Project I: Implementation of hanmun and Middle Korean online/blended learning courses

The development of offline and online hanmun and Middle Korean courses is a major research project of the Hanmun Lab.

Prof. Felix Siegmund is developing a hanmun course tailored to the needs of Korean Studies students. This course will then be enhanced into an online-courses for Blended Learning scenarios and eventually moulded into a course for autonomous self-study. Drawing on the didactic experiences gained, subsequently Middle Korean teaching materials developed by Dr. Thorsten Traulsen will be turned into online courses.

Both online courses will be developed using the technologically advanced platform of the Personal Learning Environment LSI.online of the Landesspracheninstitut (Ruhr University Bochum), which facilitates the individualization of learning by providing customized support concerning lexical and grammatical knowledge or text comprehension. LSI will continue to host the courses beyond the project duration.

Hanmun sources selected as textbook materials will initially be fed into the Thesaurus Linguae Sinicae (TLS) database for only parts of the data being exported to the online course in abbreviated form. Thus, beginners will not be overburdened, while advanced learners will have access to more fine-grained grammatical and lexical analysis.

i. Development of classroom/online hanmun courses for Korean Studies students

As a regional variety of Literary Sinitic, hanmun can, of course, be acquired through the study of Literary Chinese as offered by Chinese Studies departments and using Sinological textbooks. This has so far been the ubiquitous practice in the West wherever hanmun was studied at all; the only textbook of this language specifically catering to students of Korean Studies is, to our best knowledge, the one prepared by Yulia Boltach in Russian. However, the said practice constitutes a significant hurdle for students with no prior exposure to Modern Chinese. The fact that Standard Chinese and Sino-Korean pronunciations of characters differ is only part of the problem (although far from negligible); other significant obstacles include the – quite natural – reliance on and presupposition of Sinological knowledge (Modern Chinese language and Chinese history) in courses offered by Chinese Studies departments, which tends to confound and overburden Korean Studies students.

There is no question that far better results can be achieved through hanmun education focussing on the situation of Korean Studies students, based on Sino-Korean character pronunciation, using Korean heritage texts and thus reinforcing curricular contents concerning the history, religions, and literature of Korea, and contrasting the syntactical rules of Literary Chinese and Korean in a way that renders the concomitant acquisition of both languages synergetic instead of confusing. The Hanmun Lab aims at providing to the field of Korean Studies a service with lasting effects by creating and implementing tools of online learning that will make the study of hanmun easier, more attractive, and thus attainable to all students proficient in English, at first throughout Europe, finally wherever they reside. To this end, we plan to make use of four – partly consecutive – building blocks:

1. Development of a classroom hanmun course. Course materials will be prepared in English.
2. Development of an online version of the hanmun course as in 1), based on partial self-study but including the supply of online teaching, resulting in a Blended Learning hanmun course experience aimed at students outside Bochum. The teaching language will be English.
3. Further development of the Blended Learning hanmun course into an online tool for self-study (Online hanmun course), leading to a level of hanmun competency equivalent to one year of classroom study as in 1). The teaching language will be English.
4. Two-week-long hanmun summer schools offered at RUB from the third project year onwards (online or on-site, depending on demand and available funds), inviting students who wish to acquire basic hanmun, have completed our Blended Learning or Online hanmun courses, or have acquired some hanmun competency through other means.

An additional result of our efforts will be the publication of a printed hanmun Reader containing texts of mid-level difficulty and providing explanations for unusual or complex syntax as offline study material for advanced hanmun learners.

ii.Development of online Middle Korean courses

Teaching Middle Korean has a long and uninterrupted history at Ruhr University Bochum, where Korean Studies developed through the engagement of the eminent professor of Japanese Language and Literature Bruno Lewin (1924-2012), who co-authored the first German Korean Language textbook and deeply studied the history of the Korean language. The first chair of Korean Studies at RUB, Werner Sasse, specialized in Middle Korean. Our year-long, two hours per week obligatory course in Middle Korean is now taught by one of his graduates, Dr. Thorsten Traulsen.  Building on this decades-long experience in teaching Middle Korean at RUB, we wish to make its fruits more widely available to Korean Studies students and scholars by providing online and offline teaching in English based on existing course materials along similar lines as those of our plans for hanmun teaching:

1. Development of an online version of the local Middle Korean course for Blended Learning, drawing on the experiences and didactic competencies we accrue with the online hanmun courses.
2. Further development of the Middle Korean course for Blended Learning into a full online study tool.

Summer schools after the model of the hanmun summer schools are planned for the time after the completion of the initial six-year project period.