Learning Korean language in China: motivations and strategies of non-Koreans

Abstract

The ethnographic research reported in this article documents how a group of non-Korean families, whose children are participating in a Korean bilingual school in Northeast China, construct their motivations and strategies of learning Korean language. The main motivation of expectancy of further education opportunities and success in future career and strategies mainly in establishing Korean sociocultural context for Korean language acquisition are described. The positive attitude of non-Korean families toward Korean language studies highlights the functional importance of Korean language as a means of acquiring a larger benefit from China's economic marketization, especially increasing business contacts with South Korea. With the challenges of Korean language studies, this article argues that the increasing significance of trilingualism or even multilingualism in China's reform period implies the necessity of relevant policy initiations for the increasing needs of language acquisition.

Keywords:

• non-Korean
• Korean language
• integrative motivation
• instrumental motivation
• sociocultural context
• multilingualism

Notes

1. The Constitution adopted in 1982 defines the PRC as a ‘unitary multinational state’ (tongyide duominzu guojia) composed of the people of all its 56 nationalities (minzu) with a total population of 1.30628 billion (NBSC 2005). The majority of China's population belongs to the Han Chinese (90.56%), whereas the 55 officially recognized minority nationalities account for about 9.44% of the total population (NBSC 2005). There are also 1,072,642 people belonging to unspecified and unclassified minorities, 0.8% of the total population, according to the fifth national census in 2000.