Teaching Korean as a Foreign Language is a long-established journal from the Korean Language Institute. In commemoration of the 15th anniversary of KLI’s establishment, Teaching Korean as a Foreign Language was first published in December 1974 to embrace and promote the integration of Korean language education and related research. Since then Teaching Korean as a Foreign Language has established itself as one of the leading journals in its field for almost half a century.

The first volume was published in December 1974 as Language and Culture, but the journal ceased publication in 1975. The journal changed its name to Mal (literally ‘speech’) and had resumed publication with the June 1977 volume as a scholarly journal specializing in Korean linguistics and Korean language education. Mal provided a forum for presenting research findings and discussing theological issues among researchers in the field of Korean linguistics and Korean language education. Another important point is that Mal had undoubtedly made a significant contribution to the status of Korean Language Education as an academic field. Traditionally, there was an inclination to treat Korean Language Education as a less important study. Thanks to its contribution, Korean language education has successfully achieved the status of an academic field.

When academic findings had been actively discussed in Korean language education in 2001, the journal changed its name to Teaching Korean as a Foreign Language. The journal initially published annually from 2001 (Vol. 20) to 2012 (Vol. 25/26), but became a biannual journal in 2013. Between 2013 (Vol. 38) and 2017 (Vol. 47) the journal published biannually. Starting from 2018 (Vol.48), Teaching Korean as a Foreign Language has been continuously published four times a year to provide an invaluable forum for educators, researchers, and administrators in Korean language education.

For almost half a century since its publication, Teaching Korean as a Foreign Language has enhanced and promoted an interest in the teaching of the Korean language, culture, and literature; it has helped to carry out researches on a wide variety of topics in Korean language education, including Korean language acquisition as a foreign, second language or heritage language; Korean linguistics; corpus linguistics; language assessment; discourse analysis; language pedagogy; teaching innovations; computer-assisted instruction; sociolinguistics; language policy as well as in the teaching of Korean culture and literature, and to host annual international conferences for presenting results and findings and workshops for professional development. Teaching Korean as a Foreign Language provides a forum for the exchange of information and ideas among researchers.