Bilingualism with Tears: A Case Study of Two Korean Immigrant Families.

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

This study from two-year ethnography examines Korean immigrant parents’ efforts for their children’s bilingual development or fisrt language maintenance. This study shows two Korean immigrant families’ ongoing strategies and perspectives in helping their children become bilingual, along with children’s attitude changes toward their bilingual development. Data from interviews, observations, and the researcher’s ethnographic involvement as an insider show that bilingual development requires continuous parental efforts for many years to help their children become bilinguals. However, despite the Korean parents’ efforts, their children’s bilingual development is not so successful in terms of bilingual proficiency, especially in the Korean language. Most of the immigrant children became English dominant when they went to school. Even those children who were constantly being pushed to speak Korean at home and learn Korean in the Korean school were rarely, if ever, fluent, if not all, in Korean. The findings in the present study show that "there is no such thing as ‘bilingualism without tears’" (Swain 1983: 35) or natural bilingualism (Yamamoto 2001). In short, it can be argued that continuous first language development is the key to success in bilingualism in a second language environment.(Hanyang University)

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