| The purpose of this study is to investigate the contemporary social phenomenon in which Korean parents, driven by Korean English Fever, bring their young children to the U.S. for English education. By using the framework of a Figured World (Holland, Skinner, Lachicotte, & Cain, 1998), I investigated what motivates parents to undertake the seemingly extreme practice. I conducted an ethnographic study of Korean short-term resident families with 3- to 8-year-old children living in a Midwestern university town. Through in-depth interviews with parents and observations of their daily lives, I began to understand their belief systems regarding their children's English education and how they enacted these belief systems in their daily lives. For the parents, English education in the U.S. is not just for language learning, but for preparing their children for a globalized and cosmopolitan future. The parents continuously validated, altered, and revaluated their practices in this figured world. As they stayed in the U.S., their beliefs about what were extreme and what were normal practices evolved, and they eventually normalized seemingly extreme practices, for example, becoming Wild Geese families. Parents' folk pedagogy (Bruner, 1998) of learning English, in which a belief in children's "natural" English learning was initially strong, also changed. In time they lowered their expectations about "natural" English learning. |
