Korea is becoming multicultural society in which ethnical and cultural varieties exist due to intermarry and incoming of migrant workers. Because of this, the children from families of multicultural surroundings are rising as serious problems. Especia...
Korea is becoming multicultural society in which ethnical and cultural varieties exist due to intermarry and incoming of migrant workers. Because of this, the children from families of multicultural surroundings are rising as serious problems. Especially, teenage period is important for ego-identity formation. However, increasing number of students seem disable to get used to Korean schools and most of them drop out of them. In fact, they have serious issues with Korean reading, vocabulary and writing, and this leads to school maladjustment. Particularly, vocabulary problems last long aside from phonological and grammatical ones, and this plays key role in this constantly changing society. Considering the fact of rising number of dropping out students, multicultural families adolescent's linguistic abilities should be studied carefully in long term.
This study has been conducted through total of thirty seven students including eighteen multicultural families adolescents (twelve boys and six girls) age thirteen to fifteen, and nineteen Korean adolescents of the same age (eleven boys and eight girls). Two groups are all in same grade and we limited their mothers' nationality into Asian countries which is Chinese, ethnic Korean, Japanese and Vietnamese. Through this experiment, we compared linguistic ability, ego-identity and school-related adjustment with general Korean students. Moreover, we analyzed correlation between receptive, productive vocabulary and ego-identity, school-related adjustment.
First of all, multicultural families adolescent showed very low performance in both receptive and productive vocabulary, and we found meaningful difference. Moreover, when we looked for difference of those two vocabulary ability in both groups, there was meaningfully low results.
Secondly, although teenagers from multicultural families indicated lower ego-identity compared to the other group, there was no meaningful statistical difference between them. And when we compare subfactor such as sociality, social adaptation, uniqueness, future plan, value factor, former group showed lower score but only sociality were found with meaningful difference.
Thirdly, school adjustment ability were lower in multicultural group, but no meaningful difference was shown. In addition, when sub factor was compared, all of them were lower for the group, and only school friend adjustment showed meaningful difference.
Fourthly, multicultural students showed positive correlation between receptive, productive vocabulary and ego-identity. Moreover, receptive vocabulary itself were found to be very much related to social adaptation among a few sub factors and sociality, future plan, uniquness has followed. Productive vocabulary also showed highest correlation with social adaptation and sociality, future plan has followed.
Fifthly, multicultural students' both vocabulary abilities showed positive correlation, and did not indicate statistically meaningful numbers. And both abilities were mostly related to school adjustment but there was no meaningful relation.
Sixthly, multicultural teenagers' ego-identity showed meaningful correlation with school adjustment. Moreover, ego-identity showed meaningful relation with school life adaptation, which is among the sub factors of school adaptation, this showed best correlation with uniqueness, and social adaptation, sociality has followed.