Parents’ Perceptions and Expectations on Their Children’s Heritage and Target Languages in Four Korean-Student Families

Parents’ Perceptions and Expectations on Their Children’s Heritage and Target Languages in Four Korean-Student Families

  There have been many studies on heritage language loss and maintenance in the Indo-European language families. This issue has become a recent phenomenon among Asian-language-speaking immigrants. In this paper, we examine four Korean student families in the U.S., which we expect to have implications on the recently growing dimension of L1 loss and maintenance in Asian families. The aims of this paper are to report parents" strategies for L1 maintenance and to expand the understanding of heritage language loss as a process in four Korean student families. Multiple sources of data from parents and children are analyzed into three emerging, recurring themes: (1) the attitudes toward English and Korean literacy vs. communication; (2) the L1 community; and (3) relations among older and younger siblings.