[Air-l] Korean students

[Han Woo PARK (Dr)]

Dear AoIR members

 Regarding the Korean students, I feel sorry that you started to recognize them as spammers. As a matter of fact, I asked them to post in order to gain some experience about an internationally-running scholarly mailing list on the Internet. Although I have taught them the way in which email should be written when sending to the mailing list, I have also noticed that they did not communicate with you properly. Since students do not have a high level of language skills in English, they hardly shared their ideas, information, and/or thoughts with international audience. 

 But please understand that they are undergraduate kids and this is a valuable learning process. Further, I think that they will be a good component of online AoIR community in the future. Arguably, native English speakers tend to dominate the majority of conversations being made on the list. Asian people who are mostly lurking have also a right to speak out their words. Once students are afraid of dropping email just because their English is not good enough, they might never express themselves.        

 Lastly, spring semester in Korea is approaching to the end and my students will thank all of you for helping finish their assignments. However, it should be noted that my sincere apology goes to those who had wasted their time in reading some awkward emails of my students.   


 Best wishes,

 Han..