Reflection of Kang's Early Childhood Education :: Korean-Immigrant Parents’ Support of Their American-Born Children’s Development and Maintenance of the Home Language

This article makes me question what truly is bilingual? Is it attainable? In my opinion, probably not. You can never be truly monolingual too, if you ask me. There are so many phrases and words in every languages that you would probably have to be a polymath to even reach a significantly more amount of vocabularies than an average human being. Even so, you would not know everything. Just a lot.

According to Oral Proficiency Interview (OPI) by ACTFL, there are ten levels of language proficiency: beginner-low, beginner-medium, beginning-high, intermediate-low, intermediate-medium, intermediate-high, advanced-low, advanced-medium, advanced-high, and superior. To reach to the superior, you would have to be specialized in a certain area to talk about a certain topic and use certain vocabularies others who didn't obtain your education otherwise wouldn't have.

The research study Dr. Kang has done on Korean-American families is very interesting. Although it might work to a certain extent, I do think the researched is a little bit biased. Even though the conversations in the household is audio-recorded, it definitely puts a pressure on the family to have to feel obligated to talk. With this kind of unnatural setting, there is definitely a very big variable in the study.

Some questions I have for Dr. Kang (as an ISU professor and coming to our class as guest speaker!!):

• Was this research most for Korean-American families? If so, are you planning to have more studies on other languages?
• In your research, there were 7 Korean-American families. Have you ever thought of expanding this research into nation wide?
• What do you think of Dual Language Schools with implements of two languages one being English? Research have shown Spanish and English being very efficient, what do you think about Korean and English?

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