Despite the recent advancement of dual language immersion (DLI) programs, DLI research is still limited to a few languages such as Spanish, French or Chinese in the U.S. and mainly focuses on the students' academic and cognitive development (Johanna et al., 2018). To address this gap, this presentation investigates 1) Korean and non-Korean parents' access, advocacy, and bias toward a Korean Dual Language Immersion (KDLI) program and 2) the multiple factors underlying parents' different beliefs and levels of commitment to their child's bilingual and biliteracy development in the program.
We use the parental involvement framework (Fan & Chen, 2001) to navigate multidimensional motivations and concerns in a dual language immersion program regarding their communication with teachers and other parents and their involvement in the Korean community. We also apply the notion of investment (Darvin & Norton, 2015) to explore how Korean and non-Korean parents' advocacy for and investment in their child's bilingual and biliteracy development is intersected across their own ethnolinguistic identity, socio-economic capital, and linguistic/cultural ideologies in the school and society.
This study is part of larger collaborative ethnography research to longitudinally examine the experiences of multiple stakeholders (i.e., students, teachers, parents, and administrators) in a newly-established KDLI program at a public elementary school in the southeastern U.S. Seventeen parents who have enrolled their child in the KDLI program participated in this study. Semi-structured individual interviews focused on their motivations and experiences of the KDLI program. This data was analyzed qualitatively.
Findings show that Korean parents advocate bilingual education through the KDLI program due to social and emotional benefits such as their child's visibility at school and confidence as Korean/English bilingual speakers. Contrarily, non-Korean parents' advocacy for bilingual education is attributed to economic and cultural benefits such as job opportunities and acceptance of diversity, which is, however, drawn from broad civic minds rather than a deeper level of cultural appreciation and critical orientation. Moreover, both Korean and non-Korean parents have biases in bilingual education in that the primary language in the KDLI program should be English rather than Korean. For example, Korean parents are deeply concerned about English proficiency and use private tutoring for their child to compensate for the loss of input in English due to Korean-medium instruction in the KDLI program. Non-Korean parents consider Korean as an additional language and do not invest extra efforts for their child to reach the same proficiency of Korean as Korean children, rather wish community support and external spaces for their child to practice Korean.
Based on these findings, this study discusses the different groups of parents' contrasting investment and involvement and unequal power status between English and Korean in the KDLI program. This study poses a question of how we can disrupt the perpetuated hierarchy between English and other minority languages in the US context. This study suggests that future research needs to identify and consider different stakeholders' needs and concerns, as this newly-established program adds further grade-level students.
