The area in blue is Phase I, now complete, of the Korean Language Village / Courtesy of Mark Peterson By Mark Peterson The Lake in the Woods, or “Sup sogui Hosu” in Korean, is the name of the “village” that comes alive every summer for students learning Korean in a residential immersion context in the Minnesota North Words. All of the 14 language villages hosted by Concordia Language Villages since 1961 under the auspices of Concordia College in Moorhead, Minnesota, carry the name “Lake in the Woods” in each of the target languages (Arabic is “The Oasis” — lakes are in short supply in the Arabic-speaking world). The Korean Language Village just celebrated its 25th year and to date has hosted 2,500 students in short-term, intensive, immersion language programs.
The programs incorporate experiential learning with lots of “culture,” food, games and music, and high school students attending for four weeks can earn credit for a full year’s worth of language equivalent to 180 hours of classroom instruction. Villagers come from all 50 U.S.
states and from abroad to attend these unique programs. The founder of the Korean Language Village is Ross King, professor of Korean at the University of British Columbia. After 15 years he passed the “deanship” of the village to one of his former students, Dafna Zur, now professor of Korean literature at Stanford, and together they have spearheaded the development of this remarkable educational resource.
For 25 years, professors King and Zur have been closely associated with the Korean Language Village, located in a remote area of northern Minnesota, spending their summers in “fun and games” innovating ways to take young learners aged 7-18 and turn them into lifelong learners of this most difficult of foreign languages for English speakers. Many of their colleagues, who are busy in the summers preparing university lectures and writing articles and books for academia — the “serious” world of academics — have misunderstood what they’ve been doing. If you think his work with primary and secondary school students is neither serious nor academic, you are missing the heart of the matter.
Professor King has understood for a long time that unless we capture the imagination of our learners while they’re still in primary or secondary school, we won’t have any university students. More than that, he is himself a product of the Concordia Language Village system. From age 10-18, he attended the Spanish, German, and Russian Language Villages every summer all summer long throughout the 1970s.
And this led him to his career in linguistics studying at Yale with Samuel Martin, the famous Japanese/Korean professor of linguistics, and earning a Ph.D. at Harvard.
After teaching at the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London, he moved to the University of British Columbia where he has been raising the next crop of Korean studies professors. But paradoxically, while reviewing Ph.D.
dissertations in the fall and spring, King spent his summers as he did as a child himself, at the Concordia Language Villages in the Minnesota North Woods with young people. It’s a remarkable story and a remarkable career. The celebration of the 25th year of the Korean Language Village was held recently near Bemidji, yes, Bemidji, Minnesota.
In attendance was the Minnesota Senior Senator Amy Klobuchar who commented that language learning is a core value of American foreign policy and diplomacy, and emphasized the deep ties between the state of Minnesota (the state that proportionately sent more servicemen to fight in the Korean War than any other) and the U.S. more generally, to be memorialized in a new Han-Mi Commons (“Mi” for Mi-nnesota and Mi-guk) on the village grounds.
Read More Beyond K-pop, Korean traditional culture flourishes at Concordia village in US Also in attendance was Kathleen Stevens, a former Peace Corps Korea volunteer and the first U.S. ambassador to Korea to be a fluent speaker of Korean.
As she noted, the completion, at a cost of $7.5 million, of Phase I of this major capital project to build a dedicated year-round culturally authentic home for the Korean Language Village, is a major milestone not simply for Concordia Language Villages, but for U.S.
-Korea relations more generally. When Phase II is completed (at a projected cost of another $10 million), the Korean Language Village will be a destination site for year-round use in the building of bridges between the U.S.
and Korea. But King and Zur know from bitter personal experience how challenging it is to fundraise for anything related to Korean studies. Koreans will think nothing of investing millions of dollars into English language education for themselves, but convincing Korean corporations and other donors to invest in their own language is still a hard sell.
When Kenny Park (CEO of Simone Corporation, the leading manufacturer of luxury handbags in the world), the lead donor to the Korean Language Village, gave the initial $5 million gift that made construction of the new Korean Language Village possible, it was the largest single one-time gift in support of overseas Korean studies in history (and still is), but garnered no coverage in the Korean press. We are still at the stage where for most Koreans, giving money in support of Korean language education or Korean studies outside Korea is conceived of as mere charity or alms for the poor — something best handled at the level of a church bake sale or rummage sale. That needs to change — it is time for major Korean corporations to step up and make long-term investments in Korean language education and Korean studies overseas.
K-pop can only last so long, and we will need an infrastructure in place once it fades. Mark Peterson ([email protected]) is a professor emeritus of Korean, Asian and Near Eastern languages at Brigham Young University in Utah.
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