Case Study- Part 1- Ann Min
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School
CUNY Queens College *
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Course
EECE764
Subject
Linguistics
Date
Jan 9, 2024
Type
docx
Pages
2
Uploaded by snguyen2019
Ann Min
EECE 791.2
Case Study
For my case study, I chose a 6-year-old boy in 1
st
grade, named Peter (pseudonym). He is Korean
and English bilingual. He uses Korean with some of his family, such as with his grandfather and
grandmother and occasionally with his parents. However, he uses mostly English with his mother and
father and with friends. At school, he is in a dual language program that he has been attending since
kindergarten. He also attends Korean school on Saturdays, so he has a chance to develop his Korean
language skills there, as well. He sees his grandmother and grandfather almost every day.
Because bilinguals can have varying degrees of proficiency in either language, it is important to
note how proficient Peter was in Korean. He started off about equally proficient in both Korean and
English. However, his Korean language started to diminish, as he began to switch to English dominance.
It may have been due to more exposure to the English language at his pre-k, or with more friends
speaking English. Also, his primary language of choice with his parents is English, so unless he was
speaking and interacting with his grandparents, English was used more frequently.
His Korean improved a lot through the Korean bilingual program at his school. He already had a
base knowledge of some Korean vocabulary, but of course through the program he enrolled in, his
Korean vocabulary as well as his Korean writing improved drastically. His mother even said that even just
one week into dual language that his Korean language skills already saw improvements. Even just having
exposure to the less dominant language can help to bolster the language.
Throughout the year, his Korean language has developed more than in previous years when he
was not attending bilingual school, although he had opportunities at home to speak with his
grandparents in Korean. English was the dominant language going into kindergarten. Even though
English is still his go-to language, his Korean language has improved drastically since before he attended
dual language school.
His dual language program alternates between English instruction and Korean instruction, and
he learns content areas in both languages. He learns Korean and English literacy skills, such as letters,
sounds, writing words and sentences. He learns both language skills simultaneously throughout the year.
He was also learning Korean literacy at Korean school, so all of these skills helped him to develop even
stronger literacy skills. Korean is a phonetic language, so the characters all have specific phonemes
attached to them. And the characters connect to form more characters and words. Reading can be
accomplished quickly with memorization of characters and sounds, but comprehension is another story.
Because Korean language does not have the same word order as English in sentence building,
some people can have difficulty with understanding Korean sentences and building Korean sentences.
But because Peter has had exposure to the Korean language and already knows the grammatical
concepts of word order due to sheer exposure and interaction with grandparents, he is able to construct
grammatically correct sentences without much trouble. Others, however, might find more difficulty in
constructing meaningful sentences without the prior knowledge.
There are many kinds of bilingual education models. Peter’s school is a dual language program,
which seeks to develop proficiency in both languages. This is contrasted to a transitional bilingual
education program, in which students start with support as necessary in the minority language but are
seeking to eventually move out of bilingual classes and into mainstream classrooms with only the target
language being spoken and used for instruction. Because the program he is in lends itself to developing
literacy and language in both languages, he has been benefiting from acquiring both languages. His
literacy in English does not seem to be lagging behind any other first graders, who are not in a dual
language program, but time will tell.
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