Raising Ambi-lingual Children: Linguistic Minority Children's Heritage Language Learning and Identity Struggle

In this book, the author examines the issues of the unequal power relationship between languages and the consequent heritage language loss and identity struggle, especially in the case of Korean linguistic minority children (LMC) in the United States. The author highlights that the Korean American children's (ethnolinguistic) identity is ruptured by the domination of host language (i. e., English); furthermore, their hybrid identity is attributed to their parents¿ ambition for bilingual learning for academic success and bicultural adaptation to both distinct societies, Korea and the U. S. The author also discusses many concurrent issues associated with the ambitious project for bilingualism: i) the dominance of English in the era of globalization, ii) the English-learning fever in Korea; and iii) ideolization and reproduction of social discourses in school in terms of pedagogic discourse. The discussions of this book may help immigrant parents and ESL (English as a Second Language) educators to understand why immigrant children struggle in their identity formation and why it is important to deal with the issues of linguistic imperialism and ecology of language.