Objective: The study examines how Korean American and immigrant youth interpret the Black-White binary in U.S. history and social studies curricula. Method: Task-based interviews were conducted with 23 Korean-heritage students from two Midwestern cities. The study used Asian Critical Theory (AsianCrit) and sociocultural theory as frameworks for…

Despite the importance of family-centered practice in the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act Part C, a federally funded program for birth to two-year-old children with disabilities, there is a lack of research on Asian families who participate in early intervention in the U.S. This study examined the experiences of two Korean families and…

This study examined translingual practices in two playdates of a Korean four-year-old boy (Theo) with a Korean boy and an American boy. The boys played a game called "Candy Land." In both playdates, the boys' naturally occurring English and Korean communication strategies were observed and analyzed based on Canagarajah's (2013) four…

Despite a growing number of Second Language (L2) researchers working in cross-cultural and cross-linguistic settings, issues related to these uniquely situated researcher identities have only scantily been addressed. In order to close this gap, we investigated three U.S.-based Korean female researchers in L2 studies. We sought to understand (1)…

This study was to design and explore the effects of an enrichment program on the leadership, attitude, and motivation of ethnic minority gifted and talented students who want to be scientists and engineers in the future. Ten gifted and talented students participated in this study, Youth Science and Technology Leadership Camp (YSTLC). A leadership…

This dissertation documents a collection of sociolinguistic and sociophonetic studies of the speech of bilingual Korean Americans in California. Korean Americans are an ethnic minority in the United States whose speech patterns in Korean and English remain understudied. The goal of the studies is to begin sketching out the acoustic traits that…

This study explores parents' reasons for enrolling their children in a Korean dual language immersion (KDLI) program. The research focuses on parents' reasons for choosing a school and a KDLI program, respectively, to examine whether a KDLI offering significantly affects parents' decision to enroll their children in a specific school and to…

The case studies of three Korean American families examined the directives and honorifics used by families to analyze how family members socialized each other into culturally appropriate ways of directing. Drawing from audio- and visual-recordings of interactions, interviews of parents and children, field notes, and artifacts, this study found…

This study examines the perceptions of Korean language teachers on the classroom practice of embedding contemporary Korean pop culture into classrooms for effective world language instruction. While integrating culture in language classrooms has been practiced for decades, Korean teachers in this study expressed a lack of confidence in designing…

Research on parenting styles and children's developmental outcomes have been prominent in the parenting and achievement literature for decades and research shows that parenting style is not consistent across families from diverse backgrounds (Baumrind, 1971; Chao, 1994; Grusec, Goodnow, & Kuzcynski, 2000). Building on this research, this study…

It has been widely reported that Korean-American students as a group outperform most other groups of students in terms of academic achievement due to having parents with especially high academic expectations due to traditional Confucian values. To examine this achievement, this study examines the common factors across the indigenous East Asian…

This study examined the instructional focuses and practices of three Korean heritage language (HL) teachers in community-based HL schools related not only to their constructed identities as HL teachers, but also to their students. Constant-comparative analyses of interviews and classroom observations across the three teacher cases showed that each…

The strength of English learners' second language reading is closely associated with academic success. Using qualitative research methods and verbal protocols, this study examines four elementary-level English learners' uses of reading strategies and describes how each English learner employs these strategies while reading both culturally relevant…

This study investigated Korean heritage language (KHL) learners' foreign language classroom anxiety, reading anxiety and writing anxiety using the Foreign Language Classroom Anxiety Scale (FLCAS) by Horwitz, Horwitz and Cope, the Foreign Language Reading Anxiety Scale (FLRAS) by Saito, Garza and Horwitz and the Writing Apprehension Test (WAT) by…

This article examines the relationship between language and emotion, especially drawing attention to the experiences and perspectives of second language (SL) learners. Informed by the sociocultural perspective on the construction of emotion and its representation, this study highlights the intertwined relationship among emotions, cultural…