines 15-20). SN had a sense of affiliation with his country, as noted by his selection of the word ―friendship‖

(line 18). This sense was in effect as well when he met South Koreans who visited the

China-North Korea border area. In another interview, he exactly remembered the first moment he had met a dozen South Korean tourists in China, who had spoken the same language with his in ―a much softer accent‖ and who had given his begging team money with concern and attention. Furthermore, since leaving North Korea permanently, SN‘s sense of affiliation has been converted into a sense of longing for the home country, childhood friends, the scenery of his primary school, and what he learned there, as shown in lines 30-33 above. In summary, SN‘s choices as a refugee were not motivated by a desire to emigrate or by an attachment to his host country.

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1 R: Do you remember when you first saw any English word or alphabet? 2 SN: In Chungjin. A woman wore a T-shirt printed with English alphabets. Such 3 clothes are not allowed [in North Korea], and I soon saw her taken by the 4 police. ((Chuckle)) By the way, I knew A, B, C, D there. A little girl who stayed 5 in the same room in the Children‘s detention center proudly taught us the ABC 6 song. So I knew A, B, C, and D, but not up to Z. 7 R: How do you think the girl knew that song? 8 SN: Well, she was dead in the room the next morning. She was like a sick but 9 talkative grandma. She had diarrhea all night. I was 12 and she was 9 or 8. 9 to 10 10 children stayed in an about 2-pyong [6.6 m2] room. So- (1.0) I have no idea 11 where she learned that song. Nobody wonders that kind of thing there. 12 R: Did you have any other chances to hear or learn English later on? 13 SN: Wandering as a Kotjebi, I stayed in Ranam District in Chungjin for a year when 14 I was in the age of Grade 7. I attended an extracurricular institute with some 15 friends there. But I was not allowed to enroll in Grade 3. In the class of Grade 7, 16 a classmate spoke Chinese, and another spoke English like blah, blah, blah. I 17 was surprised. I didn‘t attend the institute long because I re-entered the 18 children‘s detention camp soon. In the camp, I found many children whom I had 19 seen at the school. ((Chuckle)) I had simply thought that jail was only the place 20 for criminals. But I was there! I was in jail for more than two months. The 21 prison guards didn‘t give us enough food and forced us to work in the nearby 22 cement plant. Without proper shoes, we had to stand on the rough raw cement 23 pile for hours a day. Our feet were bleeding. […]

Excerpt 5.3 [SN1205-0001]

Excerpt 5.3 also manifests how rocky SN‘s homeless life was. Moving town to town with no destination, he was always unprotected from malnutrition, exploitation of child labor, exposure to teenage crime, interrupted education, security problems, hygiene and health issues, and emotional shock and instability. I felt embarrassed and sorry for him as he answered for my question in line 7, which simply stemmed from my genuine curiosity about when and where North Korean children learn the English alphabet song.

Note that my three questions in the excerpt above (lines 1, 7, 12) can be in fact asked to

190 any English language learners in different contexts. SN‘s responses, however, overwhelmed those interview questions in terms of their unexpectedness, extraordinariness, intensity, and sociocultural and sociohistorical overtones. His experience in the excerpt above may also have an impact on his identities, mentality, physical health, and any plan to go back to school or learn something academic in the future. Although space precludes the description of every life-threatening situation that he faced and escaped in this dissertation, SN‘s story forced me to revise my understanding of L2 learners.

One lesson SN learned in his struggle for survival was that literacy or school education did not provide him with the ability to meet his fundamental needs. He said, ―I learned it in body.‖ He also insisted that it would be impossible for South Koreans to understand his experience as a street child in the North and in China and as a refugee in the South. Therefore, he believes that South Koreans have no right to meddle with his life in South Korea. This logic is displayed in Excerpt 5.4.

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1 R: It‘s a pity that some young North Koreans spend their time earning money 2 rather than studying. 3 SN: Well, North Koreans don‘t enter South Korea for study. They come because 4 they have to come. I don‘t understand those North Koreans who come to South 5 Korea to study. North Koreans huff and puff, eking out a living every day. Even 6 if it‘s because [North Korean] education is not as good as here [South Korean 7 education], few people decide to come to the South just for study. 8 R: But don‘t you find the number of such studying North Koreans growing? 9 SN: Yeah. [They] may feel the need [for study] to live [in South Korea]. But earning 10 money comes first. In 2006, the guardian had me work at a pizzeria.27 I hated it 11 because I didn‘t want to converse with South Korean strangers. In the end, 12 however, I learned a lot at the pizzeria for a year and 4 months. Later I 13 voluntarily searched for another part-time job. I don‘t know whether I don‘t 14 study because of this idea but- (2.0) Study is meaningless. It‘s just- In our lives- 15 An individual or a family never becomes happy because of studying. Happiness 16 comes from one‘s heart. 17 R: Yeah, for sure. 18 SN: As soon as I came out [of Hanawon], another guardian, whom I called Auntie, 19 was after me to study so hard. So I didn‘t meet with her for a year on purpose. 20 But thanks to her, I passed the qualification exams for elementary and middle 21 school graduation here. A year later, I missed her. I missed somebody‘s 22 nitpicking so badly. 23 R: Oh, you did. 24 SN: Yeah. I owe who I am to her. Without her, I would be totally uneducated. My 25 Dad seemed smart. But not me. ((Chuckle)) […]

Excerpt 5.4 [SN0208-1916]

Motivated language learners have been traditionally explained in SLA literature as those with a specific goal, a desire to attain the goal, effortful behavior, and favorable

27 Under the arrangement of the Ministry of Unification, NKRs are matched with one or two South Korean adult volunteers who assist each refugee or refugee family at least for a year to settle in South Korea safely after the Hanawon training. The term ―Guardian‖ (Bohoja) in Excerpt 5.4 is what SN called them, not the official title given to the volunteers. They help the refugees buy a cell phone, grocery, furniture, insurance, South Korean-style clothing, open a bank account, receive vocational education, see the city sights, and so forth. Kim‘s (2012) autobiographical novel, Cheongchun yeonga (A love song for the youth), lively portrays this earliest process of NKRs‘ resettlement in South Korea. 192 attitudes towards the learning activity (Gardner, 1985, p. 50). This approach regards this learner disposition as equally applicable in different settings (MacIntyre, 2002). Since the 2000s, some researchers have questioned this acontextual view on motivation in SLA, adopting a process-oriented approach to look at the dynamic and temporal variation of the learner‘s motivation (Dörnyei, 2000, 2001; Shoaib & Dörnyei, 2005). Shoaib and

Dörnyei (2005), for instance, traced 25 ESL learners‘ motivational change across learning situations over an extended period. The authors found six recurring patterns based on interviews (p. 31): (1) Maturation and gradually increasing interest, (2) A stand- still period, (3) Moving into a new life phase, (4) Internalizing external goals and

‗imported visions,‘ (5) Relationship with a ‗significant other,‘ and (6) Time spent in the host environment. The authors assert that specific life episodes continuously reconstruct people‘s motivation to learn L2.

Shoaib and Dörnyei‘s (2005) finding demonstrates that ―the analysis of long-term motivational moves and shifts is a central issue‖ in SLA (p. 36). What their study does not uncover, however, is the learners‘ prototypical phase of the not-yet-motivated; the authors recruited research participants who were already ―actively engaged in developing their English proficiency either by themselves or through institutionalized learning‖ (p.

27). In consequence, what they find is the fluctuation between the two extremes of the full intrinsic motivation and ―demotivation‖ (Dörnyei, 2001, p. 143) without exploring the genesis and development of motivation. The authors do not consider how the research participants first arrive in the L2 classroom, which is not a natural step for most people.

For refugee learners, whose migration is forced and sudden and whose everyday life has

193 been upset by this displacement, new language learning in the host country may not fit the pattern implied by prior SLA studies. In this respect, I argue that motivation research must take a comprehensive view of motivation, including how it first develops and then changes with time.

Excerpt 5.4 opens up such poststructural discussion about the refugees‘ volition to navigate their lives and practice of learning; Davies and Harré (1990) describe a poststructuralist research paradigm that inquires about ―a multi-faceted process through which meanings are progressively and dynamically achieved‖ (p. 46). This meaning- making is driven not only by social constraints and constitutive ideologies, but also by the agency exercised by the learners themselves, as they choose their actions in relations to the competing discursive practices. Norton (2013) also recognizes the value of poststructural research in studying marginalized learners‘ voices in the target language community. Learners are positioned by the constitutive force of discourse, and at the same time position themselves in the developmental achievement of legitimacy and identities. In a similar vein, some migration researchers such as Rutter (2006) points out that the distinction between voluntary and forced migration in the literature often denies agency to forced migrants.

Although education is often considered a virtue and a requirement of modernity, the value of learning is contested by SN‘s choice not to study in South Korea. SN makes it clear that education is not fundamental to his identity by setting himself apart from his

―smart‖ father (line 25) as well as ―studying refugees‖ (line 4). Rather, he identifies himself with a community that does not highly value education, by using the subject such

194 as ―North Koreans‖ (line 3), those who ―huff and puff‖ (line 5), in contrast to a ―few people‖ who sit in South Korean classrooms (line 7). In fact, the reality runs counter to

SN‘s claim; the number of NKRs entering South Korea solely or primarily for education has increased since the mid-2000s. For example, one of my participants, ZO, is an educational migrant, who told me, ―I came to South Korea in order to go to college.‖

Although SN passed two national qualification exams for elementary and middle schools in South Korea (line 20), this cannot be ascribed to an internal motivation to learn. In lines 18-24 in the excerpt above, he makes it clear that while he appreciated the attention of and relationship with his South Korean guardian, or ―Auntie,‖ he had no internal desire to increase his education. She permanently left South Korea and was living in Canada at the moment of data collection. SN proclaims that ―happiness comes from one‘s heart‖ in a resolute tone (line 16), but his heart seems bound to people, who he loved and loved him.

“I crawled. Now I walk”: North Korean refugee learners’ warm-up

SN‘s story is an example of an NKR for whom there is no initial desire to learn another language. From the evidence of my dataset, the participants‘ experience of violence, hunger, illness, family loss or permanent separation, the demoted or low social hierarchy in the North home, and the illegal residency in China for extended years often prevented them from immediately pursuing learning in South Korea. Their conscious de-emphasis on education is difficult to understand in the context of an educationally sophisticated society, but this does not justify the underrepresentation of the adult refugee learner

195 group in the field of SLA. Researchers need to be aware that not all adult immigrants and refugees happily and immediately accept the host community‘s invitation to learn a second language. Rather, we should understand when and how they develop an interest in learning L2. This section describes this critical moment.

SN participated in my research in his first month at the British Council‘s intensive language program, in October 2012. In January 2013, he moved up to the next level,

Elementary A, where he stayed another three months. The teacher who taught SN at the

Starter‘s level spoke highly of him. When I asked the teacher about SN‘s progress, she viewed SN as one of the best students; he had never missed a class (48 class hours for three months), participated in the class activity with enthusiasm, and had been kind to and cooperative with the classmates. This evaluation conflicts with SN‘s self-definition as a shy boy (see line 17 in Excerpt 5.1). From my point of view as an observer, he was the one with whom the students made small talk or whispered in Korean the most during their English-only class. ZO, SN‘s classmate and one of my research participants, once described SN as ―an easygoing person whom I like to sit beside‖ in the class. Also, SN was one of the students whom the teacher expected to speak out as a spontaneous responder to her questions for the class as a whole. Although the teacher conscientiously attempted to give all the students an equal opportunity to respond in class, I found that she quite often unconsciously looked at SN when hoping to hear any reaction or feedback from the students. These impressions intimate SN‘s personality and his competence relatively high at the Starter‘s level, enough to respond spontaneously to the teacher‘s turn most often and most quickly in the class.

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I sometimes assumed that SN would be exhausted during a class at the end of a full-time working day; however, he was usually excited to be there and had completed every homework, review, and preparation. Regarding homework, he once said, ―I do my homework in snatches of time while on duty. If I don‘t finish it at the café, I do the rest on the bus.‖ As for preparation, SN anticipated how many pages would be covered a day, looked up unfamiliar English words from those pages in the dictionary, and wrote down their meanings underneath in Korean before coming to the class. For instance, see an arrow on Figure 5.1 with his handwriting under ―temperature‖ and ―comfortable,‖ the words highlighted in yellow in the section b.3.15.

Figure 5.1. SN‘s textbook example

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Walking to the subway station together after the class for about ten minutes, he usually asked me lots of questions about what he had learned in class on that day. He also often wanted to converse with me in English, bluntly asking, ―What‘s your hobby?‖ or

―Tomorrow- what time- do- you arrive in Gwanghwamun?‖28 Aware that I was a doctoral student at an American university, SN casually used me as a language-learning resource at every opportunity, both offline and online. Figure 5.2 shows a series of chats between

SN and me through a smart phone chat Application, from February 7 to 11, 2013. SN‘s real name is blurred out.

Figure 5.2. Smart phone chat log with SN

In the figure above, at 4:13pm on February 7, SN initiated a conversation, translated as: ―Nuna (The term for boys to address an elder sister), I have a question.

How is the word ―even‖ interpreted in the phrase ―even his 9-year-old son‖?‖ I answered

(4:38), and he thanked me (5:03). On February 8, I initiated a conversation (2:29), asking

28 Gwanghwamun, the main gate of a royal palace of the Chosun Dynasty and today a landmark in northern Seoul, is commonly referred to as a downtown area around the gate. The British Council is located in this area. 198

SN in Korean, ―SN, what time do you arrive in Gwanghwamun tonight at the earliest?‖

He responded in English that he could see me around 7:10pm on the day (2:46). Then he suggested chatting in English from that moment (2:49), ―because I need English very much‖ (3:11). Afterwards, we predominantly chatted in English (as displayed in the last four lines on February 11 in Figure 5.2).

Given SN‘s steady interest and diligence to practice English over a few months, I wondered how his English learning and the ―study‖ that he had believed ―meaningless‖ in Excerpt 5.4 were different. Why is his English learning not categorized as the

―meaningless‖ work? What is the nature of SN‘s investment in learning English? The answer was in interview transcribed in Excerpt 5.5, which was conducted about five weeks after the interview in Excerpt 5.4. Between these interviews, SN and I mainly talked about his leveled-up class with a new teacher, classmates, textbooks and materials since January 2013.

1 R: Do you remember anything that you learned last week [at the British Council]? 2 SN: Yeah, there is so much. Hmmm- Listening and reading. (1.0) Um- 3 R: Is there any expression that you remember? 4 SN: Vowels! A, Ee, Eh, things like that. And how to pronounce words through such 5 vowels. Computer- things like this. Computer? Yes. (2.0) And how thirteen and 6 thirty are pronounced differently. (1.0) Stress- Syllable- 7 R: I see. Would you have any suggestion for your class? 8 SN: I wish I had more homework. How hard it is to study by myself! I just do Maeil 9 Youngeo [Everyday English]. I would recommend this to you if you didn‘t 10 speak English, but you‘re good at English. ((Turning on his smart phone)) I self- 11 study English through this App every day. My goal in 2013 is to focus on 12 English as much as I can. [English] is improved when I hear it around me all the Continued

Excerpt 5.5 [SN0319_1316] 199

Excerpt 5.5 continued

13 time. Right? 14 R: Yeah, right. What made you study English so hard? 15 SN: Since the trip to Canada in Summer 2012. There was a Canadian English 16 teacher in my church group, as I moved in to the common apartment in Gimpo. 17 I hated studying anything until last year. I only worked. One day, English words 18 written on the coffee machine in the café that I was working at came into sight. I 19 was curious what it meant and had a feeling of restlessness. Just around that 20 time, the guardian uncle invited me to join his trip to Canada for two weeks. 21 You know that I‘m an obedient person. ((Chuckle)) Since then [uncle‘s 22 suggestion], I memorized some English words for the first time in my life with 23 an Oxford picture book. 24 R: Wow. By yourself? Or did you have any teacher who helped you then? 25 SN: I did. A seventy-year-old lady who attended a small school managed by my 26 pastor. She taught me English every morning for thirty minutes for two months 27 before my trip, which started on June 25, 2012. By the time, I learned English 28 like [a house on] fire. I also learned so many things on the trip. 29 R: That‘s awesome. Who did you say suggested that you join the trip? 30 SN: The guardian uncle on Sabbatical in Canada for a year. 31 R: And how did you like the trip? 32 SN: At first, [the uncle‘s] proposal didn‘t really appeal to me. I thought, ‗Should I 33 really go? Well, I can go because [the uncle] invites me.‘ The only thing I had to 34 do [because everything else was arranged] was to buy an air ticket. In the end, it 35 was an amazing experience. From Vancouver through Seattle, Washington, and- 36 (1.0) Oregon. What a great decision it was to join the trip! Coming back from 37 the trip, I was full of drive. I tried hard to find private institutes [for English] 38 near Balsan station. But the tuitions were all more than 200 dollars per month 39 and they were targeting a high school curriculum.

Excerpt 5.5 illustrates SN‘s first non-classroom-based English learning experience.

As discussed in Excerpt 5.4, here in line 17 he describes his resistance to formal education of any kind, including learning English, until the first half of 2012. Shortly afterward, he describes an accidental, strong curiosity with respect to the English language (lines 17-19). This sense of restlessness about a glimpse of something unknown 200 might have faded had it not been for the uncle‘s offer of the North America trip (line 20).

In other words, SN might not have purchased an Oxford Picture book (lines 21-23) or asked for help (lines 25-27) just because of his fleeting curiosity. Note that he was in doubt about whether to go on this trip (lines 32-33). Much like his motivation to take the national qualification exams (see Excerpt 5.4), he decides to participate in the trip for social (rather than intrinsically motivational) reasons: because ―I‘m an obedient person‖

(line 21) and ―Uncle invites me‖ (line 33). Several conjectures can be addressed concerning his laugh after he says that he is an obedient person, but to me it sounded bashful with his self-praise. Alternatively, he may be hinting that he had other reasons to accept the offer beyond mere filial duty (e.g., it is a really good offer). In any case, his turn in line 21 is a type of self-praise in relation to others. To wit, it was SN‘s social environment and resources that have motivated him to learn English.

Three people appear in Excerpt 5.5. The first is a person SN refers to as ―Uncle‖

(SN had been matched with two South Korean volunteers whom he called ―Uncle‖ and

―Auntie,‖ respectively). The uncle brought SN to his church, which has provided SN with housing with some other church people up to this day. The uncle also proposed that SN work at a pizzeria (see Excerpt 5.4) and join his travel abroad. It is inferred from SN‘s obedient attitude (lines 21, 33) that he regarded the uncle as a second parent concerned with SN‘s own good. SN also refers to ―a Canadian English teacher‖ whom he met in the church (lines 15-16). Although this teacher is not directly part of the storyline in Excerpt

5.5, what is clear is that SN‘s perception of ―what made [him] study English so hard‖

(line 14) included this teacher. The third human resource in the excerpt above, a lady who

201 taught SN English for two months, is also engaged in SN‘s church network. He recalls the time with her in vivid detail. To explain how he was eager to learn English in a short period, SN uses a metaphorical expression bulbutda, which literally means ―to be ignited‖ and can be liberally translated into English as ―to be like a house on fire‖ (line

28).

SN‘s follow-up action after the trip also merits attention. His effort to find private institutes nearby is noteworthy as an independent step taken without another‘s protection, suggestion, nitpicking, and assistance. It also broadened his social connections beyond his church community. Because SN disliked even encountering South Korean strangers on his arrival to Seoul (see line 11 in Excerpt 5.4), his first few years in South Korea had exclusively been spent within the church community. After the West Coast trip, however,

SN stepped into the larger world on his own account, and evidently developed an internal motivation to learn English. Failing to find an inexpensive English class or tutor for adults near his place, he luckily instead found, from a pastor‘s Facebook page, a news article that advertised the British Council‘s inauguration of the educational support program for adult NKRs. In regard to this timeliness, he contentedly told me, ―I heard that its [the British Council‘s] tuition was much more expensive than any others‘ that I had searched for near my house.‖ On another occasion, he also said, ―I crawled so far.

Now I walk,‖ alluding to the change in his life since learning English. The metaphor of crawling represents SN‘s underprivileged childhood and the consequential difficulty of adjusting to the new society. He has just started walking, by learning English with self- reliance and excitement.

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SN‘s episode in this section may correspond to how people decide to learn anything, not necessarily a second or foreign language. However, would he have been as motivated as presented in this section even if he had been suggested participating in, for instance, a science camp or a ski class instead of the trip to the U.S.? I did not ask SN this question, but I assume that the answer is no. Unlike other kinds of knowledge that he might be motivated to learn as well, the English language had been easily found around him outside of the formal educational setting—in his workplace, on the street, on newspapers, television, and Facebook pages. His awareness of and curiosity about this ubiquity of the English language led SN to focus on learning English as a preparation for the trip, rather than on studying, for example, geography, culture, or ecology of the West

Coast region. In addition, as will be discussed in the rest of this chapter, language learning provided him with an opportunity to think about his future and the meanings of life. Overall, I find SN‘s story worthwhile in particular to explore how the multifaceted social context triggers one‘s first L2 learning.

North Korean refugees’ L2 learning as recovery from the loss

Thus far, SN‘s attitude towards language learning differs from that of TY and DN in

Chapter 4, who were highly motivated to learn from the early stage of escape and settlement in order to (re)gain cultural capital in South Korea. TY and DN had had a clear landscape of South Korean society in their imagination, whereas SN drifted into South

Korea seeking food and shelter. While TY and DN could lucidly explain to me their foremost reason for migration (cultural freedom and advancement), SN could not. During

203 the period of data collection, in the early phase in particular, SN was not sure why he had come to South Korea. Excerpt 5.6 and Excerpt 5.7 are from the earliest interviews with

SN, who was in those days constantly asking himself and, as a sincere Christian,29 God, who he was in the new circumstances.

I think I like to be in South Korea. But I‘m lonely because I have no wife or anyone. I pray to God and whine about my lack of marriage. ‗If you don‘t marry me off, tell me how to go back to North Korea and then to heaven. Am I a useful being in this world? I‘m futureless. God, please bring me to you tonight.‘

Excerpt 5.6 [SN1115_0700]

R: Can you tell me anything that you‘d like to do in your future? SN: I don‘t know. I don‘t have any particular things that I want to do. I didn‘t study because I hated it. I just worked and worked. ((Chuckle)) What I believe now is that God saved me [from numerous near-death experiences] because he would give me a task to do.

Excerpt 5.7 [SN1122_0630]

Although SN sometimes indulged in self-pity and despair (as in Excerpt 5.6), he was mostly a composed and serious seeker of the meaning of life, identity, and emotional recovery from the loss that he had experienced in North Korea and in transition. Spiritual faith was a critical force in his pursuit of stability. In addition, as investigated in the previous section, SN‘s English learning was another major step forward to resolve his inner conflict and loneliness. Of a number of examples of such functioning in my dataset,

Figure 5.3, SN‘s writing sample about his ―best friend‖ Kristie (pseudonym), represents

29 I describe SN as a sincere Christian to indicate that he did not just profess faith to receive social services from the church. He became a Christian after migrating to South Korea. 204 how he keeps good company by learning English. In an interview in February, he said to me en passant that he wished to have a native English-speaking friend with whom he could casually practice his English outside the classroom. I introduced him to a non-profit organization called PSCORE, which matched an NKR with a volunteering conversation partner who lived in Seoul. The writing homework in Figure 5.3 was done about a month later since SN had been matched with his conversation partner Kristie, a 25-year-old

British woman.

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Figure 5.3. SN‘s composition about his best friend (April 5, 2013)

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Watching the process in which SN contacted PSCORE, attended its orientation, joined its weekly English conversation class, and met Kristie once a week on the top of taking the British Council‘s course, I was surprised with two things: that he had not heard of PSCORE before, and how he thought of Kristie. He once said that ―I don‘t have much information about any program for NKRs [in South Korea].‖ I had learned about

PSCORE by an Internet search and a call inquiry to the organization while preparing for my field work in early 2012. This NGO was established in 2006, and its information was not hidden or difficult to find online. Why did SN not search for learning opportunities online?

I suggest two reasons. First, one does not search online in a vacuum; my established knowledge about plausible forms of language support with which a community may provide newcomers enabled me to access online resources. Instead, SN has gained access to foreign language education through his social networks; he obtained the information about the British Council‘s support in 2012 when the article was shared on an acquaintance‘s Facebook page, and he found PSCORE through me. This is in line with the idea of Nystrand (1997), who argues that one‘s subjective consciousness can be defined only in relation to people. SN‘s English learning is a joint achievement of people who played a significant role in his life, or, to borrow Nystrand‘s words below, the

―significant others‖ and the ―world around‖ him.

[…] our relations with the significant others in our lives shape our consciousness—how we understand ourselves, others, and the world around us. Even our most private thoughts –stream of consciousness, cryptic dialogues

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with ourselves, the ones that keep us awake at night–are ultimately reviews of and rehearsals for conversations with others (Nystrand, 1997, p. 9).

Secondly, SN did not know PSCORE‘s service before talking with me because of low linguistic and educational urgency. To SN, learning English has been neither critical for daily survival (unlike ESL learners in Anglophone countries), nor an immediate need for accomplishing the goal of increasing‖ cultural capital for upward socioeconomic mobility (unlike TY, DN, HK, and ZO in this study). SN‘s low pressure for L2 learning is reminiscent of Kubota‘s (2011) research on Japanese adults‘ EFL learning as consumption and leisure. Those adults attend English conversation class not for linguistic development but for fun, socializing with classmates and being exposed to an exotic

English-speaking space.

SN‘s EFL learning is distinct from their learning, however, in two aspects: whereas

Kubota‘s participants enjoy learning English as ―the haves‘ culture,‖ I find that SN learns

English as a compensation for his deprived childhood. Hence, the former are willing to pay the service, unlike SN who was unwilling or unable to pay tuition. He would have given up attending the British Council and PSCORE as well without their full financial support for NKRs. On the other hand, Kubota (2011) finds that her participants keep taking lessons with little linguistic and intellectual enhancement. In contrast, SN, although he might be slower than those learners with a high sense of practical purpose, did change in a number of aspects of his life through the improvement in his English abilities. SN‘s learning was not momentary or short-lived as it might be if it were a casual pastime. Note that he was evaluated not only as a friendly classmate but also as a

208 relatively capable student in the class at the British Council, successfully passing the placement test to move up to the next level of Elementary A in January 2013.

More importantly, as briefly mentioned above, I would argue that SN‘s current EFL learning is a practice of compensation and recovery from his past deprivation.

Interviewing SN after he had known Kristie through PSCORE, I realized that he was especially fond of her. First of all, Kristie was one of the few whom he could call a friend in South Korea. He had no school fellows, of course, as he did not go to school in South

Korea. Except for a few boys close to his age in the church, people that SN met every day or kept in touch with were far older than him (e.g., North Koreans who fled with SN as a team from China through Vietnam to South Korea, all his roommates including the café owner, the church pastor, and the two guardians). Other than them, he only had passers- by that he met every day at the workplace.

Within this context, SN had little opportunity to make friends in South Korea. He looked delighted whenever telling me about Kristie. In the essay in Figure 5.3, he mostly patterned his own writing on the outline of the given essay. His narrative is more creative and excited when describing what he and Kristie recently did than any other part: we have time once a week, then we taste each other countries food. for example, last evening we had dubai food. It was delicious. The stative expressions such as Her name is Kristie or She is very kind could have been written based upon his memory of the old friends in

North Korea and in China. The active expressions with dynamic verbs including ―have time,‖ ―taste,‖ and ―had,‖ however, could be made only from the recent friendships in

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South Korea. Kristie instilled the ingenuity in SN‘s writing. Even though only a month passed since they had met each other, SN considered her a close friend.

Later on, SN told me his hope to date Kristie. As illustrated in Excerpt 5.6, he felt in desperate need of someone who could be by his side. Throughout multiple interviews, he talked about a number of encounters in which he had been betrayed, swindled, harassed, exploited, and verbally and physically abused since becoming homeless. This tribulation continued even in South Korea, as recounted in part in Excerpt 5.8. Home delivery was one of the full-time or part-time jobs that SN had had in South Korea during six years before he received vocational education and settled on the career of a barista in

2011.

I did so many kinds of work [in South Korea]. The toughest one was the door-to- door delivery. I have never been spoken ill of and humiliated more than the time [working as a delivery man]. I saw the very bottom of human nature. People are mean, selfish, and disgusting. I‘ll rather say that North Koreans are naïve but more compassionate than South Koreans.

Excerpt 5.8 [SN1221_0620]

Even worse, SN was badly beaten by the café owner, called Uncle P, around the end of my data collection in late May 2013, which led to his absence from the British

Council‘s lesson for the first time for more than a week. I heard the whole story afterwards, which is partly transcribed in Excerpt 5.9.

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R: May I ask you why he beat you? SN: He said I‘m cocky. What happened is- I‘m off duty every Wednesday. On a Wednesday morning, Uncle P abruptly called me and asked to come to work in a commanding tone. I said no. He flared up. On that night, waiting for me back home, he beat me in a dark alley for- Ten to fifteen minutes. And he left- Doesn‘t live in my apartment anymore. […] NKR men who enter South Korea in their 40s, especially those from Hambuk, have an explosive temperament. They grew up in that crude way, which is not welcomed at all in South Korea. So whenever things don‘t go well here, they get mad. They have no way to vent their rage. R: But violence cannot be justified. You should ask somebody‘s help. SN: [Uncle P] beat me because I have no parents. He knows that no one will accuse him or something for me. I talked to my pastor. I told him that I was afraid he might come back and beat me again. The pastor said, ―Be beaten if he [Uncle P] comes back. If you run away or hide or beat him as well, it will just provoke him.‖ R: What? Are you kidding? SN: I‘m going to obey the pastor‘s advice. Next time I‘ll take my glasses off. I heard that it‘s an attempted murder if one beats a man wearing glasses. […]

Excerpt 5.9 [SN0605_0622]

As underlined above, SN attributes all the difficulties that he faces and can ever face to the absence of family. In his thorny path, friendship and family were the two warmest memories that SN had had in the North and in China respectively, and that he desired to recover in his life in South Korea. While practicing English with Kristie, he strives to compensate for the loss in his childhood, find reasons to live, and reconstruct who he is.

As mentioned in Chapter 4, my focus on SN in this chapter is designed to show a refugee learner‘s life path in connected, chronological order and in an in-depth and focused manner, with SN thus serving as representative of my research participants. His narrative is the clearest and the most whole of the other participants‘ stories, which,

211 however, also equally present the two core themes that have been explored in this chapter: L2 learning in the pre-investment period and as recovery from the past difficulties. That is, although SN‘s narrative included the most thorough attention to the above themes with meticulous details, all the other participants did explain their pre- investment period of L2 learning and its function as recovery in varied degrees.

For instance, KM, a 23-year-old man, told me that ―It seems that I‘m having adolescence once again here [in South Korea].‖ When I first met KM in November 2012, it had been only six months since he had completed Hanawon training. An NKR woman in her late thirties who took the course with KM once commended him in surprise: ―You

[KM] entered [South Korea] last spring and attend this [British Council] already? You‘re doing well.‖ After surviving numerous life-or-death crises in the course of escape, he needed time to catch his breath before pondering what to do in South Korea. Besides attending the British Council every night, he had few structured activities. It was not until the year 2014, a good while after the research participation, that he started preparing for the national qualification exam for college entrance.

Therefore, it is hard to say that KM was at the British Council owing to his motivation or investment. When I asked KM what had led him to the British Council on his arrival to South Korea, he responded, ―It [the English lesson] reminds me every day that I‘m alive in the country of freedom. I still dream of my old home, unfair treatments that I received there, and lukewarm people who weren‘t even willing to lift a finger to help me in trouble, scared to be punished. Here I open my eyes in the morning, and shout with joy that I‘m in South Korea.‖ As the only and first regular event in KM‘s new life,

212 language learning was a warm-up practice that he chose for self-understanding, which had been threatened in the North home.

NKRs‘ English learning may also work as a means for recovery from trauma in

Hanawon. BH, a female participant in the same age with KM, was bullied and subjected to mob violence by 330 North Korean women (in a room with the capacity of 100 people) in a refugee camp in Thailand for the simple reason that she had skin disease. Excerpt

5.10 provides some detail.

330 women beat me whenever stepping over me and confined me to the bathroom, arguing that I was leprous. I was bullied in that way for three months there. (2.0) The room in the camp is indeed a republic [where a few tacitly elected NKRs wield power], full of people who act only in instinct. As I was beaten too much, I started cutting a steel bar little by little from a barbed-wire fence surrounding the playground during the time for exercise over a month. Having sharped the point of the steel bar, I swung it to those who approached me to beat me, shouting, ―If you beat me again, I‘ll die but you‘ll die, too. Leave me alone.‖ From that day they left me alone, but treated me as if I were crazy.

Excerpt 5.10 [BH 0312_1841]

This story continues in Excerpt 5.11, where BH directly uses the word ―recover‖ as underlined below.

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By the way, it [the experience in the Thai refugee camp described in Excerpt 5.10] was recovered in Hanawon, where I met once more the women who had beaten me in Thailand and as we stayed together for three months. […] You know what‘s so funny? Among those hundreds of North Koreans in Hanawon at the moment, I was the only one who could play musical instruments. And when an English study group was made, no one knew English but me. They came to see me by ones and twos, asking me to lead the group [as a facilitator between the instructor and the refugees]. It was the moment that they dropped their heads in the submission to knowledge [that BH had]. To put me to work, the representative team came to me, apologized publicly [about bullying in the past] and arranged a drinking party for me. But I was sick for almost a week, going into convulsions as the aftermath of being whipped for a long time. You know how shameless they are? One day the refugees participated in a performance where a South Korean actor and I did something together briefly [because she majored in acting]. They [the bullies] made a fuss, saying, ―Oh! I know her! I know her!‖ I wanted to spit on them.

Excerpt 5.11 [BH0312_1841]

I do not believe that BH immediately recovered from the trauma simply once the bullies left her alone and apologized to her for the past violence in Hanawon. However, the dataset from the interviews with BH confirms that her recognition of the ―power of knowledge‖ in this period has been a driving force for her to keep studying English despite a variety of obstacles. In this light, BH learns English in South Korea to protect herself from unfair treatment, recuperate human dignity, and make up for the lost time since the displacement.

BH‘s migration was involuntary like SN‘s, but in a different way. BH was 19 when leaving the homeland, following her mother, who had fought fiercely with BH‘s father.

HK had a similar involuntary migration experience when she came to South Korea with her entire family at age 21. Although BH and HK were young adults, they migrated

214 because of their parents‘ decision to move. In the context of this lack of agency, both BH and HK were exploring their own reasons to be in South Korea. Learning English was one way to reduce the resentment against their displacement beyond their own will and the ensuing hardships. For example, English knowledge extended BH‘s ―friendship pool,‖ making foreign friends and visiting their countries. This helped to liberate her from her traumatic memories with NKRs in the Thai refugee camp. Indeed, she said that it took five years for her to forgive the bullies and resume getting along with NKRs in general, which was around the time that she started attending the British Council.

The term recovery in L2 studies has been used either as a reconstructing process of negative first-language transfer to second language acquisition (Oh, 2010), or as a clinical outcome of bilingual aphasic patients‘ speech-language therapy (Gil & Goral, 2004). In this chapter, recovery was used to explain the refugees‘ effort to compensate for the deprivation experienced in the process of unexpected and inhumane migration. My NKR participants‘ L2 learning was a form of struggle for existence in the new society rather than resulting from academic interest or a desire to increase cultural capital. Many of them were first guided to the L2 learning environment by people around them, with little intrinsic motivation or goals. I find that they used this learning opportunity afterwards, with the purpose of filling up the vacuum of their lives—the vacuum of self, family, friends, relaxation, and dignity.

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Conclusions

Chapter 5 is in line of the discussion in Chapter 4 that the NKR identity is reconstructed as the refugee learners attain and maintain their membership in the target language learning community. I will examine more details about this overarching theme across chapters of this dissertation in the conclusions chapter. On the other hand, findings in

Chapter 5 are distinct from those in Chapter 4 in a few ways. Whereas TY and DN

(examined in Chapter 4) were highly motivated to learn a second language on arrival in

South Korea, the refugees in this chapter became L2 learners gradually and, to some extent, involuntarily. Unlike TY and DN, who approached L2 learning as a way to attain something (mainly cultural capital), the participants in this chapter became L2 learners under adverse circumstances and without objectives they could articulate. The learning opportunities were mostly given through the assistance of people around them, and the refugees used those opportunities on their own accounts—to attain whatever they needed at the moment.

What is important here is that SN, KM, and BH, who were in the phase of pre- investment while participating in my research, were considered ―excellent students‖ who were comfortable and willing to speak in English at the British Council by their teachers and colleagues. Although these learners were not able to explicitly specify why they came to South Korea and why they were learning English at that point, particular social conditions and networks had led them to attend the British Council and they were gradually generating their own meanings in the practice of EFL learning. In this respect, the degree and nature of language learning motivation and reasons for migration does not

216 always seem an indicator of the refugee students‘ performances in the L2 class. Even when unmotivated, some migrants can be already included in the learning practice which sets them up to be good language learners. Although they fled seeking safety and food, it does not mean that they keep being satisfied simply with a safe and nourishing environment of the host nation. They learn English with their own rationale and stories, which are considerably influenced by their hardships and losses that they have been through.

To visualize the contrast between these participants investigated in this chapter and other L2 learners, Figure 5.4 compares (b) TY‘s and (c) SN‘s English learning trajectories, along with (a) TY‘s perception of South Korean college graduates‘ English proficiency and (d) Kubota‘s (2011) participants who ―consume‖ English lessons.

Although TY told me that her one-on-one tutoring in 2009 was ―almost the first time‖ experience of learning English in her life, it was not actually her very first one; as discussed in the previous chapter, she received public English education at her secondary school in North Korea. She knew the Roman alphabet, 2-30 English words, and how to read and write simple sentences before entry to the South. So did DN, HK, BH, and KM.

This pre-migration growth of English knowledge is displayed in Figure 5.4 as a gentle slope of the line in (b). As shown in what follows, TY‘s English proficiency was stagnant since her graduation from the secondary school until her decision to learn English in

South Korea. As examined before, there exists a time gap between TY‘s entry to the

South and the moment she started learning English. Therefore, the stagnation (or, perhaps, even regression) continued for the first two years of TY‘s South Korean life.

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And the slope degree rises as she intensively learned English after earning her BA degree in 2012.

Figure 5.4. SN‘s relative trajectory of learning English

In contrast, SN has learned English for the first time in South Korea, at a later age than when TY started learning it in South Korea, after more time since the entry to the

South than TY, and at a slower rate than TY given low urgency and pressure. SN is also a distinct learner from Kubota‘s (2011) foreign language learners in their mid-thirties or mid-forties, who ―already established their socioeconomic status at home‖ (p. 475).

Graph (d) is incomplete, as the study does not inform us when and how the participants started learning EFL. The selection of a certain moment or period of time in L2 learners‘ lives is inevitable and strategic in SLA research, depending on research questions. What this chapter focused on is the adult refugees‘ pre-investment, which can affect their subsequent investment in L2 learning. In this regard, the contrasts shown in Figure 5.4 do

218 not mean that SN will maintain the slow progress, which can change depending on how he understands the practice of EFL learning over time and situation.

The participants in this chapter suggest that there may be a large population of potential learners who are not yet engaged in the language learning community and hence have been previously overlooked by SLA researchers. However, this population can provide critical insight into the process of L2 learning through an examination of how internal motivation originates and develops. This, in turn, can inform the policies of the host country regarding support for newcomers‘ SLA. For example, as explored in this dissertation so far, the NKR population consists of the two extremes—the not-yet- learners of L2 and the remarkably intensive L2 learners. BH once told me, ―NKRs have no gray zone. I had two [NKR] friends in my class before: One was too passive and quiet even to open her lips. Another spoke a lot in class and often rudely to the teacher. I recognize at first sight that those people are out of the ordinary. I observe them for a few days, and ask them [if they are from North Korea]. Then it‘s always right! I‘ve never been wrong.‖ In order to meet the educational needs of those migrants from a country with a thin middle class to a country with a solid middle class, the host country‘s support policies should not be monolithic.

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Chapter 6: Conclusions and Implications for Future Research

Introduction

This ethnographic study investigated the interface between adult North Korean refugees‘ transnational identities and their language learner identities. In this study, identity is the sense of self situated in one‘s spatiotemporal history and in relation to others.

Transnational identities refer to how migrants understand their relationship to their home country, transition, and destination community and how their hybrid understandings transform along with time and location of residence. Language learner identities refer to how learners understand their relationship to the target language, its native or competent speakers and speech community, how that relationship is negotiated across contexts, and how learners understand their possibilities for the future as a consequence of language learning. To explore the relationship between these identities, I analyzed the NKRs‘ ongoing identity work within the EFL community in South Korea and their learning situations in the past and the present, learning activities, learning styles and preferences, and ways of speaking in and about EFL. In this chapter, I summarize the analyses and findings of my research by illuminating how they answer my research questions. I also discuss implications and limitations of this study, laying the groundwork for my suggestions for further research on adult refugee L2 learners.

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Research questions revisited

A year of research at and around the British Council with seven North Korean refugee participants deepened my understanding of the following research questions. Although these two questions have been interrelated within and across cases in my study, I will first examine them separately and then integrate the ideas in them at the end.

1. How do adult North Korean refugees understand and come to understand the practice

of EFL learning in South Korea, and what are the consequences of such (developing)

understandings?

The vast majority of NKRs had little opportunity or rationale for L2 learning in their home country, which is characterized by its autarchy and closed-door policies.

NKRs who settle in South Korea, those beyond school age in particular, slowly recognize the local meanings of the English language in the host society, where English skills are furiously pursued as linguistic capital. This change requires them to adjust their understanding of what English means to them as well as to other members of the host nation. The development of this understanding is unique and complicated because they, as adults, spent most of their lives without English knowledge, and hence any need for learning English in the host community can be a surprise. This is why the adult EFL learner group with little to no pre-migration experience of language learning merits special attention besides research on L2 learning by highly educated migrants.

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My participants‘ habitus established by their experiences of economic, cultural, social, and symbolic capital in the pre-migration period influenced their present practice of English learning in South Korea. This study dealt with TY‘s aural habitus, DN‘s home disciplines since her early childhood, and SN‘s experiential emphasis on friendship.

Although selectively described in the analysis chapters, all the other participants substantiate this close and constant connection between individual histories and dispositions and the nature of their L2 learning (e.g., BH‘s continuous pursuit of her career as an actress and life as a global citizen, HK‘s changing attitudes toward the

English language through her college major in Chinese language and literature in South

Korea). This dissertation has demonstrated that adult NKRs come to understand the practice of EFL learning in the course of time as:

(1) A necessary investment to gain or increase cultural capital in South Korea (e.g., to

study abroad, to earn a decent undergraduate GPA and a bachelor‘s degree, to enter a

graduate school, to earn a decent graduate GPA and a master‘s degree, and to work at

a major corporation)

(2) An indicator of South Korean-ness (e.g., how educated South Koreans‘ English

sounds, how South Koreans have learned English from their early ages, and how

proficient South Koreans are at English)

(3) A mark of distinction from other NKRs in South Korea

(4) A way to resist the preconceptions of NKRs that are prevalent in South Korea

(5) A practice that reminds them of their familylessness

(6) A way to relieve their familylessness 222

(7) A consequence of using social conditions and networks around them (e.g., a mentor

or a friend‘s suggestion to learn English or travel abroad, and classes offered for free

for adult refugees)

(8) A means of compensating and recovering from traumatic memories and acquiring

stability in new daily life

The boundaries between each of the above understandings are not rigid within and across refugees; even a pair of contrastive statements such as (5) and (6) can accurately describe different moments and places of a refugee‘s life. Furthermore, for each numbered item, an average of 3.88 participants understood (at some time) their EFL learning in that way. They either partially or entirely accepted South Koreans‘ general understanding of learning English, as listed in (1) above, and at the same time generated and underwent their own understanding of the membership in the target language learning community.

The major consequence of developing these understandings is identity transformation, which has been examined under my second research question (see the next section below). On the other hand, in the previous chapters, I argued that the participants‘ development of ideas about L2 learning results from their transnationalized habitus, revalued forms of capital, and re-imagined host community in the course of resettlement. When I think about what has happened to my participants after the fieldwork, I find that their understandings of EFL listed above lead them again to another stage of transnationalization, revaluation, and re-imagination, based upon their increased knowledge of English and learning experiences. For instance, three of my participants, 223

SN, ZO, and KM, were selected for a four-week study abroad program for NKR students at the British Council (August 2013). They home-stayed in London, took ESL courses at a college, and travelled in and around the city. Similarly, as previously mentioned, BH was one of ten NKRs who were invited to Washington D.C. by the U.S. government for

English learning and an internship for a total of eight months (September 2013 – May

2014).

As SN‘s West Coast trip prompted him to voluntarily find a place to learn English in Seoul in 2012 (see Chapter 5), the participants‘ study-abroad experiences provide an impetus to explore other ways to study abroad and enhance their English proficiency in the near future. KM recently won a competition for another study-abroad program for

NKRs offered by an NGO, and will stay in New York for six months starting in

September 2014. ZO is planning to apply for both the internship abroad program that BH joined in 2013 and the scholarship that TY pursued in 2012. The internship that DN did at the British Embassy in April 2013 is the one that TY did in 2011. Likewise, adult

NKRs who are devoted to learning English exploit the limited funds and educational programs specifically tailored and implemented for NKRs in rotation. NKRs have been encouraged to choose a particular route to learn English, one that is limited to NKRs but extremely competitive.

This small world of and for adult NKR English learners contributes to providing them with access to subsidized learning opportunities that otherwise they could hardly afford. It intensifies the polarization of the access to knowledge within the refugee group, however, as the opportunities to learn English less intensively or competitively are fewer

224 and of lower quality. I will come back to this issue in the implications section of this chapter.

2. How do adult North Korean refugees, in the course of transnational and settling

experiences, construct, modify, or preserve their EFL learner identities in South

Korea?

This study investigated a dynamic interplay of multilayered identities that NKRs assert or are assigned in the process of escape, resettlement, and EFL learning. Block

(2007) explains the continuity of identities in one‘s life trajectory by noting that ―as individuals make their way through the world around them, they are forever inhabiting and having attributed to them new and emergent subject positions‖ (p. 187). To answer the above research question, in the analysis chapters I started my descriptions with the refugees‘ oldest identities: who they used to be at home, at school, and among friends and neighbors in North Korea. These early identities underwent changes (as represented by four phases of life in Figure 4.3), and were rarely preserved after leaving North Korea.

These early identities, however, influence their identities afterwards, driven by the border-crossers‘ habitus, the system of historical dispositions on judgments and expectations across contexts.

This study found that NKRs‘ L2 learner identities are constructed as a reaction to the disjuncture between their original imagination of the host society and the given reality there. Claiming EFL learner identity in South Korea is an opportunity for some NKRs to

225 retain and reveal their habitus in the new circumstances, a homing instinct toward their deep-rooted dispositions in relation to various types of capital that they had enjoyed in the home country. This breakthrough is not always successful, however, owing to a number of sociopolitical and sociocultural reasons explored by this study, such as the security of the refugees themselves and of their families remaining in the North, pejorative stereotypes of NKRs, and the close involvement of family in English education in South Korea.

This study also found that EFL learner identity is a gateway toward NKRs‘ self- understanding in the new environment. Language learning in the phase of pre-investment provided some of my participants with an opportunity to think about their futures and the meanings of life. It was also an essential step forward to resolve their inner conflicts and loneliness in South Korea. In short, NKRs‘ English learner identity impacts on their identity in overall aspect of their resettlement process, prior to any plans to gain cultural capital through their English abilities.

In addition to the interaction among their EFL learner identity, habitus, and resettlement, the relationship between EFL learner identity and NKR identity is also a key issue for the refugee learners. While claiming an EFL learner identity, my participants showed different degrees to which they claimed their refugee identity. TY rejected it, whereas DN selectively revealed it in order to connect her North Korean-ness with her membership in the EFL learner community. BH‘s NKR identity was unmistakable while staying in Washington D.C. Those participants who went to London through the British Embassy‘s financial support leveraged their refugee identity in order

226 to study abroad. HK‘s competitor in the final round of a bank‘s recruitment promoted her

NKR identity and achieved the position. At the British Council the participants adroitly hid their NKR identity, but at the same time developed a confidential, embedded NKR community by recognizing among themselves who was from North Korea in their classes. Evidently, this ambivalence of hiding and promoting their NKR status in the L2 learning situations often made some of my participants hesitate to pursue further learning opportunities.

On the other hand, the participants‘ L2 learner identities have been transformed over time. To SN, for example, the sense of self as a refugee who had challenged fate in numerous life-or-death situations did not fit with any kind of learner identity in South

Korea. This sense of L2 learning self has gradually been revised, however, from an assigned identity on the basis of the acquaintances‘ suggestion and help to a voluntarily claimed identity. To BH, learning English was one way to reduce her resentment against her involuntary displacement and subsequent troubles. This internal force of the claim to

EFL learning was mitigated as she dated a Russian boyfriend, visited his country, and strove to communicate with him and his friends there in English. BH‘s sense of L2 learner self has been created more by external forces than by the refugee community or her traumas since that point.

Implications of the study

This research on border-crossers‘ developing L2 identity was profoundly influenced by

Norton and her colleagues (Kanno & Norton, 2003; Norton, 2000 [2013], 2006; Norton

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& Gao, 2008; Norton & Kamal, 2003; Norton & Toohey, 2011; Norton Peirce, 1995), who shed light on language learning processes mediated in socially stratified worlds that often constrain learner agency. A wide range of research in the past decade has been informed by Norton‘s notions of identity, imagined communities, imagined identities, and investment (e.g., Chang, 2011; Gu, 2008; Haneda, 2005; Kim & Duff, 2012;

Ortaçtepe, 2013; Potowski, 2004; Tomita & Spada, 2013; Warriner, 2004). While the above researchers also examined the interplay of multiple identities in the social practice of L2 learning, my dissertation is unique in analyzing migrants‘ foreign language learning practice within the non-Western world. Canagarajah (2007) argues that ―we need more emic perspectives from non-Western communities‖ in order to broaden the SLA database and build its alternate theory (p. 924). In this spirit, my study contributes to expanding the knowledge of language learning and identities by dealing with transnational EFL learning and therefore modernizing the existing models of World

Englishes.

This study also contributes to the scalar perspective in the field of TESOL. I discussed three scalar phenomena in this dissertation: (1) the degree of formality and foreignness of English in different places around the world (as shown in the Cartesian grid in Figure 1.3), (2) four life phases of North Korea refugees (Figure 4.3), and (3) individual refugees‘ local actions situated in historicity (Bourdieu, 1990). The metaphor of scale has been an important notion in sociolinguistics, especially as thinking about intricate connections and movements of social events and processes in the era of globalization (Blommaert, 2010; Dong & Blommaert, 2009). According to Blommaert

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(2010), the scalar perspective helps sociolinguists imagine non-unified movements of people or messages across time and space with different codes and expectations. The continuum of layered scales ranges ―from the individual to the collective, the temporally situated to the trans-temporal, the unique to the common, the token to the type, the specific to the general‖ (p. 33).

Understanding the interaction among these different scales is essential to investigate language practices in the transnational world. This study illuminated the refugees‘ participation in L2 learning in different timeframes, spaces, and imagined spaces. This is also in the same vein of Norton‘s suggestion about future directions in research on identity and language learning; she stresses the need for longitudinal research to provide ―a more nuanced spatio-temporal understanding of how learner identities evolve through a scalar lens‖ (p. 25). The scalar perspective of this study was attained within an in-depth ethnographic approach over the course of a year.

Beyond the immediate application to the research site and researched group of people, I hope this study can enhance research on how to teach adult learners and newly arrived migrants with limited prior experience of language learning. A central and difficult question about these learners is whether they should be taught separately from or together with members of the host community. Multifarious forms of educational support for adult NKRs‘ English learning in South Korea, each with its own pros and cons (see

Chapter 3), show that there is no consensus on this question. The issue of differentiating versus mainstreaming beginning English learners in educational institutions of the host nation has been broadly discussed in the United States and the Great Britain (McKay &

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Freedman, 1990). The former has given a primary emphasis on language support services for newcomers before they are placed in the mainstream class, whereas the latter has paid more attention to social integration from the beginning stage of the newcomers‘ settlement in pursuit of a pluralistic society against racism. These distinct social and pedagogical assumptions raised the debate of ―discriminatory intent versus discriminatory impact‖ (McKay & Bokhorst-Heng, 2008, p. 34); migrants in the United

States are discriminated in intent but not in effect, and vice versa in the Great Britain.

My dissertation can provide insights into this debate in the EFL setting, where there is presently a tremendous influx of immigrants from various countries of origin. The findings of this study imply that both differentiating and mainstreaming policies and pedagogies are needed for NKR English learners in pursuit of different purposes and emphases; language services can be offered for NKRs in isolation during the early stage of resettlement (e.g., as a regular session in Hanawon training), considering (1) their post- traumatic stresses caused by the loss and hardships before the entry to South Korea and

(2) a significant gap of educational experiences and linguistic knowledge due to North

Korea‘s thin middle class structure.

After this period of basic education and accommodation, further EFL support is needed in collaboration with existing educational institutions that can keep their NKR identities confidential. The British Council‘s EFF program is one example of such support. In addition to this mainstreaming support, continuous research on and communication with the refugee learner group will help policymakers and service providers better reflect the learners‘ changing EFL learner identities in policies and

230 practices for them. Financial support for the adult refugee population is important not only to assure an equal opportunity for a quality language education for all the citizens including newly-arrived refugees, but also to extend the target language learning community by attracting not-yet-motivated learners who might not choose or afford to learn English regularly without a continuous financial award.

As stated before, many of the English-learning opportunities for adult NKRs are awarded via competition among NKRs (e.g., English speech contests, scholarships, internships, and study-abroad programs). This within-group competition is inevitable given the limited resources, and necessary in order to select capable and motivated applicants. Moreover, the one-shot competing system is doable for many public or private institutions, which can conveniently publicize such efforts as an instance of their corporate social contribution.

Nonetheless, there are a few potential downsides to this type of refugee support.

First, it perpetuates a differentiating attitude towards EFL learning. In Chapters 3 and 4, I explained possible different connotations given to the bachelor‘s degrees granted to

South Koreans and NKRs by the same South Korean university due to a special graduation track enacted for NKR students, including the exemption from submitting a standardized English test score. Similarly, a basket of one-off language programs awarded only to NKRs over the years may be viewed as a less honorable success, since the competition was only among students with lower levels of English proficiency than average South Korean graduates. This attitude can lead to less support for and study of these programs, decreasing the quality of the programs but implicitly expecting their

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NKR participants to be satisfied, for example, ―merely with the fact that [they] were in the U.S. for free‖ (see an interview with BH in Chapter 4).

Second, although resources offered by the differentiating EFL programs benefit the advanced NKR learners, these programs do not always vitalize the other types of educational support for the majority of NKRs. These competitive programs make the less expensive, less intensive, and more socially integrated programs for English learning less attractive among NKRs. While the Chevening Scholarship and the British Embassy‘s or government-funded study abroad programs are considered prestigious, and thus remain competitive, not all adult NKR learners steadily attend a language institute. It is ironic that adult NKR learners generally want more opportunities and resources available to them in terms of EFL education, whereas some service providers are currently concerned with an insufficient number of regularly attending NKR students.

To sum up, the qualitative discordance between supply and demand in the field of language education for refugees may result from misunderstanding of the refugee learners‘ backgrounds and motivations. Although this study was conducted at a language institute in South Korea, it has global implications for foreign language education policy and pedagogy for refugee learners. As Park (2009) points out, the discussion of language policy can be richer when we focus on ―the agentive role of local speakers as a key element in the processes through which the hegemony of English is established, as the micro-level processes through which those speakers engage in discursive construction of language ideologies‖ (p. 11). This study provides empirical evidence across macro- and

232 micro-perspectives on how to better equip adult refugees to participate in language learning sustainably.

Limitations and future research

This study has three limitations, which lay the groundwork of my suggestions for future research. First, what I find as a strength of this study—its attention to only a few research participants—can also be a limitation. I closely worked with seven NKR participants, who might not represent the entire refugee English learners in South Korea. As noted in the methodology chapter, random sampling was not possible because I did not obtain full access to the whole population of EFF students enrolled in the British Council‘s language program in 2012-2013. The fact that the program coordinator called my participants and they agreed to see me in person implies that the selection of participants is already biased; they might be a group of students whose personality was more extroverted and open-minded towards strangers and research participation, who attended the British

Council more regularly and had enough time to work with me for a sustained period of time than other NKRs.

This limitation raises the question of EFL learning among NKR students who attend the British Council less regularly or quit attending it altogether. Although some external forces such as work schedules or their college‘s final exam week often prevented my participants from consecutive enrollment and regular attendance at the British

Council, all of them have been consistent English learners for the past few years. Chapter

5 discussed some of my participants‘ pre-investment period, when, nevertheless, they

233 remained in the EFL learning context. Two types of NKRs were unexamined in this study: those who do not learn or quit learning English (1) in their pre-investment period or (2) despite their desire for investment.

Research on migrants‘ reasons not to learn their host language has been conducted in the Anglosphere (e.g., Broeder et al., 1996; Norton, 2001; Norton Peirce et al., 1993;

Rida & Milton, 2001; Santoro, 1997). For example, Rida and Milton (2001) examine what makes adult migrant women ―the non-joiners‖ of ESL education in Australia (p.

35). The reasons for non-participation that the authors found include: the lack of access to information about available ESL services, the women‘s limited schooling and low literacy skills in their first languages, their young children to take care of and other kinds of family responsibility, spouses‘ unsympathetic reaction to their need to learn English, and cultural or religious barriers that influence their decision to take English language classes. In addition to these external factors, Carmack (1992) points out that some ESL curricula are less attractive to female immigrant learners because they do not empower women‘s own education but reinforce their position as subordinate to that of their families. Note that all these obstacles are particular to women, and there are barriers that general adult refugee ESL learners face, e.g., long waiting lists for ESL classes, anti- immigration sentiments, racism, or difficulties with transportation (Warriner, 2004, p.

280). Following this vein, further research on NKRs is needed, with a focus on both external and internal reasons for their underparticipation in the EFL learning community in South Korea.

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Secondly, although this study acknowledged multiple identities in effect in the participants‘ practice of EFL learning, it did not consider their gendered identity in order to maintain the coherence of the main arguments. During the interviews, some of my participants talked about their understandings of NKRs‘ gender differences in the course of accommodation to South Korean society, which implies a difference in how male and female NKRs understand the personal and social meanings of L2 learning. As hinted at in the previous paragraph, the relationship between refugees‘ gender and language learning has been a burgeoning subject of inquiry in the field of TESOL (e.g., Frye, 1999;

Nimmon, 2010; Warriner, 2004, 2007). Research on NKRs will be promising with this topic of inquiry in particular, given that 70% of NKRs in South Korea are female

(Ministry of Unification, 2014).

Finally, even though I collected as many hours of classroom interaction data as interview data, the former was not comprehensively presented and discussed as a form of excerpts in this dissertation. Admittedly, my original research plan included a detailed analysis of the participants‘ L2 conversation in the classroom setting, which would certainly contribute to a better understanding of my participants‘ language learning practices. As data analysis proceeded, however, I found many important themes in relation to my research questions in the participants‘ retrospective accounts of their personal histories in North and South Korea. Accordingly, I related my knowledge gained from classroom observation to these accounts and viewed my participants as learning agents across diverse time and space including their classes at the British Council, rather than giving an independent emphasis to the moment-by-moment context constructed by

235 their classroom talk. The participants‘ conversational sequences in L2 interaction themselves merit attention as a way of doing and being North Korean-ness, which I will suggest for future research on NKR English learners.

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Appendix A: Human subjects permission

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Appendix B: The British Council Korea permission

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Appendix C: The British Council‘s English for the Future Programme proposal

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Appendix D: Student consent form

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오하이오주립대학교 연구 참여동의서

연구제목: 성인 핚국인의 교실 영어 학습 연구자: Dr. Leslie More, 박서현 연구기간: 2012.5 – 2013.6 연구방법: 규칙적인 영국문화원 수업 관찰

귀하는 연구 참여 요청을 받으셨습니다. 동의하기 전에 연구원은 아래와 같은 설명을 반드시 해야 합니다:

 이 연구의 목적  연구에서 어떤 읷들이 벌어지는지 및 참여 기간은 어느 정도읶지  연구에 참여하는 학생들이 경험하는 절차들  참여학생이 겪는 위험이나 불편  참여학생이 얻는 가능핚 혜택  연구에서 참여학생이 갖고 있는 그 밖의 선택들  연구에서 수집된 참여학생의 개읶정보가 어떻게 보호될 것읶지  연구원이 어떤 경우 학생의 참여 중단을 결정핛 수 있는지  학생이 연구 참여 중단을 결정하면 어떻게 되는지  학생의 지속적 연구 참여 결정에 영향을 줄 수 있는 새로운 연구 결과를 언제 알 수 있는지  참여 학생이 부담하는 경비  얼마나 많은 학생들이 이 연구에 참여하는지

이 연구 참여 결정은 귀하의 선택입니다. 이 연구 참여 거부도 귀하의 선택입니다. 이 연구에 참여하기로 결정하시더라도 언제든 중단하실 수 있습니다. 어떤 결정을 내리든 상관없이 학생은 불이익을 받지 않을 것입니다. 혜택이 거부되지 않을 것입니다.

이 연구에 관해 질문이나 염려 또는 불만이 있으시면 010-xxxx-xxxx 또는 [email protected] 로 연락하시기 바랍니다.

연구 참여 학생의 권리에 관해 질문이 있으시면 책임있는 연구 관행 감독부 (Office of Responsible Research Practices), Ms. Sandra Meadows, 전화 1-800-678-6251 로 전화하시기 바랍니다. 이 번호로 전화해 연구진이 아닌 타읶에게 연구에 관핚 불만을 접수하셔도 됩니다. 핚국어로 대화하고 싶을 경우, [email protected] 으로 연락하십시오.

여기에 서명함으로써 귀하는 연구에 관핚 내용을 설명 받았음을 읶정하는 것입니다. 궁금핚 점을 물어볼 기회를 가졌어야 합니다. 연구 참여 결정 전 모든 질문들에 대핚 설명을 받았어야 합니다. 여기에 서명핚다고 해서 법적 권리를 포기하시는 것이 아닙니다. 이 동의서의 사본을 받게 되실 것입니다. 또핚 연구의 내용을 요약핚 내용도 받게 되실 것입니다.

연구참여자 이름 정자 연구자 이름 정자

서명 서명

날짜와 시간 날짜와 시간

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Appendix E: North Korean refugee student consent form

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오하이오주립대학교 연구 참여동의서

연구제목: 이주자의 제 2 언어학습: 남핚 내 성인 탈북자의 영어 학습 연구자: Dr. Leslie More, 박서현 연구방법: 주 1 회 1:1 인터뷰, 영국문화원 수업 관찰 및 기타 자료수집 연구기간: 2012.5 – 2013.6

귀하는 연구 참여 요청을 받으셨습니다. 동의하기 전에 연구원은 아래와 같은 설명을 반드시 해야 합니다:

이 연구에 관해 질문이나 염려 또는 불만이 있으시면 010-xxxx-xxxx 또는 [email protected] 로 연락하시기 바랍니다.

연구참여자 이름 정자 연구자 이름 정자

서명 서명

날짜와 시간 날짜와 시간

247

Appendix F: Teacher consent form

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The Ohio State University Consent to Participate in Research (For teachers at the British Council)

Transnational second language acquisition: Study Title: North Koreans refugees‘ learning of English in South Korea Researcher: Dr. Leslie Moore and Seo Hyun Park This is a consent form for research participation. It contains important information about this study and what to expect if you decide to participate. Your participation is voluntary. Please consider the information carefully. Feel free to ask questions before making your decision whether or not to participate. If you decide to participate, you will be asked to sign this form and will receive a copy of the form.

Procedures 1) The class will be regularly audio-recorded from May 2012 to June 2013, tracking the North Korean refugee students‘ progress at the British Council. The researcher will unobtrusively stay behind the classroom, taking a field note. 2) The researcher may take a look at your textbooks, worksheet, assignments or PowerPoint slides that you use in your class. The researcher may make a copy of them and personally keep it.

Risk, confidentiality, and participant rights The audio file is only used so that I can keep an accurate record of classroom interaction for the transcription later. I will not use your real names in the final report of our research. If your name or any personal information is accidently recorded, it should be either deleted or dubbed over. You may listen to the recorded conversation anytime you want. Moreover, you may ask me to delete any part of the data. Finally, I want to emphasize that you are free to ask me questions concerning this study at any time before, during or after the study. I will be happy to sit with you to answer these questions and discuss any of your concerns. Furthermore, if you have any questions concerning your rights as a research subject that I have not answered, you may contact the OSU Office of Responsible Research Practice ([email protected]).

Efforts will be made to keep your study-related information confidential. However, there may be circumstances where this information must be released. For example, personal information regarding your participation in this study may be disclosed if required by state law. Also, your records may be reviewed by the following groups (as applicable to the research):

1) Office for Human Research Protections or other federal, state, or international regulatory agencies; 2) The Ohio State University Institutional Review Board or Office of Responsible Research Practices

You can decide to stop participating in this study anytime you want. There will be no penalty to you due to the decision, and you will not lose any benefits to which you are otherwise entitled. Your decision will not affect your future relationship with The Ohio State University.

249

Contacts & Questions For questions, concerns, or complaints about the study you may contact: Dr. Leslie Moore [email protected] 614-xxx-xxxx Seo Hyun Park [email protected] Cell(US) 614-xxx-xxxx (Korea) 010-xxxx-xxxx

For questions about your rights as a participant in this study or to discuss other study-related concerns or complaints with someone who is not part of the research team, you may contact Ms. Sandra Meadows in the Office of Responsible Research Practices at 1-800-678-6251.

Signing the consent form I have read this form and I am aware that I am being asked to participate in a research study. I have had the opportunity to ask questions and have had them answered to my satisfaction. I voluntarily agree to participate in this study. I am not giving up any legal rights by signing this form. I will be given a copy of this form.

Printed name of subject Signature of subject

AM/PM

Date and time

Researcher I have explained the research to the participant or his/her representative before requesting the signature(s) above. There are no blanks in this document. A copy of this form has been given to the participant or his/her representative.

Printed name of person obtaining consent Signature of person obtaining consent

AM/PM

Date and time

250

Appendix G: Examples of student interview questions

251

1. How many languages do you speak, read and/or write?

2. When do you often hear, speak, read and/or write English at school or at work?

3. Have you ever had an English tutor before?

4. Have you ever wished to have an English tutor before? If so, mainly for what?

5. How do you feel about your English?

6. What kind of activities do you do in order to practice and improve your English?

7. What is the hardest part while learning English?

8. Before entering South Korea, have you had any experience to learn or use English?

9. If your answer is ―yes‖ in question #8, how is your previous English experience

different from the current one you have in South Korea?

10. Do you have any chance to use English outside the British Council?

11. If your answer is ―yes‖ in question #10, how is it different from your English use at

the British Council?

12. Why is learning English important to you?

13. And would you answer differently to the question #12, if you were in North Korea?

14. Who, if ever, is your role model as an English language expert?

15. Please tell me about public English education in North Korea.

- Is English the first foreign language taught at school? Any other foreign

language(s) during K-12?

- What kind of English textbooks did you use?

- How often did you learn English per week?

- What kind of activity did you do while learning English at school?

252

- How was English tested at school?

- How was the students‘ different level of English proficiency considered at

school?

16. Please tell me about private English education and any other ways to learn English

outside the public education in North Korea.

17. Have you ever listened to contemporary songs from English-speaking countries?

18. Have you ever watched any movies in which actors mainly spoke English?

19. Have you ever read any literature such as novels, poems, plays in English?

20. Have you ever read any English newspapers?

21. Have you ever received any letters or e-mails written in English? And did you

respond them in English?

22. Have you ever visited any websites created in English-speaking countries?

23. Have you ever had any friend who spoke English as his/her first language?

24. Have you ever found any person who spoke English on TV or radio?

25. Do you think media and communication with English-speaking population help you

improve English skills?

26. Have you ever prepared for the standardized English test such as TOEFL, IELTS,

or GRE?

27. Please tell me about the best English teacher that you have ever had.

28. Have you ever taught English?

29. If your answer is ―yes‖ in question #28, what did you teach to whom and how

long? If your answer is ―no‖ in question #28, would you accept any request to teach

253

English to someone in the future?

30. Is it fun for you to learn English in general? When do you enjoy it the most?

31. Please tell me about your family and hometown.

32. How was your childhood?

33. Please tell me about your close friends, both in North Korea and in South Korea.

34. Please describe the day you escaped your town and crossed the national border.

35. How many courses did (do) you take per semester at your university?

36. Have you ever taken any English-mediated courses at your university?

37. Did you fully understand why the course(s) had to be mediated in English?

38. If your answer is ―yes‖ in question #37, did (does) such understanding help you

motivate yourself studying English for the course(s)?

39. What kind of assignment did you have in English-mediated courses?

40. What kind of textbooks did you use in English-mediated courses?

41. Did you use any translation of the textbooks?

42. How do you solve any difficulty, if ever, of understanding/producing English

during the lectures and in the textbooks?

254

Appendix H: Participants‘ graphs of happiness

1. TY

2. HK

255

3. SN

4. ZO

256

5. DN

6. KM

257

Appendix I: Transcription conventions (Jefferson, 2004)

Transcript Symbol Meaning [ Overlapping utterances = Latched utterances (0.0) Length of silence by tenths of seconds (.) Micro-pause ::: Prolonged sound ↑ Shift into especially high pitch word Relatively high volume WORD Especially high volume ?/./, Rising/falling/continuing intonation º º Soft sound - Cut-off > < Speedy utterances < > Slow utterances (( )) Transcriber‘s description

258

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