The pursuit of multilingualism in transnational educational migration: strategies of linguistic investment among Korean jogi yuhak families in Singapore

Abstract

Jogi yuhak (early study abroad) has become a prominent educational and linguistic investment strategy for middle-class Korean families to raise their children as global elites, allowing them to attain multilingual competence through transnational educational migration. Singapore, a newly emerging center of jogi yuhak, attracts Korean families with its multilingual language learning context. While jogi yuhak families aim at attaining elite multilingualism, the actual conditions of educational migration in Singapore mean that the students tend to acquire a ‘truncated’ multilingual competence, including incomplete competence in their own mother tongue. As the discrepancy between the ideal and the reality of language learning leads to a sense of anxiety among jogi yuhak families, they carefully negotiate their strategies of linguistic investment, varying their investments in different linguistic resources to maximize the effectiveness and profitability of educational migration. Through an analysis of jogi yuhak families’ strategic patterns of linguistic investment, this paper demonstrates Korean families’ scalar evaluation of the values and functions of languages in their pursuit of multilingualism in English, Mandarin and Korean.

Keywords:

• educational migration
• globalization
• multilingualism
• linguistic investment
• linguistic resources

Notes

1. In Singapore, jogi yuhak families have two options in school choice; international schools or Singapore government schools (Park and Bae 2009, Forthcoming).

2. All personal names are pseudonyms.

3. Typically, the term jogi yuhak is not used to refer to students who are accompanying their parents who are working or studying abroad or those who have permanent immigration status; such students are also excluded from official government statistics on jogi yuhak. However, transnational strategies of jogi yuhak families are increasingly diversified and they often move between different categories of migration to further their educational migration (Song 2011).

4. Singapore English (SE) is often described in terms of two subvarieties: Standard Singapore English (SSE) and Colloquial Singapore English (CSE) (Alsagoff 2007, 2010; Gupta 1994; Pakir 1991). The term ‘Singlish’ is widely used to refer to CSE, which is characterized by features of phonology, morphosyntax, discourse particles, etc. (Leimgruber 2012; Rubdy 2001). However, scholars such as Alsagoff (2007, 2010) argue against positing a binary distinction between SSE and CSE, instead focusing on the wide range of variation in SE. Since the aim of this paper is not to discuss SE as it is used among SE speakers but to analyze Korean jogi yuhak families’ ideologies about SE, I use the term ‘Singlish’, the general term the families used to talk about SE. Korean families tend to be only vaguely aware of the systematic difference between SSE and CSE and usually perceive SE as a bounded variety, treating the distinction between SSE and CSE as ‘having weaker or stronger Singlish accent’.

5. Koreans’ preference for ‘American English’ is related to the neo-colonial role of the USA in Korean history as well as the status of English as a global language (Park 2009; Shin 2006). In this sense, Koreans’ prevalent perception of American English as a legitimate and more valued form of English can be seen as a manifestation of linguistic imperialism (Phillipson 1988) that secures a privileged position for native speakers of the Inner Circle in asserting ownership of English and authority in English language teaching (Pennycook 1998; Shin 2006).

6. Once a foreign student attends a Singaporean government school from the first grade and chooses Mandarin as the mother tongue subject, she/he must continue taking Mandarin throughout the school. But students enrolling at second grade or later are allowed to ‘opt out’ of Mandarin (Park and Bae 2009).