Transforming culture and identity: transnational adoptive families and heritage language learning

Abstract

This study examines the narratives of four white, English-speaking American mothers who have been learning Korean, the birth language of their adopted children, at community Korean schools. By drawing on in-depth interviews and employing narrative analysis, this study explores the mothers’ motivations for studying Korean, experiences at the community schools, and strategies for promoting Korean at home. The narratives show that the mothers viewed learning Korean as a: (1) requirement for a positive racial identity; (2) burden that parents should bear with children; and (3) way to connect with birth/foster families. These discourses help the mothers to construct their positions as parents of transnational adoptees and reveal the ideological processes at play in heritage language learning for these families. They show the mothers’ beliefs in not only promoting cultural identification for the child but also reinterpreting their own racial and cultural identities. The mothers’ accounts also showed that they negotiated practical aspects of language learning at the community schools (e.g. forming separate classes for adoptees, adjusting teachers’ expectations for language outcome) and created additional opportunities for language practice through Korean-speaking extracurricular teachers and Korean popular culture. This article discusses the implications of these findings for community heritage language schools.

Keywords:

• transnational adoption
• adoptive parents
• family language policy
• heritage language
• racial identity
• Korean

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to the two anonymous Language, Culture and Curriculum reviewers for their helpful insights and critical feedback on an earlier version of this article. I would also like to thank the four mothers of this study who generously shared with me their stories of adoption and childrearing.