Addressing unsolved educational problems about linguistically diverse children: perspectives of early childhood educators in South Korea

ABSTRACT

Despite efforts to adopt inclusive education practices and foster cultural competence in classrooms across the globe, adequate training and shifts in teachers’ mindsets frequently seem to lag behind. Studies continue to find that teachers in a variety of contexts hold negative views of culturally and linguistically diverse (CLD) families. Individual teachers’ attitudes and perspectives may take on more primacy in schools where CLD populations are relatively low and thus targeted interventions and policies to support multicultural and multilingual learners are not in place.

This study applied culturally and linguistically responsive teaching frameworks to explore perceptions about CLD students among mainstream early childhood educators—an under-researched group that plays a pivotal role in children’s language and identity development—in the rapidly diversifying country, South Korea. Our qualitative analysis of interviews with nine teachers revealed a tendency toward monolingual, Korean-centered ideology and deficit-oriented views that pathologized multilingualism with some exceptions where few teachers showed openness to languages other than Korean. These findings have implications for teacher training programs and highlight some of the challenges to realizing genuinely inclusive education for CLD children in South Korea.

KEYWORDS:

• heritage languages
• bilingualism
• language minorities
• early childhood educators
• South Korea
• monolingualism

Acknowledgements

We sincerely thank the Dobong-gu Healthy Family and Multicultural Family Support Center for invaluable assistance on recruiting the participants, the participating teachers for sharing their experiences, and Allison Sullivan for giving critical comments in revising the paper. We are grateful for the opportunities of learning with them.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 CLD children in this paper refer to damunhwa [multiculture] or ijubaegyeong [immigration backgrounds] students. They include various types of CLD children, one of whose parents are not ethnically, racially Korean and both parents are non-Koreans as well as ones who are and are not born in Korea (Seong 2011). These broad criteria also reflect the participants’ description of them.

2 We use the revised Romanization method for romanization of Korean terms.

3 In discussing CLD children’s potential bilingual development in this paper, we rely on the concept ‘education of bilingual children’ rather than ‘bilingual education,’ a distinction made by Bialystok (2018, 667). We did so as the current paper is not concerned with bilingual programs in which instruction is offered in two languages.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Shim Lew

Shim Lew is an assistant professor of TESOL in the department of Teacher Education and Educational Leadership at the University of West Florida. Her research focuses on the language and literacy development of multilingual children and adolescents, the disciplinary linguistic knowledge development of pre-service and in-service teachers, and multicultural education.

Jayoung Choi

Jayoung Choi is an associate professor of TESOL/Literacy in the department of Inclusive Education at Kennesaw State University. Her research aims to unpack the ways in which language, culture, identity, agency, power, and ideology affects learning and teaching for immigrant multilingual learners in and out of school contexts.