English-Only Island, (Korea)

In a fairly strong approach to second language acquisition, the government of Korea is planning to create an entire English-only town on the island of Cheju, complete with elementary and secondary schools and colleges. It’s a way to boost students’ language skills, while also saving a chunk of the $3.3 billion that Korean students spend to study abroad each year. It could be related to the ever increasing numbers of Korean students coming to study in the U.S., which jumped 10% just in the past year.

I see at least two main ways to think about this—one that Kevin is right and current U.S. dominance allows us to assume most people speak English and focus on other areas, or two, that if people from other countries can speak English and increasingly do our jobs for less, maybe we should start developing new skills and flexibilities to compete. My vote is to start with Chinese. There’s no reason that academic content can’t be taught in dual language academies so that we aren’t removing anything to teach language skills.

On a broader level, I think we overestimate the number of people who speak English, and fail to recognize the importance of being able to communicate with the 4 billion people who don’t speak English (including over 20 million in the U.S.) both in terms of being able to compete economically and valuing global citizenship. Obviously, we can’t all learn one language that will open global communication, but I don’t think learning Chinese (1 billion speakers) or Spanish (330 million speakers) is a bad place to start. First up? Rosie O'Donnell.