Bringing Korean Folktales to Life: Student-Produced Puppet Shows for Community Engagement

This article reports on a community-outreach puppet show implemented in an advanced Korean language course at a U.S. university. The project was designed to enhance students’ linguistic proficiency, cultural understanding, and civic engagement through the integration of Korean folktales, collaborative script writing, and public performance. Over the course of the semester, students studied a Korean folktale, co-authored an original script, constructed puppets, and performed the show in Korean for approximately 300 students at a local Korean dual language immersion (DLI) elementary school. Rather than prioritizing grammatical accuracy, the project foregrounded meaningful language use, creativity, and communicative effectiveness through interaction with a real audience. Informed by the principles of project-based learning and performance-based pedagogy, the experience provided advanced learners with a concrete communicative purpose and a socially situated context for language use. The elementary school students, in turn, expressed excitement and a sense of pride in understanding the Korean performance, which inspired them to envision their own language-learning journey. This article discusses the pedagogical rationale, instructional design, and implementation process of the project and analyzes student learning outcomes. It argues that community-based performance projects can foster learner motivation, intercultural understanding, and meaningful language use.