Abstract
Employing a multisited ethnographic stance, this study examined second-generation Korean immigrant children who sustain linkages with their parental homelands to better understand how transnationalism shapes their language and literacy practices by documenting their experiences in and across multiple spaces in North Carolina, the United States, and Seoul, South Korea. Findings suggest that the circulation of care, or the multidirectional and reciprocal exchange of support and care, functioned at the center of the children’s multilingual and transnational lives. The children actively engaged in language and literacy interactions through which they forged and extended meaningful ties with their parental homelands and strengthened intergenerational relationships. This study challenges the binary and fixed notions of home/host countries and highlights the need for longitudinal, multisited research on immigrant children’s transnational journeys with careful attention to the mobility of their language and literacy across generations and countries.
Migration is not a singular and linear process of assimilation (Levitt & Jaworsky, 2007) in which immigrant children and families permanently leave their “home” countries and settle in new contexts. In the past, many immigrant families made it a priority to integrate into American society instead of forging and extending connections with their parental homelands. Even those who strived to maintain ties with their country of origin could only do so through phone calls, international travel, or nostalgia and imagination. However, with the advancement of technology in today’s interconnected society, contact and travel between home and host countries for immigrant families have become much easier and more affordable. With this shift, there is a growing population of immigrants who engage in transnational ways of being (Levitt & Glick Schiller, 2004), which refers to immigrants’ active engagement in transnational practices and local/global relations, such as making virtual contacts with family members, visiting homelands, watching transnational media channels, and exchanging letters, gifts, and remittances (Kwon, 2017, 2019a; Skerrett, 2015; Vertovec, 2001).
In transnational migration scholarship, however, a substantial body of research argues that the transnational connection is a “one-generation phenomenon” (Portes, 2001) that is particular to the first-generation immigrant parents. Zhou (1997) asserted that transnational connections, or the meaningful ties between the United States and the parental home country, cannot be passed down to subsequent generations because it is unlikely for second- and third-generation immigrant children to engage in economic, political, social, and cultural practices that stretch beyond geographic territories at the same intensity as their parents. Min (2017), whose research focused on Korean American communities, also noted that subsequent generations of immigrant parents are less likely to visit their parents’ home countries regardless of their class status.
Impacted by these views, existing studies on the intersections of transnationalism and immigrants are often tethered to fixed binaries of “receiving” and “sending” countries while also focusing on immigrants’ experiences within the borders of a singular location, context, and country (Levitt, 2009). In fact, many existing studies on the mobility of immigrants and their transnational literacies are situated within either the boundaries of the United States or their home countries. In addition, these studies tend to focus on adults’ voices and experiences during their migration and transnational processes and overlook the meaningful roles and impacts of young children in transnational journeys (Gardner, 2012; Orellana, 2016). Although research on literacies of immigrant youth in transnational contexts has emerged in the last decade (Skerrett, 2015), the experiences of elementary-aged children, particularly from Asian American contexts, are rarely explored.
Employing a multisited ethnographic stance (Marcus, 1995), this article examines second-generation Korean immigrant children whose everyday lives are rooted in complex and dynamic transnational networks. By accompanying children on transnational visit to their parental homeland and documenting their experiences in the United States and South Korea, I attempted to understand how transnationalism shapes language and literacy for second-generation Korean immigrant children as they traversed across linguistic, cultural, and geographic boundaries. The two specific questions that guided my study were: (1) How do the focal children engage in language and literacy across multiple locales beyond geographical boundaries? and (2) How do their ties with their parental homelands shape their language and literacy experiences? One of the key and salient themes that I identified from observing the focal children, whom I positioned as knowers and experts, and listening to them throughout the year was the circulation of care that functioned as the center of their multilingual and transnational experiences, which I further elucidate in this study.
A Transnational Turn on Language and Literacy
This article draws upon a transnationalism framework that theorizes immigrants’ mobility across contexts and challenges the binaries of home/host countries through a sociocultural lens that attends to what children do with literacy. A transnationalism framework theorizes the phenomenon through which immigrants construct and sustain multilayered linkages, interconnections, and mobility between their countries of origin and other temporary or permanent contexts in which they settle (Basch et al., 1994; Ong, 1999). It departs from the binaries of home/host and old/new countries and instead focuses on those whose lives encompass multiple cultures and countries and engage through hybrid and dialogic cultural and geographic boundaries (Gardner, 2012; Lam & Warriner, 2012). When considering immigrant children’s social worlds through a transnational lens, the multiple and dynamic ways immigrant children and their families engage in language and literacy engagements that cross nation-states becomes important (Compton-Lilly et al., 2019a). With the transnational framework, I take the perspective that children’s plural and dynamic language and literacy experiences are closely tied to the social and cultural contexts in which they engage (Street, 1984). Drawing on Barton and Hamilton’s (2000) idea that literacies are “fluid, dynamic, and changing the lives and societies of which they are a part” (p. 13), I attend to what the three transnational immigrant children do with language and literacy in different locales as they occupy social worlds that span two or more nation-states (Vertovec, 2001).
Heath’s (1982) work is relevant to this study given the ethnographic stance she took on documenting literacy in relation to the larger social patterns. Heath’s (1982) work on three communities demonstrated the various ways that children engage in literacy and display their knowledge are connected to different sociocultural contexts. Her prominent work informed this study by guiding me to select an ethnographic approach and immerse myself in the focal children’s transnational childhoods to understand these meaningful and important experiences. Following her work, the current study attends to varying literacy events and practices that are part of the focal children’s everyday experiences. However, when approaching Heath’s work through a transnationalism framework, her ways of limiting literacy within the boundaries of fixed spaces does not create a comprehensive portrait of the dynamicity and mobility of young immigrant children’s literacy. Recognizing this limitation, I took a multisited ethnographic stance as I investigated immigrant children’s mobile and transnational lives and examined how their language and literacy practices remain, transform, and/or mobilize across time and space.
Language and Literacy Practices of Immigrant Children in Transnational Contexts
Through transnational migration, immigrant students engage in an array of linguistic and cultural practices that connect local and global, which are due to and facilitated by the advancement and affordances of technologies, digital tools, and easier travel across countries. During these transnational practices, immigrant children engage in complex multilingual and transnational literacies that reflect their mobility (Ghiso, 2016; Kwon et al., 2019; Martínez-Álvarez & Ghiso, 2017; Orellana, 2016). They expand their linguistic and cultural repertoires and naturally learn to draw on and manage their multilingual resources and transnational funds of knowledge to build social contacts and navigating multiple settings (Compton-Lilly et al., 2019a; Kwon et al., 2019; Levitt, 2009).
In local communities, especially those in metropolitan areas, immigrant students are exposed to a variety of multilingual signs, images, advertisements, and literacy resources that foster their transnational thinking and multilingual literacies (Jiménez et al., 2009; Orellana, 2016). In these contexts, immigrant students are invited to draw on their transnational and multilingual expertise. They may also interact with community members who teach them about transnational histories and invoke feelings of belonging to multiple contexts (Duff, 2015). In areas that have high populations of immigrants, students may attend and experience transnational cultural events centering on their own and others’ heritage cultures and involving multiple languages. Min (2017) reported that there are more than 100 Korean transnational cultural events held annually in the New York–New Jersey area. Such events are growing in number and enable Korean immigrants in the local area to sustain transnational ties. However, it is important to acknowledge that Korean immigrant students in most U.S. states, aside from areas with a high density of Korean immigrants such as California and New York, have few opportunities to experience such transnational cultural events in their own communities.
The border-crossing experience is another context that provides immigrant students with unique opportunities to deeply engage in language and literacy. Students whose family members physically travel to their homelands are given opportunities to use or be exposed to their heritage languages, interact with extended family members, and develop attachments to multiple countries during their transnational journeys (Gardner & Mand, 2012; Kwon, 2019b). Skerrett (2015) notes that transnational sojourning can help immigrant students to develop family ties, establish cultural identities, and engage in multiple languages, and she notes an urgent need to investigate “the possibilities, challenges, processes, and outcomes of literacy learning across physical borders” (Skerrett, 2018, p. 32). In this article, I direct my attention to language and literacy experiences of an underexplored immigrant group (elementary-aged Korean children) across physical borders by joining them on their transnational journeys.
Korean Immigrant Children’s Language and Literacy Practices
Learning and maintaining heritage language, or a language that immigrants and their children have personal, cultural, and historic connections with (Valdés, 2001), is a major topic of discussion among scholars whose research focuses on the language and literacy learning of Korean immigrant children. Previous studies reported that Korean immigrant parents emphasized passing down Korean language and culture to subsequent generations because they believed that it offered numerous sociocultural and educational benefits to their children, including strengthening their ethnic identities, building bilingual assets, and succeeding academically and professionally (Kim, 2011; Kwon, 2017; Park & Sarkar, 2007). Parents also believe that learning the heritage language and culture can contribute to fostering family cohesion because it enables the children to better communicate with parents and grandparents and strengthen the intergenerational relationship (Lee, 2013). For example, Kwon’s (2017) study, which focused on the Korean and Japanese mothers of second-generation immigrant children, revealed that sustaining intergenerational communication and relationships was a key driving force for mothers to teach heritage language to their children. More importantly, Kwon’s (2017) study, which used a transnational orientation for heritage language maintenance, found that the intergenerationality that mothers seek to foster is not limited to interactions among their family members living in the United States. Rather, the mothers wanted their children to connect with their extended families in their home country so that the children could maintain close connections.
Driven by this clear vision for their children, as well as a resource-oriented view toward their heritage language, Korean immigrant parents make significant efforts to avoid language shift and loss. Their endeavors include enrolling their children in heritage language schools and exposing their children to Korean literacy materials (i.e., Korean books, bibles) and ethnic media channels (Kwon, 2017; Shin, 2005). The parents’ language attitudes and active engagement in teaching Korean are significant, yet focusing on their perspectives creates only a partial portrait of Korean immigrant children’s language and literacy. I argue that a fuller understanding of children’s language and literacy requires researchers to observe the children who are at the center of these practices and listen to what they may have to say about their language and literacy experiences. Given that their experiences at a young age tremendously impact who they are at later stages in their lives, it is important this study centralizes the voices of Korean immigrant children and how they interact with language and literacy in light of transnational migration.
Methodology
I employed a multisited ethnographic study in an attempt to trace and closely document three second-generation immigrant children’s transnational experiences across multiple locales and geographical boundaries. Researchers whose work is situated in transnational migration (Boccagni, 2016; Levitt & Glick Schiller, 2004; Punch, 2012) have asserted that multisited ethnography is an important approach for gaining a nuanced understanding of immigrants’ transnational and mobile lives across time and space. Data collection for this study took place for 1 year in and across two locations including the U.S. state where the children were recruited (North Carolina, United States) and the parental homeland they visited during the data collection period (Seoul, South Korea).
Contexts and Participants
North Carolina has experienced rapid growth of immigrant students during the last few decade, making it a unique context for studying Asian immigrant children (Hilburn & Fitchett, 2012; Rong & Preissle, 2009). Researching young Korean immigrant children in this type of community and their transnational connections is particularly significant given that previous research on Korean immigrants has primarily focused on mega-metropolitan areas such as New York City and Los Angeles.
Participant recruitment for this study began with developing selection criteria and contacting community members whom I met at the public library and Korean heritage language school in North Carolina by using a snowball sampling technique (Bogdan & Biklen, 2007). I also created flyers about the project that I distributed to Korean supermarkets and beauty salons in the local community. I selected the focal children using the selection criteria: an elementary-aged, second-generation Korean immigrant child with one or both parents of Korean heritage whose family was planning to visit Korea during the data collection period.
I began this study with five children, although two of them left the study as they moved to a different city or another state. Their withdrawals from the study reveal how locations, local and global, are part of many young immigrants’ childhoods. The three children who stayed in this study throughout the year were Minsu, Yena, and Taehoon (see Table 1). Two male children, Minsu and Taehoon, were 7-year-old and in the second grade at the time of the study, and they used Korean and English at home. Yena was in the third grade, and her parents are Korean ethnic minorities who immigrated from Yanbian, China, to the United States. Yena, who has visited Yanbian several times, stated, “[Yanbian] is a Chinese place, but every single person there speaks Korean and everything is in Korean.” At home, Yena and her family members use Korean, Chinese, and English. All three children are closely tied to their parental homelands—South Korea for Taehoon and Minsu and China and South Korea for Yena. During the data collection time frame, all three children and their families visited Seoul, South Korea. As I accompanied them in their transnational journeys, I viewed the three children as transnational experts who could teach me about the dynamicity and fluidity of young immigrant children’s language and literacy in transcultural times.
Child’s Background Information.
Data Collection
Participant observation and field notes
I believe that educational settings, whether at home, in schools, or in communities, overflow with experiences and stories that are important to hear and observe (Dyson & Genishi, 2005). By conducting participant observations in multiple spaces, I immersed myself in the natural settings where immigrant children engaged in an array of transnational practices and literacy practices. From October 2017 to May 2018, I visited each child once a week and spent approximately 90 min with the child and their family members in different settings in North Carolina such as home, in schools, and at stores. Meeting with them on a regular basis helped me build rapport and learn about children’s multilingual and transnational expertise. This expertise was showcased through the poems they created, the books they read, and the ways they interacted with others, including siblings and parents. Between June 2018 and August 2018, I interacted with them in Seoul, South Korea, where I had opportunities to participate in their daily routines and observe them in various settings. On some occasions, the children’s cousins and friends joined our meetings, which allowed me to observe the children’s interactions with people living in South Korea. For instance, my observation of Minsu at the Seoul Museum of History involved his cousins and father, and I documented how they interacted with each other as they explored exhibits related to the history of Seoul. In and after each participant observation, I wrote detailed field notes in which I attended to important elements such as physical settings, activities, interactions, and conversations (Merriam & Tisdell, 2016).
Parent interviews
I conducted two semistructured interviews with the focal children’s parents at the beginning and end of data collection. Each interview lasted approximately 90–120 min, and each interview took place in a different setting that the parents chose, such as home or a cafe. The parents responded to my questions using their multilingual assets. The languages they used varied depending on their language proficiency and preference. Taehoon’s mother, who almost always spoke in Korean in her everyday life, preferred responding to me in Korean, whereas two other mothers flexibly alternated between Korean and English. For example, Minsu’s mother, an American who speaks both Korean and English, described the demographic breakdown of the child’s school as “지금 다니는 학교가 population이 White가 70 something. 그 다음에 Latino. 2% Asian.” [The population of the school he goes to has 70 something of White. Then, Latino. 2% Asian.]
During the first interview, which helped me learn about the focal children, I asked questions focused on five themes: (1) biographical information, (2) parents’ experiences in the United States, (3) children’s language use at home, (4) parents’ experiences and views on bilingualism and biliteracy, and (5) families’ transnational practices and connections. For example, to understand the families’ transnational affiliations, I asked the parents about their previous visits to their homelands, reasons for these visits, their experiences during recent trips, the frequency of communication with family members and friends in Korea, their views on their children’s connections with Korea, and how transnational ties affect their children’s language, literacy, and future trajectories. The second interview, which was conducted in a conversational manner, took place after the families returned from their trips to Korea, during which the families shared their children’s experiences during and after their transnational journeys. The languages that the parents used varied depending on their language proficiency and preference. In addition to the two semistructured interviews, the parents and I engaged in periodic conversations using email and text messages, and the parents shared photographs, video recordings, and stories about their children.
Child-centered interview activities
I designed and incorporated a set of child-centered interview activities because adult-conceived interview questions can lead children’s responses in a given direction and may not fully capture young children’s transnational and multilingual experiences. The child-centered interview activities included drawing self-portraits and mind maps as well as photo-elicitation interviews. I planned each activity with different objectives such as getting to know the child (self-portrait), building rapport (self-portrait), and understanding how each child viewed and represented his or her relationship to the parental homeland(s) (mind mapping). I constantly encouraged them to use any language they preferred or to mix different languages. These interview activities allowed me to position the three children as transnational experts as I sought to learn from the young children about their experiences of moving across geographical boundaries.
During and after each activity, the focal child and I engaged in informal conversations around the artifact they created, the topic I was exploring, and any other topics the child wanted to discuss. It is important to note that there were many occasions where the children led our dialogues into unexpected directions because they were reminded of topics that excited them. In fact, letting them take the leading role in our interactions and taking a listening stance (Yoon & Templeton, 2019) taught me about their multilingual and transnational expertise. For instance, when I invited Minsu to generate a mind map about his parental homeland, he disapproved and said he wanted to teach me one of the traditional Korean games he learned from his cousin living in Korea instead. As we played the game, Minsu excitedly shared the game rules and how the game is different from the ones he plays with friends in his U.S. school, all the while flexibly alternating between Korean and English. These examples reminded me of the purpose of the activity—centralizing the children’s voices—and helped me experience how children can take us to the spaces of possibility and learning when we follow their lead and listen. These examples demonstrate the importance of honoring children’s voices and agency over imposing researchers’ agendas. Also, they show that interview activities work more effectively when they are combined with participant observation and acts of careful listening (Yoon & Templeton, 2019).
Artifacts and documents
Personal documents and public records helped me situate the children’s language and literacy practices within larger sociocultural contexts and their transnational networks. I photocopied or photographed children’s personal documents including artifacts (i.e., children’s photographs, the letters they exchanged with extended families) and documents (i.e., journal entries they wrote for Korean heritage language school and the screenshots of their digital work). The data informed my understanding of their intersecting experiences with transnationalism, language, and literacy. Public records such as ethnic newspapers and brochures were also collected to understand the focal children’s local and global affiliations and engagements. As Jiménez et al. (2009) suggested, my awareness of children’s transnational literacies such as publicly displayed multilingual texts and signs allowed me to contextualize the study and grasp the local environment the children are exposed to. For instance, the flyers hanging on the bulletin board in one of the Korean supermarkets were photographed, and these posters helped me learn about different events and groups that Korean immigrant parents in the community informally organized including Korean-English story time at the public library.
Data Analysis
For data organization, I created a data accounting log where I kept records of the types and quantity of my ethnographic data, as well as an observation log, in which I wrote details of my observations. I organized data into three categories: observations and field notes, interviews, and documents and artifacts. During the first phase of initial interpretation, which took place concurrently with data collection, I reviewed the focal children’s biographical information, language use, and their families’ transnational experiences. I transcribed my observations and interviews after each meeting and closely reviewed the raw data, which gave me an initial sense of my participants’ experiences. Upon completing data collection, I uploaded all data including transcriptions, documents, and journals to a computer-assisted qualitative data analysis software, Dedoose. In my second phase, I reviewed each piece of data and assigned emerging codes using an inductive approach while writing analytic memos about the details of each piece of data as well as my reactions and thoughts. For instance, the initial codes I assigned to the transcribed data of Yena’s cross-border communication with his grandfather included words and phrases that described the practice (i.e., “mixing Korean, Chinese, and English,” “mother as a language broker”), direct quotes (“one hour 이 push back 했습니다”), and my reactions to the data. I then used pattern coding to group initial codes into categories such as “multilingual practices during intergenerational and cross-border communication,” which I later developed as themes of this study (Miles et al., 2014).
Researcher’s Positionality
It is important that I acknowledge the transnational and multilingual experiences that shape my views of the world, as prior experiences always impact how we see, hear, interact with, and write about children. I am a native of South Korea, bilingual in both Korean and English, who first learned English as a foreign language. I consider myself transnational, as I attended secondary schools and universities moving back and forth between Seoul, South Korea, and five U.S. states. I resonate with the focal children in that I cross the boundaries of language and cultures in everyday life, and I have emotional and affective belongings toward family members in both countries. As a person who has gone through the experiences of navigating multiple schooling contexts and countries, I may understand the complexities and challenges that the focal children and families face.
I acknowledge, however, that “being born into a group, ‘going native,’ or just being a member does not necessarily afford the perspective necessary for studying the phenomenon” (Merriam & Tisdell, 2016, p. 146). Being bilingual and transnational myself does not mean I can fully grasp what the children or their parents experience nor does it automatically provide perspectives and skills that are necessary for studying the phenomenon of bilingualism and transnationalism. For example, while the participant families considered their home in the United States as the most important space for their children to learn Korean (their heritage language), I naturally learned the language and never questioned why because Korean is valued and spoken in all settings in South Korea. It is when I became a mother of an immigrant child, during the data collection of this research, that I started not just knowing but feeling the importance of home for immigrant children. I then started paying more attention to what the participant parents do for their children’s language and literacy learning and how they use home, not just in the United States but also in South Korea, as a space for passing down their heritage.
Findings
The close linkages between the focal children and their family members living in their parental homelands were at the center of the three children’s transnational and multilingual lives. As active social agents, these children engaged in the process of care circulation, which Baldassar and Merla (2014) described as “the reciprocal multidirectional and asymmetrical exchange of care that fluctuates over the life course within a transnational family” (p. 25) and further reinforced their transnational ties. In this section, I illuminate the children’s practices of circulating care across geographical localities while paying attention to what they did with literacy during the process.
Transborder Family Network and Feelings of Connection
The close connections between the focal children and family members in their parents’ home countries, which I refer to as family linkages, functioned at the center of the three children’s multilingual and transnational lives. From the beginning of the study, the three children frequently expressed emotion and affection toward their family members living in countries outside of the United States. They also shared the images, texts, and stories that embodied their feelings of connection and represented love, care, belonging, and longing. The stories and artifacts that the children generated during child-centered interview activities clearly represented the transborder family network (Lam & Warriner, 2012) that these children were part of and their strong feelings of connection.
In my first interaction, I invited each child to draw mind maps (see Figure 1) about their parental homelands: South Korea for Minsu and Taehoon and South Korea and China for Yena. I assumed that they would include symbolic and representative images of Korean culture, such as images of the national flag, popular foods, and the language(s) that they learned at home and at the heritage language school. Although the children did include such cultural images, the first images the three children produced were related to family members who lived in their parental homelands. Using multiple languages, colors, and symbols, the children added and shared the names of places they visited with their relatives, the communities their relatives were living in, stories told by grandparents, activities they did with family members, words that reminded them of distant family members, and feelings about transnational experiences and family members. The children added detailed descriptions, drawings, and labels to represent their memories about family members. The family members that they described were both ones they had physically spent time with and family members they kept in touch with digitally.
Child-generated maps about parental homelands (Minsu, Yena, and Taehoon).
All of the children’s mind maps and the stories included family-specific words in Korean such as “할머니” [grandmother], “사춘” [cousin], “형아” [brother], and “이모” [aunt]. Taehoon, who was relatively more fluent in Korean than the other two students, put 16 Korean words in his map; of these, 13 labels were connected to family members in Korea. He started generating his map by writing “할머니” [grandmother] and said his grandparents always make efforts to spend time with him whenever he visited the country. He then narrated that he wished his grandfather drank less (as he described 술 [alcohol]) and reflected upon how his grandfather often sent him pocket money (돈 [money]) on his birthday. When Minsu presented his map, he also narrated stories and described places related to his family in Korea that included his grandfather and three cousins. Most of the symbols and words in the map were connected to his cousin, 해솔 [Haesol], whom he described as “basically my brother.” Haesol is one of the words Minsu first added in his map, and the name kept appearing as he described the playground he revisited in Korea (“놀이터 at Haesol’s house”) and places he wanted to visit with his cousin (“There is a lot of places I want to go with Haesol”). Throughout the year that I interacted with Minsu, I learned that despite the physical distance between the two children, Haesol was Minsu’s best friend and that they maintained their relationship through digital communication. Unlike the two boys, Yena, whose parents are ethnic Korean minorities from China, created two maps about her parental homelands, China and Korea. Her map included fewer words and Korean language but more colors and drawings that depicted her previous visit to China and her “사춘*” [cousin] in Korea, whom she was excited to visit for the first time during the summer of the data collection year. The maps and stories that the three children shared clearly showed that the second-generation immigrant children, who are often described as being unable to sustain meaningful connections with their homelands, were part of their transborder family networks and actively presented feelings of connection to their homelands.
Forging and Extending the Family Linkage Through Language and Literacy Practices
One of the ways in which the three children forged and extended connections with their family members in their parental homelands was through frequent and regular conversations. For all three children, these online practices usually took place on the weekend using Skype and/or KakaoTalk messenger. For Taehoon and Yena, their cross-border communication practices encompassed multiple countries, as their family members were dispersed in different parts of the world. During these practices, the children talked about different topics that were related to school experiences (i.e., school events), Korean learning (i.e., new Korean vocabulary they learned in heritage language school), and family (i.e., family plans). As they spoke, the children engaged in translanguaging (García & Wei, 2014) by alternating across named languages (Korean, Chinese, and English), using a range of linguistic features (i.e., honorific speech styles), and using gestures (i.e., bowing and nodding) that amplified affection and emotion.
For example, Yena clearly illustrated that cross-border communication practices with family living in China and Korea had fostered her multilingualism and connections to her grandparents. Yena routinely engaged in cross-border conversations with family members and knew the schedule: “Our dad’s side grandparents, we do on Saturdays. Our maternal grandparents, we do on Sundays. We do our uncles and aunts on Wednesdays.” Yena described how much she enjoyed video chatting with her grandparents by saying, “I talk about what happened this whole week. If I went to soccer, did we win? If I went to choir, did I learn a new song? My sister and I dance and sing to them in Korean.” The communication practice involved not only orality but also multimodal communication (e.g., performing piano, singing, and dancing). Since her grandparents did not speak English, Yena utilized her multilingual repertoire and received help from her mother, a language broker (Orellana, 2009) who usually sat next to Yena and translated/interpreted as needed. On special occasions such as her cousins’ birthdays, Yena and her cousins sent videos to each other. The children in this study transmitted affection and care through using transnational linguistic resources. Their unique transnational practices demonstrated how the mobility of their languages and literacies beyond geographic boundaries draws family members living in multilocal spaces together and enables them to build and extend family linkages.
Intergenerationality as a Driving Force for Heritage Learning
Darvin and Norton (2014) contrasted the idea of investment with the notion of motivation as they described how migrant students invest in language learning because they know they would “acquire a wide range of symbolic and material resources, and these social and economic gains in turn enhance the range of identities they can claim in a particular community” (p. 57). In this study, intergenerational relationships were identified as leading the three children to be invested in learning their heritage language and culture. As the children built closer relationships with family members in their parental homelands, they realized the necessity of learning the Korean language and culture to better communicate with family members, particularly grandparents, and be part of the “family.”
When the three children visited Korea, they were exposed to environments where Korean, their heritage language, was primarily spoken and used. In many cases, the focal children used Korean to communicate with most family members, even with some of their cousins who were learning English as a foreign language in their schools. Yena, who is not fluent in Korean and primarily used English in the United States, made efforts to converse in Korean with her cousin. When she faced challenges in communication, her mother served as a language broker between Yena and her relatives and interpreted for Yena. Minsu and Taehoon, who resisted using Korean in the United States despite their advanced proficiency, were observed purposefully using Korean in intergenerational interactions in Korea. Taehoon, for example, explained that his use of Korean was carefully planned and enacted in order to “fit in” with his family:
한국 가서는 영어 안 써?
First day 에는 (영어를) 써요. 그런데 거기 내 family 에 fit in 하려고. 한국말 써요. 할머니, 할아버지한테 한국말로 해요.
You don’t use English when you go to Korea?
I only use it (English) on the first day. But to fit in with my family there, I use Korean. I speak in Korean to my grandmother and grandfather.
Taehoon’s statement reveals his investment in using Korean, due to the social gains and the particular identities that he can claim as part of his “family” through using the language (Darvin & Norton, 2014).
After returning from Korea, all three children noted that their writing and speaking skills in their heritage language improved after making the trip. Minsu and Taehoon’s parents commented that they were excited to see how their children began writing longer journal entries in Korean and were using complex and advanced vocabulary. Minsu explained that it was possible “because I used it a lot with grandmother and grandfather.” Several weeks after Yena returned from her trip to Korea and Yanbian, China, she started writing about different topics related to Korea in English. Yena presented a poem entitled “Korean Flag” to me that she wrote in her Korean class:
Yena even asked her mother to buy a Korean keyboard so she could start a digital writing project in Korean. Yena’s mother commented that her children became more invested in reading and writing in Korean after interacting with relatives and experiencing the necessity of learning Korean.
Intergenerational relationships also fostered the children’s active engagement and learning in their heritage cultures. For Minsu, active engagement in Taekwondo, the Korean traditional marital art, was motivated and fostered by his grandfather in Korea, whom Minsu often described as “a national hero” and “a role model.” Minsu often shared with me and his peers at his heritage language school that his grandfather had announced that he would give a prize to the first one in the family to earn a black belt. Minsu seriously practiced Taekwondo after school and finally earned a black belt, which he bought with him to Korea and proudly presented to his grandfather. During Minsu’s visit to Korea, Taekwondo helped Minsu build a strong bond with his cousins who were beginning to learn Taekwondo, and his relatives, who expressed admiration for his expertise in Taekwondo. After he returned to the United States, Minsu became more enthusiastic about Taekwondo; he practiced harder, read texts related to it, watched videos of new techniques, and wrote about his experiences.
The Reciprocal Exchange of Literacy Resources and Support
The circulation of care that the three children were actively engaged in included the reciprocal exchange of literacy resources and educational supports. Receiving and sending literacy resources such as children’s picture books and textbooks was a practice shared across the three families. Both Minsu and Taehoon’s daily schedule involved reading books written in Korean and studying from textbooks (e.g., Korean and social studies) that were regularly used in Korean elementary schools by their parents. Their Korean relatives sent these texts because they were concerned about the focal children’s language shift and loss, knowing that it is common for many second-generation immigrant children to give up on learning heritage languages (Kwon, 2017). Similarly, Yena had a stack of books in her room that her grandmother in China bought for her. The books were unique and important in the sense that the contents were written in three languages––English, Chinese, and Korean––and were purposefully designed for Korean ethnic minorities living in China. These trilingual books, which cannot be easily found in the United States, supported Yena and her younger sister’s multilingual and literacy learning. It is important to note that the families’ exchange of literacy resources and educational supports was reciprocal. When Minsu and Yena’s family visited Korea, they brought English books, learning materials, and toys that could support their young cousins who were learning English as a foreign language at school. Before their trip, they carefully selected books to bring based on their cousins’ ages and English levels. The reciprocal and multidirectional exchange of resources and support benefitted the children in Korea and the United States and helped foster their multilingual learning.
Discussion and Implications
The circulation of care served as an axis for the second-generation Korean immigrant children’s multilingual and transnational lives in this study. The three children actively engaged in the multidirectional and reciprocal exchange of support and care by drawing on and mobilizing transnational language and literacy practices. As the children’s multilingual and multimodal maps of their parental homelands demonstrated, the three children felt a strong sense of connection to their family members beyond U.S. boundaries and maintained attachments to transborder family networks. Drawing on multilingual repertoires and using multimodal resources (e.g., aural and visual resources), they engaged in regular and frequent digital communication and letter exchanges with their family members, which helped them build closer intergenerational relationships. These intergenerational ties, sustained through transnational movement and cross-border communication, drove the children’s investment (Darvin & Norton, 2014) in their heritage learning. Furthermore, the exchange of care and support was achieved reciprocally as the family members in the United States and Korea/China exchanged literacy resources and educational support.
The immigrant children’s active engagement in the circulation of care and their ways of extending transnational and intergenerational connections through flexible use of languages and literacies has implications for both educators and researchers. First, the findings call for educators to pay careful attention to immigrant children’s out-of-school experiences that transcend languages, cultures, and countries and position the children as transnational experts who can forge connections across cultures and generations. One of the ways that teachers can accomplish these goals is by incorporating literacy materials and resources that reflect transnational experiences of immigrant children from various backgrounds. Children’s picture books such as Drawn Together (Lê, 2018), A Gift (Chen, 2009), and Dear Juno (Pak, 1999) are powerful resources about Asian immigrant children’s transnational experiences and their ways of maintaining connections with their grandparents in Thailand, China, and South Korea. After sharing these stories, immigrant children can be invited to share their experiences of border crossings, transnational literacies, digital communication, and care circulation, which position children as experts and designers of transnational curriculum. As the teachers open up spaces to discuss these topics, it is imperative that teachers acknowledge the diverse experiences of transnational children and avoid making assumptions. Each child brings different stories that are shaped by their own unique linguistic and cultural backgrounds, nationalities, migration histories, and more. Inviting children, both immigrants and nonimmigrants, to bring photographs, artifacts, and stories about people they have connection with across geographic borders and to write about them is another way of honoring the multisited connections and simultaneous belonging that children build beyond the United States. It may also create an opportunity for some students to discover new transnational stories in their families that have been lost or silenced.
This study calls for more attention and further research on young immigrant children’s language and literacy practices in the context of transnational migration and mobility. One of the remarkable findings is how intergenerational family linkages impact the children’s heritage language and cultural learning. It was evident that circulatory and connective relationships stimulated the focal children’s heritage language and cultural learning because they were able to see the value of being invested in learning in order to further extend intergenerational connections. For example, a large-scale survey on intergenerational relationships and their effects on children’s language and literacy learning for immigrant children from varying socioeconomic backgrounds and generations will provide meaningful insights to the field of heritage language and bilingual education. To further grasp the mobility and flexibility of immigrant children’s transnational language and literacy practices requires a new methodological approach. As this study shows, a multisited ethnographic approach is a meaningful way to capture a more comprehensive portrait of the dynamic mobility of young immigrant children’s language and literacy practices across geographic locales. Taking a nexus-like perspective and applying the theories of transnationalism can reveal important dimensions that move researchers away from situating immigrant children’s experiences within the bounded local spaces and attend to connections and linkages across time and space.
Conclusion
The findings of this study challenge previous literature, which stated that second-generation immigrant children do not maintain active and meaningful transnational linkages to their parental homelands (Min, 2017; Zhou, 1997) and that transnational connection is a one-generation phenomenon (Portes, 2001). The second-generation immigrant children in this study feel connected to their parental homelands and strived to be part of transborder family networks by engaging in cross-border communication with family members, purposefully using Korean in their family interactions, investing in learning heritage language and culture, and circulating literacy resources and support. In other words, transnational connection is not a one-generation phenomenon; it is a practice shared by multiple generations in which young immigrant children play key roles in building and developing family linkages and connections, particularly through their use of language and literacy. However, the holistic and nuanced understanding of the children’s language and literacy experiences in light of a transnational phenomenon requires more than observing them in one point in their lives or the particular stage in their family life spans (Compton-Lilly et al., 2019b; Levitt, 2009). Longitudinal, multisited research that follows transnational immigrant children’s language and literacy experiences over time and their engagement in the circulation of care across borders will provide valuable insights into the continuities of their transnational and intergenerational connections in transnational migration.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research and/or authorship of this article: This work was supported by American Council on The Teaching of Foreign Languages; International Literacy Association; Teachers College, Columbia University.
