Writing Korean through Pen Pal Letters

This poster presents Korean writing system and introduces Korean 102 students’ writing projects for a pen pal in Korea. Korean is written by the Korean phonetic alphabet called Hangul (한글 in Korean), which was created by King Sejong the Great, the fourth king of the Choseon dynasty Korea, and his royal scholars in 1443. Before Hangul is introduced, only Chinese characters were used among the ruling class. Hangul includes all Korean vocabulary, such as, native words, Sino-Korean words(Chinese character-based words), loanwords (any borrowed words from western countries), and any foreign words. Hangul letters along with 19 consonants and 21 vowels are combined into syllable blocks, which are composed of a minimum of two letters, including at least one consonant and one vowel. In the BSU Korean 102, the second semester of the non-heritage first-year series for learners from non-Korean ethnic groups, students learn and practice Korean reading, speaking, listening and writing in Korean. This poster illustrates how students present their Korean writing project, a Pen pal writing in Korean by fully utilizing the grammars, vocabularies, various Korean expressions in Korean. Additionally language exchange activities between Korean-English language partners are featured in this presentation