Meeting Future Challenges in Language Teaching and Testing: Building Teams, Setting Goals

English Language Teaching (ELT) is a major UK industry, supporting nearly 36,000 jobs in the UK. Until recently, this industry was largely excluded from the market in South Korea (henceforth, Korea). That market was dominated by US providers. Yet this has changed recently, with Koreans turning increasingly to the UK for ELT provision (see Economic Case for the Project in the case for support for further details).

However, ELT in Korea is in a state of potentially damaging flux, as policy changes have adversely impacted teaching practices, materials provision and testing practices. Change was initiated in the system in response to high numbers of students learning English reporting mental health issues and an increase in rates of student suicide. These issues were thought to be linked to the highly pressurised state in which English was taught and learned in Korea (see Choi, 2020, for more details). In response, the National English Ability Test program was withdrawn by the Korean Ministry of Education in 2013. It was replaced with the Korean College Scholastic Ability Test in 2018. Through this new test, the Ministry of Education hoped to place mindfulness and wellbeing at the centre of a competency-based curriculum, designed to maintain a critical yet holistic focus on ELT and learning. Yet this implementation has increased the challenge presented to ELT by the context in Korea, as the market is not well adapted to the goals of either this new test or the wider curriculum. As a result Korea is struggling to maintain its position as a world-leading example of excellence in English language learning. The complexity of the situation is compounded by the major materials and test providers in the UK and the US providing tests and materials that are not necessarily well adapted to the needs of the new curriculum. See The Context in Korea in the case for support for further details of this situation.

Consequently, this project will bring together UK and Korean researchers who work in ELT to develop a research agenda to address these pressing issues. In doing so, the project will provide support to the Korean and British ELT industries, help the UK ELT industry adapt to better service the Korean market and help to enhance UK 'soft power' in Korea (see Introduction in the case for support for further details). At the same time, the project will allow teams of UK and Korean researchers to address the new research challenges that the Korean ELT market presents (see The Research Opportunity in the case for support).

To do this we will bring academics and industry experts together to better understand the ELT context in Korea, appreciate the challenges of that context, and develop an agenda to address those challenges. In doing so, we will be bringing expert, localised knowledge in Korea and the UK's world-leading expertise in areas such as materials and test development to bear on these issues. This will be to the advantage of Korean teachers and learners (see The Context in the UK in the case for support for further details). Such expertise typically draws on the UK's tradition of developing ELT practices on the basis of large bodies of attested language use (so-called 'corpora'). Overall, this synergy of practice will maximise and further develop the beneficial aspects of current Korean ELT practices, minimise the potential drawbacks of the current system, and develop a deeper understanding of the Korean ELT market from a UK perspective.