Mother tongue

Three children stand by the blackboard, clutching pink construction paper flowers. With bashful smiles, they sing a folk tune to their classmates, while a teacher prods them along with the words they don’t know.

It’s a typical classroom moment, except for a few unlikely details: It’s a Saturday, the class is in Korean and the folk song celebrates Korea’s national flower, the rose of Sharon.

The class is part of the Lynchburg Korean School, which opened in January to meet the needs of the area’s growing Korean population.

Most of the students are the children of Liberty University students and local residents , says the school’s founder, Dr. C. Daniel Kim. The school enables recent transplants from Korea to keep up their native tongue.

“The younger students, the ones born here, they are missing their mother language and mother tongue,” Kim says.

“They go back and are lost.” 

Kim, a professor at Liberty Baptist Theological Seminary, moved to Lynchburg more than 30 years ago, when the Korean community was virtually non-existent.
Since there were no Korean churches, he organized a Friday night Bible study in his home. About 10 people would show up.

Today, the area is home to at least three Korean churches. The largest — the Korean Baptist Church of Lynchburg — has more than 450 members. The city also supports a handful of mom-and-pop markets that sell Korean specialty foods and a new Korean restaurant in an old Taco Bell building in Madison Heights.
Part of the increase is thanks to Kim, who spent years recruiting Korean students to Liberty’s undergraduate and graduate programs.

The Lynchburg Korean School is the most recent sign of growth. Though the school is in its first semester, it’s already a robust operation.

So far, 65 students have enrolled, ranging from preschool-age to 30-somethings. The school offers eight class levels, and is run by Kim, principal Dr. John J. Sohn and a cadre of 21 teachers. The central office is filled with about 2,000 Korean books.

The school has a strong evangelical identity. It’s run by the Korean Baptist Church of Lynchburg, which is a ministry of Thomas Road Baptist Church.
Kim sees it as a potential training ground for Americans who wish to do mission work in Korea.

The classes, split up by age group and ability level, look like typical foreign language classes. The students sing songs, pore over workbooks and watch lessons on the blackboard.

Korean can be difficult to learn, says Sohn, whose teenage son helps translate his Korean into English. In addition to running the school, Sohn is studying at Liberty’s seminary school during a sabbatical from Yanbian University of Science and Technology in China.

Unlike Chinese dialects, which include tens of thousands characters, the Korean alphabet is short, like the English alphabet, he explains. And, like English, each Korean character represents a sound, and words can have two or more meanings, depending on the context, Sohn says.

Dr. Tim Chong, a professor at Liberty’s seminary school, also helped launch the Korean school. He says that teaching students about Korean culture is central to their program.

“The cultural aspect is embedded in the language itself. By learning the language, you can learn what the culture is like,” he says.

Eun Gi Joung, 24, teaches the first and second graders. The Liberty graduate is Korean but spent most of her childhood in the Philippines. She can relate to her students’ struggles with the language.

“I know what it’s like to come to a foreign school and learn you own language. It can be frustrating and hard.”

While class is in session, the sounds of Korean circulate the classrooms and hallways. There are occasional snatches of English, mostly in the beginner’s class.

The beginner’s class draws a mix of ages, including one student in his 30s. Most students are Korean-American children who grew up in the U.S. public school system and speak little or no Korean.

This is the case for 14-year-old Ariel Kim, who attends Jefferson Forest High School. Her mother speaks to her in Korean at home, but Kim says she usually responds in English.

“I can understand it more than I can speak it,” says the teenager, who reluctantly admits she likes Korean school but doesn’t like waking up early on Saturday mornings.

Brian Davis of Altavista married a Korean woman when he was in the Army. Today, he sits in on the end of class, as his 10-year-old son James works on his writing skills.

“I was very happy about the class,” says Davis, pointing out that about half of James’ relatives live in Korea.

“My mom’s basically the translator over the phone,” James chimes in.

Leaders of the Lynchburg Korean School are considering adding more programming, time and money permittin g, to meet requests by parents to expand its programming.  Possible additions include a summer school and tae kwon do classes.