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Abstract
How heritage learners successfully maintain their heritage language (HL) and literacy is a significant topic of discussion in the field of bilingual education. This study examines what factors are most closely associated with literacy competence by inspecting Korean heritage learners’ language and literacy practice patterns and their literacy performance. Using language background surveys and Korean writing samples gathered from 56 Korean-English bilingual students in grades 4–12 and university undergraduates, it was discovered that participants’ levels of Korean literacy were positively associated with home Korean language use and focused Korean language practice, whereas they were negatively correlated with years of US stay, years of schooling in the USA, and home English language use. A regression analysis revealed that the quality and range of HL practice was the only significant predictor of HL literacy skills. In addition, a one-way ANOVA indicated no significant difference for HL writing scores across four age groups (i.e. elementary school, middle school, high school, and college), which implies that HL literacy does not necessarily develop or accumulate with cognitive maturity or length of schooling, a finding dissimilar to conventional native language and literacy development.
Acknowledgements
This study was funded by a grant from Pacific University to the primary author. We sincerely thank the participants of this study as well as the raters who contributed to the data analyses. We also appreciate the anonymous reviewers’ and the editor's insightful comments.
Notes
1. Although there are a number of bilingual education programmes offered in private and public school systems, many HLs are not available in K-12 school systems.
2. In this study, we focus mostly on the findings of the participants’ HL literacy competence with reference to the findings of their English language literacy competence.
3. Home language use refers to the conversational use of spoken Korean with family members within the context of daily routines.
4. Focused language practice refers to the purposeful and intentional use of Korean by an individual in each of the four language skill areas.
5. Although there are various measures that could be used to assess literacy competence, writing tasks were chosen to measure productive written language competence in this study. Writing is considered ‘the most complex of elements of literacy (reading, writing, speaking, listening, and viewing) because it is built upon all of the others' (Fisher & Frey, Citation2008, p. 35). Writing was also identified as one of the most difficult literacy skill areas for Korean HL learners in Lee and Kim's (Citation2012) study.
6. The participants who were not able to compose Korean essays were mixed in their ages: one elementary, one middle school, five high school, and three college students.
7. The seven-point Likert scale was used to accurately assess the participants’ writing effectiveness and properly rate their written language proficiency: No Proficiency, Low proficiency, Mid Proficiency, and High Proficiency, with two subscales for each level of written language proficiency. See for details.
8. Partial correlations were conducted to determine correlations without potential ‘age’ effect, as literacy competence in usual literacy development is almost always highly predictable by the learner's age.
9. Note that ‘Age’ and ‘Years of schooling in the USA’ were highly significantly correlated with each other (0.673, p < .001), so removing age effect is likely to remove years of schooling effect. When the ‘Age’ variable was not partialled out, the Pearson correlations between the considered variables and the averaged score of each participant's English language writing revealed that five of the predictor variables (i.e. age, years of US stay, years of US schooling, home English language use, and frequency of focused English language practice) were significantly correlated with the scores on their English writing.
10. The stepwise regression analyses were conducted without partialling out age effect.