[lg policy] S. Korea: An Increase in Foreign Language Support For Multicultural Families

[Harold Schiffman]

An Increase in Foreign Language Support For South Korea’s Multicultural
Families
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[image: 110925391]
<http://languagemagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/110925391.jpg>According
to South Korea’s Gender Equality Ministry and municipal governments, more
language support programs will be launched for multicultural families in
2015. There were about 204,000 multicultural children in Korea as of last
year and immigration is slowly but steadily on the rise. In order to
encourage bilingualism for multicultural children in both their parents’
mother tongues and the Korean language, these new programs will include
classes for the migrant’s spouse and Korean in-laws on the importance of
bilingual education, as well as separate sessions for foreign-born parents
on how to support their children in a bilingual household.

According to the Ministry of Gender Equality and Family, 76.1% of children
whose foreign-born parents were from North America and Europe were learning
their parent’s native language on top of Korean, while only 10.4% of those
whose parents were from Cambodia and Vietnam were doing the same in 2012.
One of the reasons behind the statistics has to do with the lack of support
from the children’s Korean parents and relatives. According to NGOs, many
foreign-born mothers are encouraged by their Korean spouses or in-laws to
only speak in Korean with their children.

“Many Korean in-laws believe that when a child is exposed to two languages
at a young age, he or she would end up not being fluent in either of those
languages,” said a worker from Multicultural Children’s Library Modoo in
Seoul, “but having a bilingual environment only betters a child’s
linguistic development and cultural understanding.” The ministry will
establish 20 more pre-school classes for multicultural children, up from
the current 80 nationwide, and increase the number of Rainbow Schools, a
special educational institution for young foreign-born children, to 17 from
the current 12 across the nation.

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