Exploring Korean students’ orientations to English during their study at a UK university

Abstract

Over the last two decades, research has exposed the need for new responses to English in various regions of the world, raising many critical issues. Recent English as a Lingua Franca (ELF)-oriented research deals with English in Asian contexts; however there seems to be insufficient research related to South Korea and, especially, Korean postgraduate-level students’ orientations to English. To help address this gap, this PhD thesis reports research into changes to South Korean postgraduate students’ use of and feelings about English during their study abroad in the UK.

Explorations and discussions of the findings of this study shed light on the students’ orientations and attitudes to English before coming to the UK, how their attitudes and beliefs adjusted over the course of an academic year, and the factors that played a part in these changes. This research produces a comprehensive study of Korean postgraduate students using English in a multilingual but also native English language setting and reveals how the students oriented themselves to English in Korea, how useful their English preparation was before arrival in the UK, how they feel about their English, and what influenced the evolution of their perspectives over time.

Importantly, the findings of the study suggest that the experience of living and studying in the UK had an impact on the participants’ attitudes and orientations towards English and their language use; among numerous other effects, a move away from norm-dependence in general, and in particular increasing awareness of the existence of different English varieties, were widely evidenced. The results give rise to new potential avenues for research into language attitudes and provide a deeper understanding of language(s) and language users in the field of English as a lingua franca in this previously unexplored context.

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