What affects diverging bilingual abilities among mixed-ethnic children in South Korea?

• In Event: International Migration Section Refereed Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): 23. Family, intimacy, and belonging

Abstract

While numerous benefits that bilingualism brings for children are well documented in recent research (e.g., Diamond 2010; Bialystok 2011, 2018), children’s bilingual ability can vary significantly across different groups. This is particularly evident when looking at children from families such as mixed-ethnic and immigrant families, who despite sharing the similar linguistic backgrounds, have different levels of bilingual ability. In this paper, we focus on mechanisms behind diverging bilingual abilities across families with the particular focus on parental socioeconomic status and family dynamics. We empirically test the two main accounts that explain the patterns of bilingualism: the assimilation theory and the stratification (cultural capital) theory, by analyzing representative data of children from mixed-ethnic/linguistic families in South Korea. The findings based on a series of ordered logit models suggest that, consistent with the cultural capital perspective, parental socioeconomic status is positively associated with their children’s bilingual ability, particularly mother’s subjective feelings of efficacy in education and ambition that mediate the relationship, but not their level of investment in education. We also find that mother’s extent of social integration has increased the chance of monolingualism for children, as the assimilation perspective would predict. However, the effects of social integration are much higher for families of low socioeconomic background than high socioeconomic background, suggesting the largely intertwined processes involving both the stratification and the assimilation perspectives. The stratified patterns of bilingualism along the parental class lines are not only determined through families’ unequal levels of cultural capital, but also via different meanings and implications of social integration for parents of different socioeconomic positions.

Authors

• Sojin Yu, University of Sheffield

• Feinian Chen, Johns Hopkins University / School of Arts & Sciences