In this blog post, I will summarize my learning journey and reflections, focusing on my English study methods during high school, my activities in the American TV drama club, my experiences with empathy and collaboration, and my career plans.
Academic Experience
Although I enjoyed English classes in high school, I wasn’t particularly good at the subject.
My grades remained at a B level, and I felt that my fundamentals in conversation and grammar were lacking. However, I wasn’t sure how to address these learning challenges. To improve my grammar, I tried taking online courses, and to improve my conversation skills, I watched a lot of American TV shows. Yet, I didn’t see any noticeable improvement in my grades or proficiency. In my sophomore year of high school, I met a talented English teacher who marked a turning point for me. Having studied abroad, this teacher had conducted extensive research on English learning methods. As a result, she was able to provide appropriate solutions to the learning challenges students faced. First, she taught me how to infer the content of a text by looking at the title before studying the main body of a unit. She had me analyze the title to determine what the content might be, what type of text it was, and what the characteristics of the protagonist and other characters were. At first, I didn’t really understand the effectiveness of this exercise, but later, when I encountered college entrance exam questions, I could infer the general content just by reading the first sentence or paragraph. When it came to interpreting the text itself, the teacher told us to avoid paraphrasing, which is a common mistake students make. Up until then, I had been trying hard to understand English immediately by translating it into Korean, which has a different sentence structure. As a result, it took me a long time to interpret the text. Instead, following the literal translation method recommended by my teacher, I practiced interpreting the text phrase by phrase, even if the sentences weren’t fully formed. Doing this not only sped up my reading but also allowed me to grasp the overall meaning even when I was only interpreting individual words or phrases. Finally, after finishing the reading passage, I practiced memorizing the entire text. Amazingly, the more I repeated the passage, the more naturally I absorbed the sentence structures. Without having to struggle to memorize different types of sentence structures or analyze grammatical structures, I was able to naturally master complex syntax.
School Activities
I’ve always liked English and had a strong desire to improve. I’ve always wanted to speak English as fluently as American high school students, so I joined the TV Drama Club with that goal in mind. The TV Drama Club was, as the name suggests, a club where we watched American TV shows together and used the subtitles to study English. Although the club didn’t have many members, it had the cozy atmosphere of a small English study group. Since I usually watch a lot of American TV shows and enjoy American culture, including pop music, I was able to enjoy my time in the club. The main show we watched during my freshman year of high school was the classic series *Friends*. *Friends* is a show that began in the 1990s and ran for 10 seasons, so it was a massive series. Additionally, educational CDs and subtitle analysis guides based on *Friends* were already available on the market, making these resources very useful for our studies. So, every week, we prepared a set portion of the show to watch with the club members and practiced summarizing the content. At first, my English skills weren’t fully developed yet, so it was difficult to understand the plot using only English subtitles. Therefore, to study step-by-step, we watched the show with both Korean and English subtitles displayed simultaneously. When watching American dramas, I didn’t just sit there staring at the screen like I would when watching alone at home. Since we were watching for educational purposes, I took notes while watching to achieve our goals. My notes consisted of looking up and writing down any unfamiliar words that appeared in the subtitles, and whenever possible, I also wrote down longer sentences or idioms. Because we were watching together in a group, I couldn’t pause the video to take notes, so I had to stay focused and take notes on my own. At first, I found these activities quite challenging.
Even when I tried to write down words, I couldn’t figure out the spelling, but my friends seemed to be doing much better than me. So, I studied vocabulary on my own whenever I had time and memorized English words commonly used in daily life to avoid getting confused about spelling. As I studied this way, my note-taking speed eventually increased, and by the time we watched Season 5, I was able to write down words immediately. By the time we watched Season 7, I had reached a level where I could not only write down words but also idioms and sentences immediately, without any issues with grammar or spelling. We used our notes to share words and idioms that were difficult to interpret, and we organized the common ones separately in a notebook. We studied difficult passages together by looking up meanings and example sentences in an electronic dictionary, and it was helpful to be able to immediately verify what we had learned during the next viewing session. Being able to verify things right away meant that even when watching the next episode, similar words or phrases would appear, allowing us to naturally review what we had studied previously. By watching and studying American dramas in this study group format, we could feel our reading comprehension and grammar skills improving significantly.
Examples of Consideration and Cooperation
By the time I entered my sophomore year of high school, the American Drama Viewing Club had entered its second year. By then, we had watched over 200 episodes of various dramas. At first, we found it difficult to understand the content, so we watched with Korean subtitles on, but gradually we were able to follow the story using only English subtitles. Of course, when relying solely on English subtitles, we sometimes struggled to catch content that went by too quickly, but once we got used to it, our listening skills improved to the point where we could even laugh at quick jokes. There were even some dramas with relatively simple plots that I could understand without English subtitles. While my speaking skills were still somewhat lacking, my listening skills had improved significantly in comparison. So, after confirming my improved listening skills, I planned to create subtitles to put my abilities to the test. I decided to collaborate with fellow club members to create subtitles for a new drama ourselves. When creating the subtitles, we didn’t simply paraphrase them directly into Korean; instead, we wrote them in English first and then translated them literally into Korean to produce the Korean subtitles. Creating two sets of subtitles was a time-consuming task, but our speed improved significantly, making it an enjoyable activity. We divided the drama into episodes and paired up in groups of two to split the roles. I took on the role of creating the English subtitles, while my partner immediately interpreted them and wrote them in Korean. Since there are subtitle creation programs available, we were able to make them easily. I would play the drama and watch it with my friend while typing the English subtitles on my laptop. As we interpreted the dialogue together, my friend also wrote down the content in Korean. It was a labor-intensive task, requiring us to pause the video after every line to write the subtitles, but since it was an activity we both enjoyed, we lost track of time. As a result of our efforts, we were able to create high-quality subtitles, and I felt a sense of pride providing them to underclassmen for use in their club activities.
Growth and Career Plans
Among my educational experiences, school had the greatest influence on my career path. In particular, the person who provided a new turning point for me—someone who loved English—was my English teacher whom I met in my sophomore year of high school. The study methods she taught me and her attitude toward researching English teaching methods had a positive impact on me overall. Watching my teacher constantly study and work hard, I decided that I, too, wanted to become an educator who always strives to improve. In particular, my greatest area of interest is English learning methods. Even though I personally loved English, my grades weren’t particularly high, so I was always thinking about how to improve my study methods. In fact, if I had been a student who was naturally good at English and had excellent language acquisition skills, I probably wouldn’t have had those concerns. However, the time I spent grappling with these learning challenges allowed me to experiment with various study methods on my own and assess their effectiveness. I found this process of applying different approaches to solve learning problems to be truly rewarding. Therefore, I aspire to work as an English instructor who devises diverse teaching methods for grammar, reading comprehension, and conversation. Furthermore, I aim to serve as an English education researcher who immediately applies these self-developed methods to students and evaluates their impact. After enrolling in the English department, I will receive comprehensive education in English, English and American literature, linguistics, and interpretation and translation, and I will strive to become a diligent learner myself. This is because I believe that an effective educator grows from being a diligent student. Based on this belief, during my first year, I will build a foundation by studying English composition, reading, and discussion. In my second year, I will focus on improving my English pronunciation while thoroughly studying traditional English grammar. In my third year, I will begin studying modern grammar in earnest, systematically applying my learning by sequentially studying English syntax, lexicology and semantics, phonetics, and discourse and sentence analysis. In my fourth year, I will take courses in English teaching materials and pedagogy to prepare myself to become a future English instructor.
