* Spoiler Alert

This blog post includes a linked audio file. Just click on the link below if you would like to hear the post read aloud. Scroll down to read the text.

By now, I am assuming that a majority of us have watched—or at the least, heard of—오징어 게임 Squid Game, the South Korean survival drama series created by Hwang Dong-hyuk which also happens to be the most-watched Netflix series, grossing nearly $900 million to date. For those who haven’t watched it, the show revolves around a contest where 456 debt-ridden players risk their lives to compete in a series of children’s games for a chance to win a cash prize of 45.6 billion Korean Won, or approximately 48 million Canadian Dollars–a helluva lot of money!

The series is shocking yet eloquent. Its nine episodes tackle issues of capitalism, debt, social and income inequalities, race, scandal, shame, and a heavy dose of desperation in depicting the brutal realities of human self-interest. I mean, the marble scene with Ali is bru-tal, am I right?!

I’m just gonna drop this picture right here:

Along with any great work of art comes a healthy helping of criticism, which I can’t help notice centers mostly on the debate around subtitle explanations. That is, what gets lost in translation, or what Senior Lecturer in Translation and Interpreting at Macquarie University Jihyun Cho denotes as the untranslatable. In other words, the meaning gap between the English subtitles and the original Korean language.

I was prompted to investigate the language piece further after a friend of mine who was watching the show dubbed in English with her son mentioned to me that she felt that she was missing something, although she wasn’t exactly sure what that was. Having watched the show in Korean, with English subtitles, and having studied Korean formally during my 5-year tenure in Korea as an English as a Foreign Language instructor, there were a few things that I took for granted while watching the series. I’ll share an example with you now and then explain why it matters in the context of classroom language teaching, with a brief discussion on positioning theory and related insights from my previous research.

Korean Honorifics and the Hierarchy of Social Relations

My understanding of honorifics in the Korean language came as a result of a first-hand experience greeting the parking woman at the hospital with “안녕” (annyeong/“Hi”) every morning on my daily walk to work in Seoul, South Korea. It wasn’t until I learned more about the honorific system in the Korean language and greeted the woman with a proper “안녕하세요?” (annyeonghaseyo/ “Hello” but formally) that she greeted me back. In my first salutation to the parking woman, I was using an informal greeting in the same way one would address a child. I was unintentionally disrespecting an elder, as “one cannot speak Korean without considering one’s own social position and age relative to the position and age of one’s address because a host of lexical and grammatical choices depend on such matters” (Fillmore, 1991, p. 343). I could have thought that the woman was being rude by not responding back to me when I said hi; rather, I was disrespecting her by not speaking to her in the proper formal tone. Indeed, age and social status are determining factors that impact how Koreans speak with one another, which is why it is not uncommon to exchange names and ages upon first meeting someone new.

In the Squid Game, Gi-hyun spoke to Il-nam with the utmost politeness and respect, signified by the formality of Korean honorifics which underscored the father-son relationship between them, in spite of the horrid games they were competing in against one another. The juxtaposition of the brutality of the games alongside the respect typically shown toward elders was striking. Not surprisingly, when Gi-hyun discovered Il-nam was the brains behind the game, he no longer used honorifics to address him. This shift signaled his disrespect to Il-nam, strengthening his sense of disdain for him.

Another example of honorifics that was present in Squid Game relates to the use of naming practices. In the English translation, characters’ first names were referenced in the subtitles. However, in Korean the speakers did not say characters’ names; rather, they used terms of endearment such as 오빠 (oppa) which means older brother (spoken by females) and 형 (hyung) which means older brother (spoken by males). These words extend beyond blood relations and signify a close and valued relationship or connection between friends. Sometimes these words were translated to ‘babe,’ or ‘sir,’ which didn’t adequately capture the relational aspect between the characters. The ‘older brother’ is expected to take care of the younger ones. This title comes with the responsibility of protection. The character Ali switched to calling Sang-woo 형 (older brother) which signified a change in their relationship and meant that Ali developed loyalty and trust towards Sang-woo, who ultimately betrayed him.

The relational aspect captured by Korean honorifics is an example of the untranslatable.

What Does this Mean for Classroom Language Teaching?

Sociocultural aspects of language have implications for English language teaching and learning. Positioning theory and the concept of the contact zone are useful in understanding these implications. Pratt (1991) uses contact zone “to refer to social spaces where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power, such as colonialism, slavery, or their aftermaths as they are lived out in many parts of the world today” (p. 34). The language classroom in institutions of higher education, where I’m most familiar, could be considered a contact zone because this learning space brings together students from diverse linguistic and cultural backgrounds. I’ve witnessed first-hand how these complex asymmetrical relations of power play out in classroom dynamics between Sunni and Shiite Muslims, or between students from India and Pakistan, for example. I briefly turn to positioning theory, as it is useful in helping us understand classroom participation and talk and all of its associated complexities (Kayi-Aydar, 2019) that may occur as a result of the asymmetrical power relations that play out in social interactions.

Positioning theory considers how discourse produces discursive practices and vice versa; said differently, the ways in which people produce psychological and social realities (Davies & Harré, 1990). The focus is on what people say and do and the aim is to understand how individuals gain access and negotiate their rights and responsibilities to perform meaningful actions (Harré, 2012). In a study examining students’ language learning experience, Kayi-Aydar (2013) found that one talkative student became an accepted member of classroom talk by using humor and building friendships with particular students, whereas the other talkative student was excluded “because his participation behavior was not accepted by his classmates, who positioned him as an outsider” (p. 708). This example points to the relationship between positioning and identity. Kayi-Aydar (2013) calls for educators to heighten their awareness to develop strategies to shape classroom discourse, with the goal of helping learners position themselves in ways beneficial to their identity and language learning development.

In reference to Squid Game and the significance of the word 형 (older brother) and the related associations of this term of endearment, or the way the parking woman did not reply to my informal 안녕in Korean, I think about how students’ classroom language practices may be influenced by rules of engagement in their home languages. Having previously written about this in a critical autoethnography of my language learning and teaching experiences in Korea, I’ll share an example of how these dynamics might play out in a classroom interactions:

One day in my class at the Blue House, four male students in their thirties and myself were discussing how we managed money in our relationships. Fifteen minutes into the conversation, an older man joined our class. I welcomed him into our conversation and told him about our topic of discussion. The four students stopped speaking. Despite my best attempts to invite them into the conversations by asking them direct questions, their replies were short and broken. They pretended that they didn’t understand my questions. I remember feeling like something was happening at that moment, but I didn’t quite understand exactly what. After the older man left the room I turned to the four students: “What was that about?” The reply: “We know we speak English better than him, but we don’t want to show that, he’s our senior, and we don’t want to shame him” (Burton, 2019, p. 79).

In sharing this example, I’m not suggesting that this is definitely happening among Korean students in language classes in North America. Rather, I want to highlight the social dynamics that influence and guide language practices that may or may not be translatable from one context to the next, nor be something that can be captured in standardized assessment practices. In investigating Korean students’ language learning experiences in a Canadian university as a research project for my Master’s degree, I learned that one Korean-language student participant in my study would alter her classroom participation and talk based on whether there were other Korean student classmates—even just one other Korean student in the class impacted her language practices. She was less willing to participate for fear of being perceived or appearing like she didn’t know English well. These classroom practices are almost always invisible to the teacher. Yet, they are sometimes the basis for discriminatory or racist remarks.

Just recently a fellow educator made this comment: Asian students don’t know how to speak up in class. Such statements are not uncommon, unfortunately. Yet they are problematic for several reasons. Beyond this statement being essentialist and definitive, it also suggests that not speaking up in class is a problem, or that Asian students are rude for not participating. While I think it is important that teachers play a role in equipping students with academic literacy and socialization skills to navigate classroom discourse patterns in Canadian university settings, I think it is even more important to turn a critical eye towards these often unchallenged academic discourse patterns. Doing so shifts the onus of responsibility away from the “Asian students” who are expected to conform to Canadian discourse practices and towards institutions who uncritically uphold and reinforce these practices. Instead of Asian students don’t know how to speak up in class, why not Educators don’t count alternative forms of participation? That is, perhaps a better point of consideration is to ask in what ways can we, as educators, honour participation experiences by altering taken-for-granted understandings of what “counts” as participation?

As I think about the recent multilingual turn (May, 2013) in language education and translanguaging as a theory of language, pedagogy and political stance rooted in social justice (García & Wei, 2014), I cannot help but think about the necessity to make space for the untranslatable, that which the ear cannot hear.

Your turn…

Before you go, I’ve got a quick question: Which idea mentioned above resonates with you the most, and why? Anything else to share? Leave a comment below and share your thoughts.

p.s. Watch Squid Game, but brace yourself!

References

Burton, J. (2019). “Make yourself look as White as possible!”: Navigating privilege in English language teaching in South Korea; an autoethnography. In A. Al-lssa & S-A. Mirhosseini (Eds.), Worldwide English Language Education Today (pp. 69-84). Routledge.

Davies, B., & Harré, R. (1990). Positioning: The discursive production of selves. Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour, 20(1), 43–63.

Fillmore, L. W. (1991). When learning a second language means losing the first. Early childhood research quarterly, 6(3), 323-346.

García, O., & Wei, L. (2014). Translanguaging and education. In Translanguaging: Language, bilingualism and education (pp. 63-77). Palgrave Pivot, London.

Harré, R. (2012). Positioning theory: Moral dimensions of social-cultural psychology. In J. Valsiner (Ed.), The Oxford handbook of culture and psychology (pp. 191–206). New York: Oxford University.

Kayi-Aydar, H. (2013). ‘No, Rolanda, completely wrong!’ Positioning, classroom participation and ESL learning. Classroom Discourse, 4(2), 130-150, doi: 10.1080/19463014.2013.835271

May, S. (2013). Introducing the “multilingual turn”. In The multilingual turn (pp. 11-16). Routledge.

Pratt, M. L. (1991). Arts of the contact zone. Profession, 33-40.