한국어교육 전공 수업 내 소집단 활동에 대한 내외국인 학부생의 인식

Korean Native and Non-native Undergraduate Students’ Perception about Small group Activities in a Korean Language Education Course Major

This paper investigates students’ perception about small-group activities conducted in a Korean Language Education course with both Native speakers and Non-native speakers enrolled, and it aims to provide a tool to support learning for both categories of student. The research methodology used a survey conducted on 38 Korean students and 39 non-Korean students, followed by focus group interviews. The survey was aimed at discovery perceptions about 1) understanding of a major-related course, 2) small group activities with both Korean and non-Korean students, 3) expectations and concerns related to small group activities, and 4) expectations towards the teaching faculty and other students. Results are as follow. With regards to the understanding of the major course, Korean students did not express any difficulty except for class presentations and cooperative learning, while the non-Korean students found mostly difficult class presentations, the use of Chinese characters and foreign loanwords, and understanding the textbook. With regards to small group activities which includes both cohorts of learners, positive answers to the survey were more numerous than the negative. Highly rated item regarding expectations for Korean students are ‘opportunity to make foreign friends’, ‘opportunity for language learning’, while for non-Korean students were ‘receiving explanations about the content’ and ‘practicing Korean speaking’. A difficulty highlighted by the Korean students was ‘Not being able to contribute to the group work’, while the non-Korean students expressed the problem of not having a successful communication due to their Korean pronunciation. With regard to expectations for small group activities, students would like their instructor to be more careful about the percentage of Korean and non-Korean learners in each group, to give more information, and to check how each group is proceeding during the assignment. Students would like as well colleagues to have an ‘active attitude’ to group-work, and for Korean students to help non-Korean students. All students expressed the wish for more attention to the level of difficulty and amount of tasks and the preference for more engaging tasks. This paper can be considered an exploratory study on small-group works to understand how to improve the quality of major course classes with an increasing number of non-Korean students. Results can be therefore used to improve collaborative learning activities.