한문 교육 진흥을 위한 독일의 라틴어와 한문 교육 사례 검토

A proposal for the improvement of the teaching of Hanmun: The case of the teaching of Latin and Classical Chinese in Germany

For the development and the promotion of the Hanmun education in middle and high schools there is an urgent need to question the purpose of the Hanmun curriculum. Hanmun education, as is widely held, is probably conducive to keeping tradition and developing personality, yet this is not enough to create a broad consensus about the need of learning Hanmun. Its nature as a written language will shed light on the fact that learning Hanmun is not only of practical use but also future-oriented. More emphasis must be put on the possibility that it helps students to improve their reading comprehension in Korean as well as other languages and to have a correct understanding of their own native language. It must also be emphasized that the long tradition of Hanmun literature can provide a favourable basis for the further development of Korean literature. In this regard, it is of particular importance to propagate the idea that the Hanmun education also aims at achieving the establishment of Korean as the literary language. In order to strengthen these functions and reach a consensus of that type, of course, it is also necessary to improve the teaching methods of Hanmun. Besides, the fact that Hanmun is a repository of language (resources) rather than one of the traditions will have to be seriously taken into account. The traditional methods have reached their limit. In this respect, serious consideration should be given to the application of modern linguistic methods based on the grammar of Hanmun. Furthermore, it might be more adequate that students have an option to learn Hanmun as a second foreign language. To this end, the research results from Korea and her neighbours as well as from the field of sinology in Europe and North America should be consulted. The latter, amongst others, is expected to be a good guide to methodological innovation. In view of all this, this paper emphasizes the necessity of changing the course of the Hanmun curriculum and makes suggestions to the effect by giving some examples from the Latin curriculum in secondary schools and the Classical Chinese curriculum on the college level in Germany.