Post date: Oct 06, 2018 8:20:44 PM
First-Ever Credit Course on Jejueo Taught at a Post-Secondary Institution
Jejueo, the language of Korea’s Jeju Island, is now being taught for credit in a post-secondary institution for the first time. The language, long mistakenly classified as a dialect of Korean, is not intelligible to people who speak only Korean and has come to be recognized as a separate language by many linguists and institutions, including UNESCO and the Endangered Language Catalogue at the University of Hawaii at Manoa.
In 2017, Dr. Changyong Yang, Dean of the College of Language Education at Jeju National University and adjunct professor in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, was asked to teach a for-credit course on Jejueo in the Department of Nursing at the Jeju Tourism University (제주관광대학교). The goal of the course was to prepare nursing students to better serve the needs of elderly patients who prefer to communicate with healthcare providers in Jejueo rather than Korean.
Reaction to the course has been very positive. The students have expressed amazement at how different Jejueo is from Korean, and how important familiarity with the language has been for communicating with elderly patients. About 40 students registered for Dr. Yang’s class in the spring of 2017 and about 60 in the spring of the following year. The course will be offered again in the spring of 2019.
Dr. Yang is using as his textbook the first volume of a Jejueo-language series that he has co-authored with Sejung Yang, a Ph.D. student in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, and William O’Grady, a professor in the same department. Preparation of the volumes in the series has been supported by the Core University Program for Korean Studies through the Ministry of Education of Republic of Korea and the Korean Studies Promotion Service of the Academy of Korean Studies (AKS-2015-OLU-2250005).