Minority youth’s mastery of academic vocabulary and its implications for their educational achievements: the case of ‘multicultural adolescents’ in South Korea

Abstract

As a way to examine the validity of deficit perspectives on multicultural children in South Korea—namely, children of mixed parentage who are said to suffer from speech problems and school failure, this study examined their everyday and academic Korean proficiency and its association with their educational achievements. The primary data sources for this study included fieldnotes produced over 11 months of fieldwork at three focal students’ homes and schools, their academic records and their academic vocabulary test results. Adopting an ethnography of an embedded case studies method, this paper employed inductive thematic analysis. This study revealed that multicultural children did not exhibit any difficulty in communicating with others in everyday Korean but that they had varying degrees of academic vocabulary mastery. This study further confirmed the tight relationship between academic vocabulary knowledge and school success. In addition to the discussion of conditions that could widen the gaps in academic vocabulary repertoire among children, this paper called for more explicit academic vocabulary instruction for children in need, regardless of their multicultural background.

Keywords:

• Multicultural children
• academic vocabulary
• educational achievement
• ethnography
• South Korea

Notes

1. The Ministry of Gender Equity and Family and the Ministry of Justice have provided Korean language and culture classes for the newcomers so that they can become acculturated into the Korean society (see Yi & Lee, 2013 for the analysis of Korean language education policies for immigrants).

2. For the larger research project, the Bupyeong-gu Multicultural Family Support Center greatly contributed to the recruitment of the study participants. We created and distributed flyers about the study (e.g. advertising benefits that the study participants could receive such as one-to-one weekly mentoring sessions for the multicultural children across the academic year of 2014). Initially, 12 multicultural families contacted the Center expressing their interest in potential participation in the project; however, after having individual family meetings, approximately half of the families decided not to participate. In total, six multicultural families took part in the research project.

3. Among six multicultural children in the larger research project, Tayo, Jinsoo, and Hayang were selected for this case study. A boy called Heedong was excluded from the study because he was two years older than the other children; the other cases (Sungho and Artanis) were dropped because their academic language and achievement profiles were similar to those of Tayo and Hayang.

4. All translations from Korean into English are my own.