Personal Experience: My Experience Of Bilingual Education

I remember the day I stepped in Incheon airport, at the age of 13, after language study abroad to Canada for 6 months. That moment was when I was-and will be-the most bilingual in my entire life, which I had Korean culture and Canadian culture combined equally inside myself. Before the trip, I was an archetypal Korean girl. Becoming multicultural started when I stepped into the kindergarten yard, not realizing that it was the trigger–the first footstep to become bilingual. I started learning English in kindergarten – but I was neither forced nor unhappy to do so. Learning English was very natural, and I bet my parents thought I might communicate better and have more opportunity to go outside Korea if I become fluent with English, which most people in the world speaks. The learning started with being able to read alphabets, pronounce it, and write it. Teachers soon taught to combine those alphabets to make some word, even long ones too. The word became sentences and I was able to do such simple and easy, daily conversation such as ‘my name is…’ ‘I am….’. That’s when I went to English academy for kids, and became to

It was to learn English deeper and so that I would be surrounded by unfamiliar world with a total foreign culture, for the first time without parents. The studies were focused more on speaking and meeting with foreign people - finally on communication. It avoided reading hard books or writing.

After coming back to Korea, after 5 months, I entered elementary school and began more radical and theoretical work; it was writing and presenting. It was still basic – I have learned in school no more than what I learned in Philippines.

After graduation, I flew to Canada and stayed for 6 months. It was rather ‘diffusion’ than an interaction. To me, it was not combination of Korea and Canada. It felt like something inside myself, made of aspects of Korean culture, melting and mixing with Canadian