I lived in South Korea and I met some folks working at Berlitz there who apparently won the contract to do English language upgrades for Korean Air. It was soon

I lived in South Korea and I met some folks working at Berlitz there who apparently won the contract to do English language upgrades for Korean Air. It was soon after 9/11 and they said that after the first class they all looked at each other in silence. Finally one of them said, "Now that is why people thought they were hijacked." They said that 6 months later the difference was absolutely amazing, they were all great students with very few exceptions and all working under the threat of losing their jobs. I worked with highly educated Koreans when I was there and what the OP says is true about using English words and phrases for highly-technical things I found little to no relationship between that use and a high level of English language competency. If you look at the quoted transcript you see that the item that is "off-script" is in Korean: "Captain: Glide scope 안 돼나? [Isn't glide scope working?]" while all the routine OK checks are in English, following training. For this reason I find elements of his arguments not much more convincing than Gladwell's. (That and the tendency of Korean airliners to drift into Soviet airspace he dismisses seems to support Gladwell's thesis more than his.) I generally think the "culturalism" thing is a dangerous excuse to engage in a kind of casual racism, but I also think that dismissing culture as an element of any task where humans have to communicate and cooperate is also incorrect.