Late modern considerations on language education for Koreans abroad

The present paper is based on the preliminary results of my recent research and aims to challenge from a post-modern perspective (Kramsch 2012) some views and practices given for granted in the field of “Korean as a heritage language”, with specific reference to the Australian context. I will first outline the main characteristics of the language use of the Korean community in Australia by using data from the last Australian census (2016) and I will then consider the Korean discourses of mother language and nationality through looking interconnections of language education and the content of the Overseas Koreans Act (1999). Then I will introduce the concepts of authenticity, native speakerism and identity in order to analyze from a post-modern perspective some issue surrounding Korean language education for Koreans abroad. I will show how multilingual speakers, and specifically how young Korean-Australians live one of the paradoxes of modernity, namely feeling an illegitimate speaker of one’s own mother language. I will also demonstrate how this sense of non-authenticity is fostered by a monolingual discourse alive in the Korean society and by the motherland’s view on overseas Korean. Finally under this light I will critically review two aspects of the broader field of Korean language education for Koreans abroad: the terminology itself and the figure of the teacher.