Korean University Students' Progress in Developing Social Interaction with Native Speakers in the UK

Although Korean university students' primary concern is academic success in their higher degrees in the UK, they highly desire to develop English communicative competence through a number of opportunities to speak with natives speakers. The paper aims at examining to what extent they are able to be socialised into a new environment while they are studying at UK universities. The in-depth, longitudinal interviews with the targeted group of six Korean masters' students at the University of York was undertaken to observe the pace of their progress in developing social skills. Reluctance and hesitance to contact and interact with their supervisors and other academic staff persisted for most of them to the final term caused by cultural reasons such as face and hierarchy rather than language problems. Despite the six participants' variation in their patterns of social interaction, they struggled with pressures towards monoculture-biased interaction with Korean people, which was quite extreme for the five participants. This passivity can be explained by several reasons such as the students' lack of communicative competence and other situational factors on one-year course. It is important to note that students' failure to develop network with native speakers is strongly associated with experience of cultural withdrawal and frustration with developing communicative competence in English.