Public Finance: Mountain Valley (Korean) National Polytechnic University

Robert Dickey   <rjdickey@hotmail.com>

Context
	Mountain Valley (Korean) National Polytechnic University (MVU) is one of 10 government-operated Polytechnic Universities in Korea, all but one of which are located in rural areas.  MVU is approximately 50 kilometers from two of Korea's largest urban areas, and a similar distance from a third major manufacturing urban cluster.  MVU, as a national school, recruits a portion of its student body from rural/mountainous areas, particularly from lower-income or disadvantaged families, and some students grew up in this small city and surrounding towns, but roughly 50% of the students commute daily from the three larger urban areas, where they were not able to enter more competitive universities.  MVU is rated one of the least competitive schools in the nation, and the Public Administration department reflects this ranking: few students are motivated to study, few expect to find jobs in the subject area after graduation.  The course Public Finance is a core course in the major, with national standards relating to students' comprehension of the budgeting process for Korean governmental bodies and general public finance theory.  Prior to this instance, the course had always been taught by a Korean faculty member or part-time instructor, solely in Korean language.  The course is listed in the curriculum for second year – second semester students.  Of the 25 students who started this class, seven dropped out immediately or shortly after the official withdrawal date (resulting in Fs, but in fact they almost never appeared) because they did not wish to take the course in English.  Six other students had been in my English class in a prior semester, they were happy to take the course with me, and though not necessarily the brightest students in the department, overall did fairly well in the class.  Six others had very poor English skills and were also not very good students in other classes, based on their departmental grade averages.  The remaining six were weak in English, but average or better students within the department.

Instructional Design
	Recognizing that these students had had only one or two semesters of English instruction at university, and were very poor English speakers and readers, a bilingual approach was adopted.  I am not at all fluent in Korean, and not capable of delivering a full 50 minute lecture.  Instead, I based this course around a Korean textbook, one recommended by the department chair, and devised my lectures to support and supplement the textbook using an English-language textbook of similar nature.  I also brought in an actual Korean (province) government annual report, something apparently unheard of in Korean universities, on which to base our in class discussions.
	My plan was that, if students read their Korean language textbook prior to class, and I lectured in (mostly) English, they would have enough background knowledge of the topic area to be able to comprehend much of the lecture.
	The department chair advised that the principal reason I was asked to teach the course was to increase the amount of English learning opportunities for the students.  (My master's degree is in public administration, I am therefore qualified to teach in this subject area.)  It was also a course that none of the professors wanted to teach.  It wasn't until week 6 (of 16) that I learned of the national standard learning objectives.  My focus was on English listening, encouraging students to speak as much as they could, and overviewing a topic area that, in the US, is more often taught as a graduate or fourth year undergraduate course.  There were no vocabulary objectives beyond the technical terms needed to discuss public finance in English, and no grammar objectives.  I used Korean in my lectures to define and explain both technical and non-technical terminology, and encouraged students to talk among themselves in both English and Korean.

Use of Language, Learning of Language and Content
	In the first few weeks I attempted to follow my formal syllabus.  By week four I realized that students weren't doing their readings (I expected that during the first 2-3 weeks, but thought they would get on track in the third or fourth weeks), and they therefore couldn't do the discussions nor understand the lectures.  So I slowed things down.  In the midterm during week 8, most students turned in empty sheets of paper, they couldn't understand the questions, or had no idea what the answers should be, even though we had reviewed the exact topic area, almost providing the precise answers, five days earlier.  After the midterms two students virtually dropped out, not appearing in class but once or twice prior to the final exams (which they took).  Few students got even half of the possible points offered on the midterm.  There were too many points weighted to short essay and fill in the blank.
	An element of the class I hadn't considered was "imagination" – looking at a budget and imagining how the money might have been spent before getting details.  Unlike many of their American counter-parts, these students hadn't done community service in high school or earlier years of college, didn't read the papers regularly, didn't think much about how society functioned.  The idea, for example, of government "social welfare" spending was completely alien, they didn't think about financial supports for poor elderly in the way of heating bricks, the cleaning of pubic parks and lands, etc.  In the second half of the course we spent more time on "imagining" and on the accounting aspects -- the simple numbers side of budgets, and less on Korean public finance theory (which was supposedly mostly completed by the midterms).  This approach made discussions easier – students could do the math in either language, and imagining didn't require full sentences, just the blurting out of ideas.  And a number of technical terms in accounting are shared between Korean and English languages, and there are direct translations for the others.
	Examination questions were written in English, one aspect was discussion, where learners could write in either English or Korean, other parts were matching, true false, and fill in the blank.  A portion of the class grade was based on classroom participation, which evidenced their ability to understand English to some extent, though the student's participation could be mostly in Korean.

Evaluation
	The students who were happy to take a course with me did fairly well, but I think they were surprised at the focus: there was more content, and less English language, than they expected.  The class was harder than they expected, but that was based on the fact that the subject matter is simply difficult (one reason the departmental professors don't like teaching the course).  I got lots of feedback from these students: visits to my office, chats around the coffee machine, etc.  There is also an end-of-semester anonymous course evaluation, here most students complained that the English was too difficult.
	Students' test scores and class discussions were disappointing, I came to know that few bothered to read (or even purchase) the textbook.  Consultation with departmental professors indicated that this was routine, few students did the assigned readings in any class, and many students slept during lectures.
	The departmental chair was pleasantly surprised that I used the annual report from a real governmental body, but a bit surprised to learn that I was teaching American finance processes (a general approach) more than the official Korean system… it was at this point I became aware that I needed to teach the Korean official system, despite the fact that it changes every 4-7 years! The current Korean system was in the students' textbook, apparently previous instructors spent several lecture hours on it.  We did eventually spend time on it, but students didn't learn it either in English or Korean, and it had to be re-taught in a later semester (where students passed a test on it, but couldn't verbalize it in either Korean or English a few months after that test).  Faculty members told me that they were satisfied with the course because those students who complained were problem students in other courses, and the better students and even the average students seemed to have good things to say about the course.

Numeric Ratings
Hopefully this section will allow some quick comparisons between various reports.  Nothing scientific here, best guesses.

   a.  Planned degree of focus, content vs. language               ___7
10     9     8     7     6     5     4     3     2     1     0
(All Content)                                (All Language)

   b.  Students' apparent belief of aim of class                         ___2
10     9     8     7     6     5     4     3     2     1     0
(All Content)                                (All Language)

   c.  Actual (semester average) degree of content vs. language instruction   ___6
10     9     8     7     6     5     4     3     2     1     0
(All Content)                                (All Language)

   d.  Focus of examinations and reports (cumulative)         ___7
10     9     8     7     6     5     4     3     2     1     0
(All Content)                                (All Language)

   e.  Focus of final grade determinations                              ___6
10     9     8     7     6     5     4     3     2     1     0
(All Content)                                (All Language)

   f.  Student satisfaction with the course as taught                               ___3
5 (Very Satisfied)    3 (Acceptable)    1 (Very Dissatisfied)

published on the web July 26, 2004, at    http://www.content-english.org/data/reports/pf-mvu.rtf