호주의 한국어 교육정책의 현황과 문제점

Current Issues of KLE Policy and Actual State of Korean Learners in Australia

The language education policy of a country can be a yardstick, indicating the closeness between two countries in terms of their past, present and future cultural, economic and political relations. Australian Government realized the importance of the various ethnic groups, and they encourage active preservations of the languages and cultures of these communities. To discuss some more details concerning issues on KLE policies in Australia, we need to refer to the NALSAS report, COAG(1994), and Kirkpatrick(1995) which raised certain the issues and some suggestions in the case of Indonesia. Korean had only began to be offered since the beginning of the 1990's. In fact, Korean has grown considerably, despite it's relatively late introduction to Australian schools. Unfortunately, however, the Korean language has been declining since 1999, after the impact of the IMF Crisis in 1997. It is time, in my view, to reassess the policy and find out what the exact problem is and how it can be solved by both the Australian and Korean Government, so that Korean language can be once again developed as one of the real ‘four priority Asian languages’.