Literacy Practices and Heritage Language Maintenance: The Case of Korean-American Immigrant Adolescents

The number of students who speak a language other than English at home has significantly increased in various Anglophone (i.e., English-dominant) countries in recent decades. As the student populations in these countries’ schools have become more linguistically and culturally diverse, concerns about language minority students’ language and literacy development have also increased. Researchers have documented the literacy practices of various linguistic and cultural groups at home and/or in the community. This paper portrays the literacy practices of Korean-American students, in particular the population of immigrant adolescents. Drawing upon case studies of four Korean immigrant students, the study described in this paper reveals that these middle school students enjoyed reading and writing for pleasure at home in Korean as well as in English (the main language of their formal schooling), although there existed differences among them in terms of the degree to which they used the languages and the activities they engaged in. Their literacy practices were necessarily accompanied by ethnic and cultural identity formation.