About KLEAR | History

It has been nearly fifteen years since the KFL (Korean as a foreign language) textbook development planning conference was held in Christian Academy House in Seoul on January 3–5, 1994. Hosted jointly by The Korea Foundation (represented by President Son Chu Hwan) and the Center for Korean Studies of the University of Hawaii (represented by Professors Ho-min Sohn and Dong Jae Lee), in cooperation with the International Association for Korean Language Education, this monumental conference was attended by forty-nine college-level KFL educators and relevant administrators representing more than forty institutions from Australia, Canada, England, and the United State, as well as from Korea.

Mission Statement

Instruction of Korean as a foreign language (KFL) is making an unprecedented rapid growth both overseas and in Korea. Needless to say, this is due mainly to the near-miraculous development of the Korean economy, the marked increase in the overseas Korean population, and the firm commitment and sincere efforts of the Korean government and relevant Korean organizations to globalize Korean studies and the Korean language and culture. The learning of Korean has thus been greatly promoted as the Korean language is the foundation on which all areas of Korean studies are built: Korean is the means by which non-Koreans conduct cross-cultural communication with Koreans; and Korean is the basis through which overseas Koreans maintain their national heritage, identity and pride. The key to these vital needs is the effective teaching of KFL supplemented with superior textbooks and other teaching or learning aids.

University of California at Los Angeles

The Department of Asian Languages and Cultures offers a variety of courses in Asian linguistics, focusing particularly on functional, discourse and typological analyses of Asian languages. The three linguistics faculty members of the Department regularly offer courses and seminars in the following areas:

Chinese linguistics, Japanese linguistics, Korean linguistics, (Southeast Asian linguistics) Corpus linguistics, Conversation Analysis, Discourse Analysis, Pragmatics, Grammaticalizaton and historical analysis, Sociolinguistics, Transcription theory and practice , Cognitive Linguistics, Prosody in discourse, Language Pedagogy