You Reap What You Sow: Parental Investment in Language Learning and Its Reflection in a 7 year-old’s World

Abstract

According to the 2000 Census, 329 different languages, including English, are spoken in the United States today. With the increasing number of immigrant and international groups, a number of topics such as language learning, language loss and maintenance, and bilingual education have started to follow an important line of investigation in the past few decades in the nation. Although language learning is a complex process and an outcome of the interaction between the cognitive processes and the social contexts attached to them, most of the research, especially in the field of Second Language Acquisition (SLA), concentrated on linguistic construction and simply overlooked the strong relationship between one`s social identity and language learning. This study, by looking at the data from a case study of a South Korean family in the United States, calls attention to this disregard through an examination of Norton`s view of ”investment” as opposed to ”motivation” in the participants` choices in terms of language learning.

根據2000年的統計數據，329種不同的語言，包含英文，都在今日的美國廣泛的被使用。隨著移民與國際團體數目不斷增加，許多議題像是語言學習、語言流失和語言保存、雙語教育，已經開始在過去的幾十年中變成重要的研究對象。雖然語言學習是一個複雜的過程，同時也是認知過程與社會環境交互作用的結果，許多研究卻僅著重於語言的建構，忽略了一個人的社會身分和語言學間強烈的關係，特別是在第二語言習得的領域。本研究中心為觀察一個生活在美國的南韓家庭，透過諾頓的投入觀點，而不是受試者在語言學習的動機層面，重新重視這個被忽略的議題。