Maintaining Heritage Language Perspectives of Korean Parents Clara

Although it is a combination of many factors that impacts the maintenance or loss of HL, such as personal motivation and determination (Krashen, 1998), ethnic pride (Brown, 2003, 2009), availability of heritage language schools in communities (Shibata, 2000), and availability of HL at school (Cho & Krashen, 1998), studies have identified parental support and involvement as perhaps the most important factor related to successful maintenance of HL (Arriagada, 2005; Oh & Fuligini, 2007; Suarez, 2002, 2007). This is in large part because HL starts at home. Parents are the first HL contact for second generation immigrant children and the main source of HL for those children. Studies have reported that the communication at home between children and parents in these families is frequently if not usually conducted in the HL (Han, 2003). Children almost exclusively communicate in HL with their parents, while in contrast mostly speaking English with their friends. Thus parents alone seem to greatly influence maintenance of HL (Oh & Fuligini, 2007; Park & Sarkar, 2007). The literature also has identified ways in which parents involve themselves in maintaining HL (Arriagada, 2005; Kouritzin, 2000). For instance, parents regulate their children’s speech by declaring a “only mother tongue at home” rule, or by not responding to their children when they use English (Krashen, 1998). These parents also often send their children to Sunday HL school (Shibata, 2000; Shin, 2010). Shibata’s (2000) study shows that when there was a low visibility of a HL community in a small town, parents’ first choice in helping their children maintain HL was to establish a weekend school. ShiIntroduction