Massive spending is failing to raise standards, reports James Card

South Koreans are spending $15.3bn a year on private English lessons, according to a new report by the country's leading economic thinktank. But while Koreans appears to have an insatiable appetite for education, they remain hampered by low self-esteem as linguists.

The Economics of English report was published by the Samsung Economic Research Institute (Seri) last month. It claims that total expenditure on language learning accounts for 1.9% of South Korea's GDP.

The report also assesses the potential value of the English language to South Korea and how teaching can be improved. However, the starkest figures expose the shortfall between expenditure and achievement.

Each year Koreans spend $752m on tests of English, with a large proportion of this being spent on the Toefl assessment test produced by the US company ETS. Currently South Korea is the world's largest market for Toefl, yet, according to a 2004 report by the Korea Government Information Agency, South Koreans ranked a dismal 110th on ETS's global Toefl rankings.

More than 1,000 expatriate managers of multinational companies polled by Hong Kong's Political and Economic Risk Consultancy rated South Koreans as the worst English speakers in Asia in a 2005 survey.

Read the rest at the Guardian Weekly.

Copyright © James Card.