Arabic popular for 2nd-language test

More students are choosing Arabic as their second foreign language option for the national scholastic aptitude test.

According to the Korea Institute for Curriculum and Evaluation, around 40 percent of students selected Arabic as their option for a second foreign language in the College Scholastic Ability Test this year.

A total of 668,527 students applied for the national college entrance exam and of those, 90,277 chose to take a second foreign language test as an option. Of the foreign language applicants, 36,000 chose to take the Arabic language test.

The national CSAT will be held next Thursday.

The main reason students select Arabic as their second foreign language choice is because it is easier to score higher on the test than other languages.

The markings made after last year’s CSAT showed that the average score of Arabic language test was 80 points out of 100, higher than the average for Japanese at 66 points.

“Because the language is rather unfamiliar to Koreans, fewer students take the test compared to other languages. So if we study just a bit, it’s easy to get a good score on the exam because it is graded on a curve,” said a second-year high school student surnamed Kim.

Because of this advantage, many students are transitioning from other languages to Arabic.

The percentage of students who take the Arabic language test is increasing every year.

The rate of students taking Arabic out of eight foreign language options was at 15 percent in 2008 but jumped to 29 percent in 2009, 42 percent in 2010 and nearly reached 46 percent in 2011.

Arabic was included as a second language option in the national college aptitude test in 2005. At that time only 531 students, which didn’t even account for 0.4 percent of the total foreign language applicants, applied to take the Arabic language exam.

However, even if more students are choosing the language as their test option, many have difficulty learning Arabic properly as there aren’t many channels from which they can learn the language.

There is currently only one high school, Ulsan Foreign Language High School, in the entire country that teaches Arabic properly.

There aren’t even many private academies that professionally teach Arabic, so students resort to expensive private tutoring from Arabic-majoring university students. <The Korea Times/Yun Suh-young>