English education is a burgeoning industry in South Korea. At the same time, universities around the world are working harder to empower second language learners on their quest to wield English in an increasingly connected world. These two fields of education have a pronounced influence over English learners in Korea, but where do they overlap? What can universities and education companies learn from each other? Most importantly, what opportunities exist for private English education companies and universities to work together to maximize the abilities of their respective students to take control of their education?

Companies that specialize in industry-specific English education have insights that can benefit university English programs. University English programs have insights that can benefit English education companies. This roundtable seeks to open a dialogue between academics and English education professionals about potential collaboration points that would ultimately benefit the learners.

Update: This session has been moved to room 204.

This year’s spring conference is the 30th international conference that is being held by Korea TESOL. It is also the 30th anniversary of KOTESOL as an organization (1993–2023). In recognition of this dual celebration, this panel will reflect back over the past 30 years to evaluate how well KOTESOL has served the ELT community as well as look forward to project what directions KOTESOL should take and what changes KOTESOL should make to best serve our ever-changing and increasingly rapidly changing ELT community. Our panelists consists of long-term KOTESOL members with distinguished leadership experience and institutional knowledge, including as national president and international conference chair.

Building confidence is a popular learning objective in English language courses but it's one of those objectives that has become a cliche in many classrooms. Confidence is a psychological construct that’s hard to measure in a language course which gives it an elusive character compared to other objectives and it's connection to the methodologies we use in class is also unclear: What are the class activities that build students' confidence as ELLs? How do we do it and how do we know? The presentation will engage the attendees in a discussion about what building confidence means in the context of a Korean College English course from both conceptual and methodological perspectives. Building on the concept of English as Lingua Franca, the presentation focuses on the idea of adding legitimacy to ELLs as English speakers in their own right. The audience will also engage in an activity called Focused Listening designed to help students engage with just the essential information of listening activities that are informationally dense and sparse. Focused listening takes a strength-based approach to listening and utilizes peer social interaction as a tool for engagement and participation. The presentation will close with comments from students on what it means to build confidence as an English language learner in a college English course.