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N. Koreans, S. Koreans have similar TOEFL average: report
SEOUL, Feb. 14 (Yonhap) -- North Koreans have almost the same average score as South Koreans in the Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL), a Washington-based radio station reported Thursday.
In the period of 2005-2006, the average score in the Internet-based TOEFL by North Korean nationals was 69 out of 120, slightly lower than South Korea's 72, Radio Free Asia said, quoting an unnamed publicity official of a U.S. institute providing the test.
The narrow gap is surprising because learning English is so popular in South Korea that many parents are willing to spend a considerable amount of their income on private English education for their children.
The North's average was higher than the average of 65 among Japanese. Chinese had an average of 76.
"We cannot measure a country's English ability simply by the TOEFL score because the ages and educational levels of exam-takers are varied by nation," said the publicity official of the Educational Testing Service (ETS), the U.S.-based institute that administers the test. "But North Korea is one of the countries whose people's average TOEFL score has risen steadily over the past ten years."
ETS changed the method of the computer-based test to an Internet-based one, or IBT, in September 2005, adding questions to measure English speaking ability and removing questions on grammar. It also reduced the highest possible score of the computer-based test from 300 to 120. The perfect score for the written test remains unchanged at 677.
The average TOEFL score in the computer-based test by North Korean nationals has improved from 178 in the 1998-1999 period to 189 in 2003-2004 and 190 in 2004-2005.
The annual number of North Korean citizens taking the test, which stayed around 1,000 before June 2000, topped 4,000 in the 2003-2004 period and surpassed 6,000 in 2005-2006.
According to North Korean defectors in Seoul, Pyongyang has emphasized the importance of learning English since the 1970s.
"People are very eager to learn so there is a lot of improvement. Some of my students scored 500 on the (written) TOEFL exam," Jake Buhler, a Canadian who taught English in North Korea for three months in 2004, was quoted by the radio station as saying.
English is now taught at all middle and high schools as well as universities in North Korea, according to Shin Eun-hi, a North Korean defector who taught English at the prestigious Kim Il Sung University and a foreign language college in Pyongyang. North Koreans previously avoided from learning English, calling it a language of U.S. imperialists.
However, she said only a small number of select people receive high-level English education. "The North Koreans who take the TOEFL are mostly students studying in third countries like China, Foreign Ministry officials and spies headed overseas," another defector told Yonhap News Agency, requesting anonymity. "Such people are not inferior to South Koreans in their English skills."
A senior official of the Korean-American Educational Commission, the former Korean TOEFL agency of the ETS, downplayed the report.
In a telephone interview with Yonhap, she said the number 69 might include scores by some South Korean students who mistakenly chose the country code for the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, the official name of North Korea.
"It happens a lot because young South Koreans are still unfamiliar with the official name of their country, the Republic of Korea," the official said, asking not to be named.
sshim@yna.co.kr
(END)
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