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[Letter from a KF Visiting Fellow] Thai Students Learn Various Cause-effect Connective Endings in Korean

Greetings! I teach Korean language at the royal Chulalongkorn University (Chula) in Bangkok, Thailand. I visited and completed my doctoral thesis in Korea last year as a KF visiting fellow. Before going into detail about my fellowship, let me briefly introduce myself. In February 2007, I earned a master’s degree in Korean language education at the Graduate School of International Studies (GSIS) at Ewha Womans University in Seoul and returned to Thailand to teach at Chula. After teaching students for about three years, I returned to Ewha GSIS from March 2010 to 2014 to pursue my doctoral studies. Upon finishing the PhD course, I went back to Chula.

Following my employment as a Chula professor, I set my first goal of establishing Korean language as a subject in which students at the university can major. By the time I came back from Korea upon completion of my doctoral course, the status of Korean language education at Chula was much higher than before. Demand for Korean language courses was increasing at the university and, with high hopes, I began to make efforts for the greater development of Korean language education. Finally, in the 2018 academic year, Korean language became available as a major for undergraduate students at Chula. After this achievement, I applied for the KF fellowship to upgrade my potential as a Korean language educator and complete my doctoral thesis.

Orientation for the first class of Korean language majors at the royal Chulalongkorn University in Thailand.

My thesis topic is on ascertaining the features of Thai learners’ language acquisition of the diverse cause-effect connective expressions of the Korean language. Korean has such varied cause-effect connective expressions as -eoseo, -nikka, -neurago, -gillae, -gi ttaemune, and -neun barame. Learners’ acquisition of Korean language skills can vary according to syntactic restrictions and semantic diversity. I sought to figure out how the features of acquisition differ in relation to the frequency of these cause-effect connective expressions and the level of difficulty in learning.

In Thai, cause-effect connective endings are rather easily used as they are not as developed as in Korean. Thai has only one such ending — เพราะ’ [phrɔ́] — and it is therefore quite challenging for Thais to understand all the cause-effect connective endings in the Korean language. Thai learners often find it difficult to grasp the semantic differences between these many cause-effect connective endings.

While studying this topic, I reaffirmed that, while teaching, I need to address not only grammatical structures but also semantic functions systematically and explicitly. Thanks to the KF fellowship, I was able to happily carry out the research that would build the foundation of Korean language education in Thailand and mature as a Korean language educator. I will continue to strive for the further development of Korean language education in Thailand.

Department of Eastern Languages, Faculty of Arts, Chulalongkorn UniversitySupaporn Boonrung, Thailand

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