The Diplomat
The Instituto Cervantes has signed a collaboration agreement with Daekyo, the largest educational and cultural services company in South Korea, to promote the teaching of Spanish in the Asian country.
The agreement was signed last weekend by the director of the Instituto Cervantes, Luis García Montero, and the managing director of Daekyo, Woo-seung Kim, on the occasion of a working visit to Seoul to visit the facilities that will house the new Cervantes headquarters in the South Korean capital, which is scheduled to open in 2023 and will meet the growing demand for Spanish language learning in Korea. The signing ceremony was attended by the Spanish ambassador to Korea, Juan Ignacio Morro, and the director of the Instituto Cervantes center in Tokyo, Víctor Ugarte.
Daekyo has been teaching foreign languages to children, teenagers and adults for more than forty years, mainly online, and preparing students from all over the country for foreign language exams.
During their trip to Korea, García Montero and Juan Ignacio Morro visited the facilities of the future Cervantes Center in Seoul. The new center will replace the Aula Cervantes, located since 2011 at Hankuk University of Foreign Studies, and will meet the growing demand for Spanish language learning in Korea, the country with the most DELE exam candidates per capita in Asia. The new Cervantes will be the first digital native center in the network thanks to the Government of Spain’s Recovery, Transformation and Resilience Plan, which includes the Instituto Cervantes Digital Transformation Plan. Early childhood and adolescent education will also be one of the priority tasks of the new center, given the scarce supply of Spanish at these stages in the Korean education system.
The director of the Cervantes also participated in the Hispanists in Korea congress, which brought together some thirty specialists, as well as Wang-moo Yoo, president of the Korean Association of Hispanists, and Youg-Tae Min, acting president of the Asian Association of Hispanists. Hispanism in Korea has a tradition of more than 70 years since the study of Spanish began in the first foreign language courses. The Korean Association of Hispanists, born in 1981, today has more than 250 members and publishes the journal Estudios hispánicos (Hispanic Studies), a linguistic institution in Asia. García Montero’s agenda also included the writers’ meeting El español y el coreano, idiomas para la cultura (Spanish and Korean, languages for culture) at Sonagi Village, a theme park created to commemorate the life and literary spirit of the celebrated novelist and poet Soon-won Hwang.
