A Bronx middle school known for violence is being talked about in the Korean community for a different reason these days: black and Hispanic students are learning Korean there.

Each Wednesday, an hour before the school day officially begins, 22 sixth- and seventh-graders pass the Baychester housing projects and the security officers who stand guard outside M.S. 142, the John Philip Sousa School, to attend the city’s only Korean class that includes not a single Asian student.

The director of the Bronx Korean Businessman’s Association, In Chul Hwang, said he nearly wept when he heard that black students in the Bronx are studying his language. In his experience, he said, New Yorkers rarely are familiar with the language or culture even though Koreans have lived in America for more than a century.

“Everybody thinks that in the Bronx nobody is interested in Koreans,” Mr. Hwang, whose association represents the nearly 3,000 Korean merchants in the borough, said.

When Mr. Hwang went to observe the 7 a.m. class, he found the assumption was false. At M.S. 142, which has about three times as many violent incidents as other large middle schools in the city, according to Department of Education statistics, students bowed to him and greeted him in Korean. “Wow, they respected me,” Mr. Hwang said. “Kids, they try and learn the Korean language. I am so proud, I am so happy.”

Mikyong Cho, an English as a Second Language teacher who immigrated to America as a 12-year-old, said it was the students who asked for the class. The only Asian teacher in the almost entirely black and Hispanic school, the students were curious about her native language. She responded and began teaching a class after school two years ago that quickly grew to include dozens of students.

Members of the Korean community are often surprised at their interest or suppose it would be harder to teach Korean to non-Koreans, she said, “but I say students are students.”

The students say they love the class and that it is well worth the 6 a.m. wake-up call.

In an orderly, plant-filled classroom in which everything from the air conditioner to the chalkboard is labeled with Korean characters, eager faces glow with the excitement of mastering words in a foreign language. It’s easy, the students proudly claim, with one Hispanic immigrant who began learning English four years ago saying he felt like he was moving faster with Korean. The classroom also has a prominent cultural component as well, with Korean foods to sample and a box full of traditional dresses to try on. Traditional dancers performed for the class recently, and the school’s principal is planning an e-mail exchange with Korean immigrant teenagers at a public school in Flushing.

The Korean Times, a daily newspaper based in Queens, has been spreading the word in the Korean community. Its close coverage, with four articles so far, is in part designed to promote interest in creating a dual-language school for Koreans in New York, the reporter covering the story, Jungeun Lee, said.

“By letting our Korean readers know about these students, black students learning Korean, we wanted to challenge the community,” Ms. Lee said. The objective is to show that “even non-Koreans are trying to learn Korean,” she said.

Principal Alan Borer, who came to M.S. 142 this year from the Bronx High School of Science, where he was an assistant principal, said he hopes to give students the option of taking Korean as a regular foreign language elective starting in September.

“My goal is the students will be able to sit for the Korean Regents. They will be able to fulfill the proficiency and go on to take Korean in high school,” Mr. Borer said. Bronx Science and Stuyvesant high schools offer Korean as a language elective, as do five high schools in Queens in Korean neighborhoods.

Mr. Borer said the program is one step in “turning a school around.”

“It’s given them an enormous sense of pride. It’s so good, especially when you consider what went on a few years ago in Brooklyn,” Mr. Borer said referring to the 1990 Red Apple Boycott in Flatbush, during which residents of the predominantly Caribbean neighborhood stopped frequenting Korean green grocers for more than a year.

The students, according to Ms. Cho, are too young to remember the boycott or the 1992 anti-Korean riots in Los Angeles. In fact, she said, before taking the class few of them knew anything at all about the Korean-American experience.

For her, the greatest reward of the class is watching as “their eyes are opening up,” she said.

A trip is planned to a local Korean senior citizen center that has volunteered to help the students. There, the children will learn Korean games, play musical instruments, and have a chance to practice their new vocabulary. This spring, they will show off the songs they practice in class, performing at a foreign-language meeting at Columbia University.

The Korean businessman, Mr. Hwang, has also pledged to do whatever he can to help. He offered money for books, but when Ms. Cho suggested instead a field trip to Flushing’s Koreatown, he jumped into action.

For many of the children, the trip to Queens felt like a voyage to a foreign country.

“They stare really hard at you in a shocked way,” one girl said about experimenting with Korean greetings in Flushing. “I feel happy that they expect more from me.”

A sixth-grader whose parents emigrated from the Dominican Republic, Samuel Germosen, said he loved the trip, with one exception: the food. “I want to live there, since I’m learning Korean,” he said. But the noodles, Samuel said, were a “lot different. They wiggle in your mouth.”