13-year-old Korean Girl Aces TOEFL iBT

First-year female middle school student, Kim Hyeon-su, 13-year old, who has never attended a hagwon, received a perfect score (120 points) on a TOEFL exam. In Korea, adults and high school students occasionally receive perfect score but Kim is the first middle school student to do so. Here is the story how a successful Korean mother develop her daughter's potential abilities in language. Her mother, 47-year old Lee Woo-suk, said on the 15th that, "from the time that Kim was little she was known as a prodigy. 18 months after being born she was reading hangul, and after 25 months she read English at a middle school level." Mrs. Lee realized her daughter's potential and developed it.

Mrs. Lee, who minored in English at university, studied Hebrew and Greek to be a missionary and lectured in English at a missionary college. She said, "I wanted to have the ability to talk freely in English with my daughter." She modeled her teaching method on multilingual Jewish families. When her daughter was one or two years old she began buying her hangul and English storybooks, and had natural conversations with her in English. She also used Disney comic books as teaching materials. Kim grew to love English and when she was four she kept an English diary and gathered essays and pictures together for a book called "My Special Child". But she has never been to an English hagwon or travelled abroad. Mrs. Lee explained, "she liked to learn English while playing at home, so I never sent her to a hagwon."

Asked if studying English is fun, Kim answered, "is eating food fun?" And, she added, "English is my second native language so I learned it naturally." Last December she applied to Daewon Middle School and fell to the third level by lottery, but this year she entered it via special examination. She said, "when I go to college I want to study English literature, psychology, and marine biology and then be a movie director."

Source: Koreabeat
Photo from Hedgehoghead