Family support and maintenance of ethno-linguistic identity: A case study of Korean linguistic minority children

This paper investigates how ethno-linguistic identity of linguistic minority children is constructed during their projects for bilingual learning. As a case study, six Korean children in a heritage language learn-ing setting are recruited as participants. This paper adopts Focus Group Interviews as a qualitative data collection and critical discourse analysis as an analytic framework. The interview questionnaires consist of 16 questions in five categories: participants ’ self-reflection, family support, socializing, schooling, and media contact/leisure. In addition, supplementary interviews with the children and their mothers were conducted. There are two major findings in this study. First, many of the participating mothers ’ responses represent Korean immigrant parents ’ double-layered educational goal for their children, which is rearing ‘ambicultural ’ children. In this process, parents ’ own racial attitudes or the value that parents place on teaching children about heritage history or culture affect children’s atti-tudes towards their ethnic identity positively. Second, the ethnolinguistic identity of the children is also affected by political and cultural environments constructed by the hierarchical relationships among languages and cultures. In short, the six participants ’ and their mothers ’ responses reveal that family support, which includes parents ’ own ethnic identity, encouragement of Korean language and herit-age, and parent’s projection for children’s educational goals, is a significant factor that influences the formation of ethnolinguistic identity of linguistic minority children. The implications of this study’s ar-guments are discussed