2004 article - according to recent articles - not so common now

South Korean parents are turning to surgery to give their children a leg up in mastering the English language.

The problem for the youngsters is sorting out L and R surrounds which they find difficult to pronounce.

Now, doctors can snip the thin tissue under the tongue to make it longer and supposedly nimbler even though the government discourages the operation.

The National Human Rights Commission has made a movie to scare the public into ceasing the practice.

It shows a young mother, obsessed with her son’s pronunciation at the kindergarten’s all-English Christmas play, rushing him to the clinic.

The boy screams as the mother and nurses hold him down, the mother insisting: “It’s all for his future.”

“Many viewers close their eyes at the surgery scenes,” said director Park Jin-pyo, who used footage from a real operation. “I wanted them to see how our society tramples our children’s human rights in the name of their future.”

The English craze among pre-school children took off in 2000 when the government made English classes mandatory from third grade.

Flawless English was once ridiculed as snobbish and even unpatriotic. Now it’s a status symbol and prized by business and colleges.

“Many parents have an illusion that good English could change their children’s lives,” said Song Young-hye, who runs Wonderland, one of the thousands of English language schools that have mushroomed in South Korea’s multi-billion English-teaching industry.

The procedure called a frenulotomy is used in the West in cases where the tissue under the tongue is abnormal and causes a speech impediment. No statistics exist on how many Korean children undergo go it. While local media say it is widespread in Seoul’s wealthier districts, doctors call the reports exaggerated.

Doctors scoff at the notion that the Korean tongue is too short or too inflexible for proper English, noting that thousands of Korean-Americans speak unaccented English without surgery.

“Doing the surgery on a normal kid just for English pronunciation doesn’t make anatomical sense at all,” says Park Bom-chung at Seoul’s Kangnam Sacred Heart Hospital.

The operation takes 20 to 30 minutes under local anaesthetic.