VIENTIANE: Students in three schools will get a chance to learn Korean when class sessions start in Laos next year.
The pilot project followed a memorandum of understanding signed between the Laotian and South Korean Education Ministries here recently.
According to The Laotian Times, the secondary schools will offer Korean classes on a trial basis.
The South Korean Education Ministry will promote cooperation between the countries’ universities and groom locals to become Korean teachers.
It will support research projects on Korean studies to be carried out at Souphanouvong University and the development of teaching materials in the Lao language.
Five Southeast Asian countries, including Thailand, are officially teaching Korean in secondary schools.
In Thailand, more than 40,500 students from 133 schools are learning Korean, and it has also been included in its college entrance exam since 2016.
Some 4,900 students from 43 schools in Indonesia, 1,300 from 18 schools in the Philippines, 1,600 from 12 schools in Vietnam and 1,000 students from 10 schools in Malaysia are learning Korean, according to the South Korean Education Ministry’s statistics.