GYEONGGI PROVINCE, SOUTH KOREA — Immigration offices in Korea aren’t supposed to be like this. Where, for example, is the gray décor, the indifferent staff or the endless lines? Instead we have a throng of kids crowding around the counters, talking to officials who are not only cooperative, but downright chirpy. And these “immigration officials” speak perfect English.

“Good morning,” beams one, “May I see your passport please?”

“Here … you are,” comes the faltering reply.

What is offered by the young customer, though, is not an official travel document from any country, but a small, faux passport that reads: “I will always speak English at the PajuEnglishVillage.”

Occupying a sprawling 68-acre site in Gyeonggi Province, north of Seoul (and just a 20-minute drive from the North Korean border), Paju Village represents the latest installment in South Korea’s relentless drive to improve the standard of English in the nation. For the young visitors, “immigration” is just the first simulated real-life experience that must be tackled using English only. Further along the village’s spotless paved roads, the children withdraw Paju currency from a bank, buy stamps at the post office and even report mishaps or missing parents at the police station.

A city hall in the Georgian architectural style and a replica of Stonehenge are on opposite ends of “town” at Paju English Village.

“These are the things you’ll actually need when you go to a new country,” says Deborah Jane Burke, an American “edutainer,” who, this morning, is playing the role of a doctor. “If you go to a new country and you can’t speak in a bank, you’re screwed,” she says with a laugh.

Part theme park, part educational camp, Paju often seems eerily like a chunk of foreign country grafted onto the Korean countryside. There are no karaokes here, nor Internet cafés, nor even any Korean fast-food joints selling gimbap or ddeokbokgi. Instead, there are shops, foreign restaurants and an English-style pub (for the parents) all staffed by native English speakers. “Sometimes we forget we’re in Korea,” says Dain Leatham, a head teacher from New Zealand who, like all the camp’s foreign staff, lives on-site.

In its attempt to emulate an English town — that is, a town in England — the Gyeonggi government left no stone unturned, even sending a team of architects to scour the U.K. for a month. The result is architecture that, though not exactly English, could scarcely look less Korean. The red-brick buildings on the main street, for instance, are peak-roofed in a European style, with none standing more than three floors high. Bookending the village are an opulent, British Georgian-style city hall and, somewhat bizarrely, an oversized replica of Stonehenge, the prehistoric circle of standing stones on England’s Salisbury Plain.

Students at Paju English Village first pass through an immigration checkpoint bearing fake passports.

“We wanted to make a place where students can feel they have left Korea behind,” says Jeffrey Jones, the director of the PajuVillage.

No kidding.

Paju is at its busiest on weekends, when thousands of schoolchildren pay a one-day visit with parents in tow. During the week, kids come for one- or two-week residential courses, during which they “major” in drama, music, entertainment or science, with all classes taught in — you guessed it — English.