Song, K. (2016). Nurturing young children’s biliteracy development: A Korean family’s hybrid literacy practices in the home. Language Arts 93,341-353.
This case study describing how Korean parents and children living in the U.S. faced the linguistic challenges of helping their children attain academic success in the U.S. while still preserving their Korean language development is quite interesting in its own right, but for me, the case study wasn’t the most useful part of the article. For me, the most useful part was the use of some of the current vocabulary used when educators talk about bilingual (and multilingual) students in today’s classrooms. The second most helpful thing was the resources provided in the sidebars sprinkled throughout the article.
Song’s case study, in which she observed the ways one child and her family used both English and Korean over a four-month period, is interesting to read. The parents’ dedication to preserving the Korean language at home, while still making sure their children did well in their English-speaking school, is admirable and even heroic, though in some ways the reader already knows how the story will end. The parents’ efforts to use the Korean language may preserve that heritage for a while, but success in school and careers will be more important, and English is needed for that. The children in this family were already communicating with each other in English. The longer they are in the U.S., the more their Korean language development will erode.
A case study like this can provide insights, but it is only the story of one family at one period of time. As always with case studies, the reader has to decide how much the case study is like the students and the context with which the reader is working. If you are working with the children of highly educated Asian parents, this case study will resonate for you. I know teachers in a nearby university town who work with children in similar situations to the one described here. However, this one case can’t be generalized to other bilingual students and contexts. In the case Song describes, many of the values of the home were congruent with the values of school. That would not be the case for all bilingual students, and it would make a difference in how that child’s literacy in both languages would develop.
For me, it was useful to see the current vocabulary of bilingual instruction being used in context. The words we use to name things really do matter, because those words reflect how we are thinking about things. When it comes to linguistic diversity, the vocabulary has often changed, and sometimes keeping up with the current accepted ways of referring to things can be challenging. An example in this article is the term “heritage language”, which in this case study was Korean. Before reading this article, I would have referred to Korean as the “home language” or even as the “first language”, but neither of those terms would accurately describe the way this family used both Korean and English in their home. The term “hybridity” is used to describe the blend and flow of the two languages in use in the home. That also was a new term for me, and I found it apt and useful. Acquiring vocabulary is an important benefit of wide reading, no matter what your age or educational level, and I found here that aging literacy educators can still reap that vocabulary development benefit!
Finally, I highly recommend checking out the resources under the standard sidebars that this journal provides in many of the articles. On page 342 are links to three excellent lesson plans from the readwritethink web site (one of my own “go-to” resource sites), and on page 350 are three resources that are all packed with information on “translanguaging” (a third new vocabulary word). I’ve already downloaded the huge resource file from CUNY and plan to mine that as I update my literacy education courses this year. We need to learn as much as we can about linguistic diversity right now, and this article helped me with that.
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