This chapter outlines the various English teacher education policies and the corresponding measures introduced by the South Korean government to emphasize the importance of English to its national competitiveness. It points out that, despite these policies and measures, English teaching in schools has not significantly improved. It observes that in contrast to official rhetoric ostensibly supporting varieties of English, even teachers who speak fluent English set native-speaker English, especially American English, as the norm and feel burdened about teaching in English as they feel they lack English proficiency. In addition, in-service English teachers continue to raise the question of whether Communicative Language Teaching pedagogy developed in the ESL environment is appropriate for South Korea in which English is taught as a foreign language. Many teachers also experience reform fatigue due to frequent changes in policies for political purposes. The chapter concludes that there is an urgent need for research on English education policies and English teacher education policies that will create the environment where new English teachers can put theory into practice.

Language teaching changed significantly over the past century, shifting from the grammar translation method to the communicative approach and beyond. These changes reflected our evolving understanding of how languages are learned, influenced by behavioral, cognitive, sociocutural, and sociocognitive theories. Following this review, the chapter discusses in detail the role of communicative competence and intercultural communicative competence in language pedagogy, presenting research by Byram (1997), Kramsch (2009), Liddicoat and Scarino (2013), and Hua (2014). These discussions outline key components of intercultural communicative competence – such as knowledge, skills, attitudes, and linguistic knowledge - that lay the foundation for the pedagogical chapters in this volume.