한국과 호주의 이중언어 교육정책 비교

A Comparative Study of Bilingual Education Policy between Korea and Australia: Focusing on the History of Development and Current System

This study aims to compare and analyze the bilingual education policies in both Korea and Australia. Both countries had an identity, historically as a homogeneous nation in the past, but have now acknowledged the constantly changing situations in the ever increasing number of immigrants that occurred in Australia during the 1970s and in Korea during the 2000s have respectively started to implement and review their multicultural policies. In the case of Australia, which holds a longer history of multicultural policies than Korea, may be able to provide potential implications for the development of a bilingual education policy in Korea. This study has analyzed the policy documents in both Korea and Australia and supplemented them by both an e-mail and telephone interviews with the key people concerned. We have discovered that Korea has been implementing a bilingual education policy as a part of its multicultural policy since 2006. However, while it is still in a ‘transitional bilingual education paradigm’ targeting primarily on immigrant students, Australia’s policy is moving beyond transitional and conservative bilingual education elements to additional bilingual education for all students, and LOTE(Language Other Than English) also includes Auslan(Australian Sign Language). Based on this analysis, the potential implications for a successful bilingual education policy in Korea are derived as follows: 1. The policy should move away from the paradigm of transitional bilingual education to help immigrant students adapt to Korean society and to move into a bilingual education policy to achieve an authentic and cohesive multicultural society. In order to do this, however, we will need to propose a method to reorganize the second foreign language education to select the languages of the community from the viewpoint of a bilingual education. 2. When choosing a language for a bilingual education, it is necessary to consider it from the perspective of the minority in our society. 3. In order to change the direction of the bilingual education policy, bilingual education and special education teacher policies should be revised as well.