The Waygook Effect has collected the ten worst dialogues from Korea's elementary school English curriculum, and believe it or not this doesn't make #1:
The elementary school English textbooks have been changed for the better---for supplementary resources see Waygook.org---but for many years the flimsy books and their atrocious CD-ROMs undermined the talents and hard work of imported native English speakers and their Korean co-teachers.
13 comments:
Although this was easily the worst acting job of the books, other videos cultural absurdity had to be ranked higher.
My personal "favourite" is still the video where the heavyset white kid with glasses(I always thought of him as "Piggy" from Lord of the Flies) weighs himself. His teacher checks his weight on the scale, then gawks at him in pure astonishment over how much he weighs.
Not very culturally accurate: these days most North American schoolteachers would probably be far more surprised to have a student who ISN'T overweight.
Wow, that blonde kid looks evil. The clapping looks sarcastic.
Blonde kid = future serial killer
Those white kids were probably just army brats. I wonder if they know of the, um, influence they've had on Korean English education and Korean students' understanding on the habits and customs of white folks.
I thought they kind of looked Russian.
My favorite is one I saw on an ESL channel at home one time. It was an English language cartoon with English subtitles. One cartoon critter said "Darn!" The caption writer apparently didn't know this expression, so s/he put in the closest thing s/he did know: "Damn!"
These instructional videos are positively gut busting. Where can I get more of these classics?
www.eslwriting.org
That girl in the video is me. I did a lot of modeling when my dad was stationed in Seoul the first time, and somehow got this gig. Don't blame the actors, it's not their fault their agents and the company didn't care about acting experience.
Thanks for sharing, Amy. We're not really blaming the actors . . . most child actors are abrasive to watch. It's just a very bizarre "English" curriculum that, thankfully, has started to be adjusted.
BWAHHAHAHA I loved and hated these so much. #5 on the original blog made me laugh out loud in class the first time I saw it because they so clearly got the voices to the dialogue backward. Then all the students started laughing too. Only the Korean teacher didn't laugh. hahaha
When my dad read the script he tried to convince them to edit it, but they said they couldn't change it because the textbooks were already written. Also, I had no idea they were dubbing our voices.
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