Updates from the Korean Language Cluster

Some faculty members of our Korean Language Cluster engaged in different activities this November.

Senior lecturer Maria Concepcion Chua (BA Ling, 2017) visited South Korea to attend meetings with the Korean-Foreign Parallel Corpus Project team and represent the local team working on the Filipino translation of the parallel corpus in discussions on the next steps for the project. She will also be featured in the video documentation of the project to explain its objectives and their workflow guidelines. The Korean-Foreign Parallel Corpus project is funded by the National Institute of Korean Language. It aims to produce a massive parallel corpus with eight languages. This type of corpus will be very useful for natural language processing research and the development of language technologies. The project is currently in its second phase, which runs until February 2023.

Chua also recently published her translation of Dancing Snail’s “I’m Not Lazy. I’m on Energy Saving Mode.” This is her second book translation published by Apop Books. Her first book translation for the same publisher is Ra-bin Kwon’s “Yearning for Home While I’m at Home.”

Korean language lecturer Marco Angulo and MA Ling student Sarah Eve Perlawan (BA Ling, 2015) participated in the 2022 Korean Language Teachers Training in South Korea organized by the Korean Ministry of Education. This training program, which aims to enhance the teaching skills and knowledge of KFL instructors from Southeast Asian nations, ran from November 19 to 25. A total of 28 participants from Cambodia, Philippines, Thailand, and Vietnam joined the program to undergo intensive training in KFL pedagogy and lesson planning. The participants also conducted field observations to learn more about Korean traditional arts and culture.

Dr. Kyung Min Bae was one of the presenters at the 2022 International Conference of Community, Innovation, and Educational Research organized by Yeungnam University in South Korea. The hybrid conference was held last November 25. Her presentation is titled “Professional Identity of Non-native Teachers of KFL (Korean as a Foreign Language): Basis for KFL Teacher Education Program Framework Development” and it is based on her doctoral dissertation. Her study explored the different sociocultural factors and critical personal experiences that influence the development of KFL teachers’ professional identities in order to come up with recommendations for creating more effective and relevant KFL teacher education programs for non-native teachers.

As the current OIC-Director of the UP Korea Research Center (UP KRC), Dr. Bae is also busy heading the organization of two events which will both be held in January 2023– the NextGen Koreanist Workshop, which the UP KRC is co-hosting with the Yonsei University Mirae Campus, and the 8th Philippine Korean Studies Symposium, which the Department is co-organizing with the UP KRC.