KF Global Challengers Internship Letter
I am doing an internship in Korean Language Education at Yantai University in Shandong Province, China. I arrived here in August last year and my internship will continue through July this year. I began to teach Korean with the opening of the semester on August 27 last year and currently conduct 14 hours of classes every week. I teach reading and writing to sophomores and conversation skills to juniors. I use specialized textbooks for the reading classes for sophomores, and utilize my own materials in the writing classes. Most of the students have excellent reading skills, yet they do not seem greatly interested in writing. I want to provide an atmosphere in which they can write in Korean with ease.
For the junior classes, I appropriately divide the time into ordinary conversation and speeches and other presentations. The students are generally rather shy at first in conversation classes, but they get better soon as time goes by. If they are given enough time, they arrange their thoughts well and make high-quality presentations.
We have an academic gathering called Mugunghwa. In September last year, Mugunghwa students and I went on a picnic to Yangma Island and had a good time bicycling and enjoying the beautiful scenery. In October, I helped the students of the Korean Language theatrical group by correcting their pronunciation. The students practiced acting and reciting lines in Korean enthusiastically and boasted a good performance and clear pronunciation during the intra-school drama contest and the Qingdao drama competition. Though they failed to win any awards, they seemed to have become more confident after participating in those events, and I felt proud, too.
In November, I made another unforgettable memory by serving as a member of the jury at the Korean Language song contest. The Department of Korean Language hosts the song contest every year, and it is a big event where students of other departments can compete. Before the event, I trained four student moderators of the event to speak accurate Korean and helped them write up and revise scripts. The four were good students who were excellent in academic performance and had good attitudes, and we were able to have a wonderful time together without any trouble.