Two dimensions of parental involvement: What affects parental involvement in dual language immersion?

ABSTRACT

This article investigates parental involvement in Korean two-way immersion (TWI) programs from the social capital theory perspective. This study explores the degree to which parental involvement is affected by parents’ demographic features and parent-related variables by analyzing data from 454 parents of students enrolled in seven elementary schools; the majority of parents and students in these schools are from immigrant families with different linguistic and cultural values. The findings reveal two dimensions of parental involvement activities: personal interactions among parents regarding their children’s education and parental participation in school. The results of a series of regression analyses indicate that the impact of social capital-related features on parental school engagement is modest. Parental interaction and participation are positively associated with each other; positive school environment is another salient factor in predicting parental involvement. The study’s findings provide insights regarding empirical evidence on parental practices in TWI and call for discussions and further research.

Acknowledgments

The author would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments and suggestions to improve the quality of the paper.

Notes

^1. As of November 2016, Californian voters passed Proposition 58 with more than 70% support among voters and repealed Proposition 227 (passed in 1998), which banned bilingual education in public schools.

^2. According to the 2010 American Community Survey, the state with the largest Korean population is California (30%). The Greater Los Angeles area is a home to more than one-quarter of California’s Korean population (Hoeffel, Rastogi, Kim, & Shahid, 2012) and has multiple KDLI programs.

^3. Response rates for individual schools ranged from 24% to 75%.

<FN4>^4. Parents’ foreign-born and native-born statuses were created based on participants’ responses on their country of birth.

^5. Grouping non-Korean Asians and Black/African Americans together may seem controversial, but it was not legitimate to create a separate group for only African American respondents due to the small sample size. Although the study includes different groups of parents in the “other” race group, the researcher was also aware of the diversity among participants in the same category and thus was careful about generalizing the group’s responses.

^6. Intraclass correlations values for the outcome variables of parental interaction and parental participation are based on the variance figures 0.23 and 0.04 respectively.

^7. This study also acknowledges that non-White respondents include both native- and foreign-born populations. In order to define the differences between foreign- and native-born participants, the foreign-born status variable was included in addition to the race variable.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jongyeon Ee

Jongyeon Ee is affiliated with the Graduate School of Education and Information Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles.