Exploring Korean dual language immersion programs in the United States: parents’ reasons for enrolling their children

ABSTRACT

This study explores parents’ reasons for enrolling their children in a Korean dual language immersion (KDLI) program. The research focuses on parents’ reasons for choosing a school and a KDLI program, respectively, to examine whether a KDLI offering significantly affects parents’ decision to enroll their children in a specific school and to investigate which factors parents tend to prioritize when selecting a KDLI program over other language immersion programs. Given the various contexts in which individual KDLI programs operate, this study also compares different parent groups characterized by Korean ethnicity and school characteristics in terms of their responses. The study surveys more than 450 parents of students enrolled in 7 elementary-level KDLI programs in southern California to determine the extent to which parents’ reasons vary across different groups and examine whether group differences exist between Korean and non-Korean parents as well as between parents whose children attend high socioeconomic and low socioeconomic status schools. The study discusses the findings by comparing the results to prior literature and identifies implications for KDLI and DLI programs in general.

KEYWORDS:

• Parents of bilingual children
• Korean two-way immersion
• Korean dual language immersion
• Asian dual language immersion
• Korean bilingual education
• Korean two-way programs

Acknowledgement

The author would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments and suggestions to improve the quality of the paper.

Notes on contributor

Jongyeon Ee earned her Ph.D. from the Graduate School of Education and Information Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and is a postdoctoral scholar at the UCLA Civil Rights Project/Proyecto Derechos Civiles. Her research includes bilingual education, school segregation, racial inequality, and school discipline in K-12 schools.

Notes

1 California Governor Jerry Brown signed Senate Bill 1174 (the Multilingual Education for a 21st Century Economy Act). State Senator Ricardo Lara (D-33) supported the proposed measure in the California Legislature. If California voters approve this proposed measure in November 2016, the measure could amend and partially repeal Proposition 227. If so, non-English languages can then be used in public schools in California.

2 According to the Center for Applied Linguistics (n.d.), Dual Language Education is used as an umbrella term that generally encompasses other terminologies, such as one-way immersion (or enrichment immersion/foreign language immersion), TWI, and indigenous language immersion (or heritage language immersion).Strictly speaking, however, individual programs differ from each other in terms of language instruction objectives and student populations. Of these terminologies, in particular, dual language education is usually deemed as a synonym of TWI education, but CAL specifies that a TWI program is a dual language program that includes both language-majority students and language-minority students, with both groups representing at least one-third of the program enrollment. Despite the distinction, dual language education is often used synonymously with TWI education in reality, especially in the United States. This study uses KDLI to refer Korean programs.

3 According to the 2010 American Community Survey, the state with the largest Korean population is California (30%), and the Greater Los Angeles Area examined in this study has more than one quarter of California’s Korean population (Hoeffel et al. 2012).

4 Of the seven schools, two schools were in District 1 and five schools belonged to District 2.

5 For the online survey tool, Qualtrics, an online survey research platform was used. More detailed information for Qualtrics can be found at http://www.qualtrics.com/

6 In such cases, parents were asked to complete only one questionnaire for the eldest child.

7 In immersion education literature, parents of students in immersion programs in the United States are usually categorized into two groups: English-dominant speakers and target language-dominant speakers (e.g. Spanish-dominant speakers). However, respondents in this study who did not speak Korean as their native language could not be labeled as a homogeneous language group, such as English-dominant speakers. Therefore, this study used the term ‘parents from non-target-language-speaking groups’ to refer to non-Korean respondents.