Negotiating Ethnic Identity: Korean Americans in College Korean Language Classes (2000)
Dissertation Abstract:
This study investigates how second generation Korean-American students form and transform their senses of ethnicity through their participation in Korean Language classes based on a year-long ethnographic study of Korean language classes at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. These classes were largely populated by second- and 1.5-generation Korean Americans. From these Korean-American college students, who "successfully" proceeded through the American educational system, my study shows that becoming an English speaker does not necessarily mean the loss of ethnic identity, and that learning Korean (a "heritage" language) does not necessarily lead to homogeneous ethnic identity formation. Although the classroom is certainly a place in which language knowledge is imparted to students, much classroom activity utilizes words and grammatical points as semantic mediators of culture, history, and even politics. My ethnography focuses on the micro-practices of language teaching and learning in order to explore these interactions, and thereby take up identity formation and transformation.
Although "heritage"(or "ethnic") language has often
been taken up as a symbol for group maintenance, my study shows that actual
interaction with the language is complicatedly and heterogeneously experienced
among the group members, especially in relation to the ethnic identity formation
process. Characteristics of the Korean classes contribute to Korean classes
contribute to Korean-American students' ethnic identity formation processes
in several ways. This is because this "ethnic" space contains complicated
and contradictory characteristics, resulting from its complex mixture of
class participants, its institutional location, and its national and transnational
situation(Chapter 4). Korean-American students participating in Korean language
classes constantly negotiate their sense of ethnic identity by interacting
with social meanings initiated from words, passages, illustrations, and texts(Chapter
5); perceiving and positioning complicated forms and styles of Korean language,
which becomes legitimated or de-legitimated against a "native" "standard" language(Chapter
6); and facing classmates' speech presentation caricaturing "Koreanness" out
of various diasporic stories, at the crossroads of traditional, idea cultural
traits and transnational, contemporary cultural flows from Korea(Chapter
7). These multiple modes are interconnected by different personal beliefs
and theories of ethnic identity and language(Chapter 3), complicating their
views and horizons on diaspora, meaning of homeland, and Korean ethnicity.
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