Traditional notions of family structure and settlement are no longer representative of families that are pursuing global opportunities for different reasons. Transnational families are increasingly more common and their experiences rooted in more frequent or intended translocations are different than those of the immigrant populations. One of the…

Language and cultural preservation efforts among different communities of language speakers in the United States have received increasing attention as interest in linguistic rights and globalization continues to deepen. In addition to mounting evidence of the cognitive, psychological, and academic benefits of heritage language/community language…

This article documents the heritage-language (HL) literacy practices of three Japanese American families residing in a predominantly Anglo and Latino community. Through interviews and observations, this study investigates Japanese children's HL-literacy practices, parental attitudes toward HL literacy, and challenges in HL-literacy development in…

The idea for this special issue of the "Heritage Language Journal" on Korean grew out of a symposium on "Bilingualism and Biculturalism in the Korean American Community" at the 2005 International Association of Applied Linguistics (AILA) conference in Wisconsin, Madison organized by Jin Sook Lee and Adrienne Lo. The broad participation and…

Examines the role of cultural identity and heritage language maintenance among the lives of 40 second-generation Korean-American university students in the United States. Analyses of questionnaire data showed that most second generation Korean-Americans achieve some level of Korean proficiency, but they overwhelmingly agree that it is not enough.…

This paper examines teachers' attitudes towards their students' heritage language maintenance and their engagement in classroom practices that may or may not affirm the value of maintaining and developing heritage languages among students. Through surveys and interviews with K-12 teachers in California public schools, the data show that the…

This paper focuses on the electronic literacy practices of two Korean-American heritage language learners who manage Korean weblogs. Online users deliberately alter standard forms of written language and play with symbols, characters, and words to economize typing effort, mimic oral language, or convey qualities of their linguistic identity such…