RETHINKING KOREANNESS IN HERITAGE LANGUAGE EDUCATION: THE CASE OF KOREAN HERITAGE SCHOOL IN TORONTO

According to Statistics Canada (2022), Korea was one of the top 10 countries of birth of recent immigrants between 2011 and 2022. According to Park (2022), there are 483 Korean churches in Canada, many of which operate their own Korean language schools. Grace Church (a pseudonym), a Korean ethnic church in the GTA, was selected as the study site due to its multi-generational congregation and its location in Canada’s largest Korean immigrant community. Established in the 1980s, it has evolved into a substantial congregation, conducting services in both Korean and English. The church fosters bilingual and bicultural competence among its younger members through various formal and informal gatherings. This setting provided a rich environment for exploring language use across generations of Korean Canadian immigrants, offering a wide range of insights for in-depth inquiry. The Grace school serves students from kindergarten to grade 8, from September to June. Initially, the school operated on Saturdays for three hours, evenly split between Korean language instruction and cultural activities like taekwondo and art classes. According to a staff at church, the program was restructured to a one-hour format on Sundays as of 2011 to better accommodate families attending church services and address teacher shortages.

This study is part of the first author’s yearlong ethnographic research project (2016-2017) examining bilingualism among Korean-Canadian children at a multigenerational ethnic church in Toronto. Ethnography provides an ideal methodology for investigating “questions that ask why, how, what is happening, and what does it look like” (Purcell-Gates 2011, p. 136) and emphasizes the importance of situating research within its broader sociocultural context. Accordingly, while studying how the church’s language school and its teachers—predominantly parent volunteers—support Korean-Canadian children’s language and literacy development, we examined the wider sociocultural forces shaping HL education.

Although the first author was a member of Grace Church, she had not visited Grace School prior to initiating this research. After contacting the Korean language school director, Da-Yoon Kim, she visited the school and outlined the study’s parameters. Upon receiving consent, she attended Grace School regularly over eight months, collecting diverse data including classroom observations, field notes from the New Year’s Day event, interviews, curriculum materials, student work, Korean government documents and websites, and records from teachers’ meetings and HL education conferences.

For this specific study, primary data sources comprised Korean government (OKF) documents and websites, participation in OKF-funded conferences, and interviews with Grace School’s parents, teachers, and students. The first author conducted interviews with participants in either Korean or English. Table 1 presents the interview participants (all names are pseudonyms):

The second researcher joined during the data analysis phase, providing an etic perspective informed by her expertise in language and nation-building relationships. We analyzed the data through cross-sectional indexing, which Mason (2002) defines as “a consistent system for indexing the whole of a data set according to a set of common principles and measures” (p. 215). While the first author identified primary themes in the dataset, both researchers collaboratively compared and contrasted stakeholder perspectives and positions. This systematic approach enabled comprehensive pattern and theme identification across the complete dataset.

The Korean government has recognized the potential of overseas Koreans in enhancing the nation’s global competitiveness and has thus promoted Korean-English bilingualism as its main strategy. Its focus on Koreanness was evident at the annual conference of the Canadian Association of Korean Schools (CAKS), the OKF-funded HL education conference. The event typically feature national symbols like flags, food, dance, and music as cultural resources that represent Korea, and prioritize teaching national language and history—examples of what Billig (1995) termed banal nationalism.

With regard to HL education, the importance of Korean culture is echoed by Dong-suk Kim, the founder of Korean American Civic Empowerment (KACE). In his speech at the annual conference of CAKS, Kim highlighted the consequences of disconnection from one’s heritage, citing Korean politicians in the U.S. who primarily aligned themselves with Caucasian communities. These politicians, he noted, often failed to recognize the struggles faced by ethnic minorities and consequently did not advocate for their rights. Kim succinctly expressed this concern with the statement: “When we lose our identity, we lose our social roles”. Similarly, other keynote speakers emphasized the need for Korean children growing up in Canada to develop into responsible citizens, maintain their Korean identities, and serve as global citizens. This perspective reflects the assumption that maintaining cultural heritage will strengthen Korea’s position in the global economy.

However, this instrumental view of culture seems to face a fundamental conundrum. As Shin (2013) emphasized, Since the Kim Young Sam government (1993-1996) introduced the concept of globalization to Korean society, the official stance has consistently viewed overseas Koreans as Hyŏngje or fellow brothers living abroad. For instance, Lee (2008) argued that South Korea, having achieved the “Miracle on the Han River” from the ruins of the 1950s when even electricity was scarce, Korea “must recognize the importance of overseas Koreans as Hyŏngje and national resources” for global prosperity.

The use of the term Hyŏngje is revealing here for what it indexes and what it conceals. On one hand, it represents egalitarian kinship by familial lineage, with a gendered emphasis that highlights the symbolic masculinization of the diaspora in relation to the Korean fatherland. On the other hand, the term obscures the idiosyncrasies of the overseas communities in relation to their host countries. Their own familial histories, the sociopolitical locations of these communities, and their diverse experiences of adaptation and integration are often sidelined within the larger discourse of Korea-as-oneness. Further, within the seemingly homogeneous overseas community, their identification in relation to Korea is highly complex, depending on factors such as time of arrival, level of Korean/English proficiency, and immigrant generations.

Indeed, the implementation of this nation-oriented language policy focuses primarily on promoting awareness of Korean traditional practices (such as lunar New Year’s Day) and historical events (including Hangul day and the march first movement). The policy also approaches Korean language development through the lens of parallel monolingualism, treating Korean as a separate, bounded system isolated from students’ other linguistic resources. Indeed, the government website’s study materials for HL classes (e.g., https://study.korean.net/servlet/action.home.MainAction) reveals that content heavily emphasizes the introduction of Korean events and traditions as part of Korean culture.

Another critical aspect to examine is the goal of HL education. The government’s stated purpose emphasizes its instrumental approach to bilingualism—positioning HL education as a means of developing globally competitive citizens who maintain a strong Korean identity. However, the following fieldnote reveals that that this Korean-focused approach often misaligns with the immediate needs and goals of HL education in immigrant families. According to interview data, parents who want their children to learn Korean are primarily motivated by more practical and immediate concerns: they seek to strike a balance between achieving functional Korean bilingualism while ensuring their children’s academic and social success in English.

As we see below, the case of Grace Church’s Korean immigrant community illustrates this priority structure clearly. The parents immigrated in pursuit of better educational opportunities for their children, often sacrificing their comfortable, middle-class life in Korea to pursue the goal of their children’s native-like English proficiency. In this context, academic achievement in English naturally takes precedence, while Korean HL learning serves a secondary, though important, role of maintaining family communication with relatives in Korea. This fundamental disconnect between objectives—the government’s ambitious economic aspirations versus families’ practical communication needs—creates inherent tensions in the motivations, goals, and curriculum of Korean HL education. The following section examines how migrant churches step into this gap, mediating between the Korean government’s nationalistic goals and parents’ desires for functional bilingualism.

This section examines how evangelical churches have developed into central hubs for HL education. Grace Church and its associated Hangul School have become vital institutions for HL learning among Korean-Canadian children in Toronto.

Somewhat paradoxically, the success of church-based HL programs can be attributed to the congregants’ shared experiences of marginalization in Western society. Having faced socioeconomic exclusion from mainstream institutions and workplaces, the immigrants sought to fulfill their linguistic, spiritual, and economic needs. Immigrant churches, through their inclusive structures and ideologies that welcome newcomers, provided crucial support during the settlement process (Han, 2014). These religious institutions provided a space for socialization into Canadian society in a less threatening way, while accepting and welcoming their linguistic and cultural origin. Within the support system of church, their hardships as racialized Others in the West were rationalized as part of God’s plan (Han, 2019). Consequently, adults, especially new immigrants, have developed a system of belief in Christianity and found a new way of being as Christians in Canadian society.

Grace Church demonstrates strong visions and commitments to evangelism, working diligently to share the gospel at local, national, and international levels. It also recognizes that effective evangelism stems from outreach programs with a focus on family. The church culture of cell meetings is particularly noteworthy in that regard. Grace Church emphasizes the importance of these gatherings as a tool to encourage and support one another. Almost every family belongs to a cell, which typically consists of 5-10 families, depending on the size. These cells meet regularly, either weekly or bi-weekly, and the congregants come to church not only on Sundays to attend services but also on weekdays to join cell meetings.

The HL programs at Grace church serve a dual purpose, providing both language education and a means to strengthen church membership. These programs create a symbiotic relationship between language learning and religious participation. Parents can conveniently drop off their children for Korean language classes while they attend church services or engage in other church activities. This arrangement not only facilitates language education for the younger generation but also encourages consistent church attendance and involvement for the entire family. Notably, all children enrolled in the Korean language school at Grace Church are also church attendees, creating a cohesive community of learners.

Moreover, the church environment proves more competitive than public language lessons which focus primarily on grammar instruction, as it successfully integrates cultural elements into language learning. Pastor Anna, the Sunday school pastor, stated that children’s KM at Grace Church was a distinctive program, calling herself it a “bicultural ministry”. In the following, she recounts how the church worked hard to instill a Korean identity by offering cultural activities.

The emphasis on culture in church-based HL programs aligns with the government’s instrumental view of Korean culture. This approach is illustrated in our interview with Pastor Anna, who drew a parallel between Korean-Canadian children visiting Korea and Jews making pilgrimages to Israel:

From a sociolinguistic viewpoint, what we observed in these events is both explicit and implicit socialization into the social relations of Korean society. The intergenerational structure of church activities—where different age groups join in shared practices—creates authentic contexts for learning culturally appropriate roles and linguistic expressions in situ. For instance, older children naturally assume mentoring roles with younger ones during events and internalize gendered divisions of labor at church. Further, they learn to develop and maintain peer relations in the Korean language, specifically by adjusting social distance through the deletion or display of honorific expressions (e.g., maneuvering between casual hae, haeyo and more formal hasseoyo or haejuseyo) based on age hierarchies and gender.

Through these situated practices, participants internalize not just linguistic forms but also the underlying cultural values of respect for elders and age-based hierarchy in language use. Given that it would be difficult to find multigenerational spaces where participants can speak, learn, and use different varieties of Korean in a friendly and inclusive environment, the church serves as a key place for HL learning. Thus, one parent remarked that having their children learn Korean implicitly was better than no exposure at all.

In conclusion, Grace Church has come to house a HL school because it offers a unique combination of immigrant support, convenience, and authentic opportunities for language socialization. As we see below, the formal language instruction in Grace school may be limited due to understaffing. Nevertheless, the overall church experience provides a comprehensive environment for HL learning. This model demonstrates how religious institutions serves as a central space for immigrant communities, offering benefits that extend beyond mere language acquisition to encompass broader aspects of language socialization, and ultimately, community cohesion.

This excerpt is from a sermon delivered by Pastor Choi in 2017, the senior pastor of Grace Church, in the Korean Ministry. The Christian ideology that emphasizes sacrifice and dedication figures particularly in the context of HL programs, largely because all teachers are volunteers. Grace School exemplifies a volunteer-driven community institution for HL learning, with minimal funding from government and church sources. This program thus relies heavily on a workforce of dedicated volunteer teachers, requiring commitment and long-term engagement. Given the strikingly little attention paid to the challenges and treatment that HL teachers face, the Christian ideology appears to exhort individual teachers to make meaning out of their experiences as volunteers.

The cognitive and emotional labor of volunteer teachers, nevertheless, often goes unrecognized and thus rendered invisible (cf. Daminger, 2019; Hochschild, 1983). The government offices are well aware that teachers play important roles in the success of HL programs. The speakers at the CAKS conference, for instance, suggested that Hangul school teachers build positive relationships with their students, individualize lesson plans, and work closely with other teachers to increase students’ learning outcomes. What they seem less aware of, or perhaps choose not to delve into, is that all these teachers are volunteers, working for free or for subminimum wages.

Teachers at Grace School are integral to the program’s success. The teachers are tasked with various responsibilities, including curriculum development, creation of classroom materials, language and culture instruction, classroom management, and participation in faculty meetings. These educators, themselves immigrants, view HL as crucial for preserving family connections and facilitating communication with relatives in Korea. Mrs. Jeong, Mrs. Hwang, and Mrs. Lee are first-generation immigrants who primarily use Korean in class, while Mrs. Song, a 1.5-generation immigrant raised in Montreal, employs both Korean and English. With their diverse multicultural backgrounds, these teachers recognize the importance of Korean language instruction. Some view their involvement as an opportunity to amplify their voices and nurture hybrid cultural and linguistic identities, both for their students and themselves as Korean Canadian citizens.

Despite the individuals’ well-meaning motivation to maintain HL, Grace school faces understaffing, like many other under-resourced HL programs Grace school has a policy where parents who volunteer as teachers have their children’s fees waived and receive a modest stipend, typically around $50 per year. Despite this, the compensation is not competitive enough to attract a sufficient number of qualified educators.

Furthermore, once they take the position, the teachers face numerous challenges in their roles and responsibilities. One of the primary challenges is managing the wide range of Korean and English proficiency levels within each class in the absence of the curriculums. This diversity stems from the varied backgrounds of the students, including 1.5 generation (those who immigrated with their parents), second-generation (born in the host country), third-generation students (whose home language is English), and recent newcomers still learning English. However, due to understaffing, addressing varied linguistic proficiency seems very difficult. Mrs. Song, who teaches grades 1 and 2, articulated this challenge:

When there is no structured curriculum, cultural education often defaults to one-time events such as traditional costume displays or musical performances. However, these isolated cultural showcases can be problematic as they tend to present culture as static and exotic rather than as lived experience. Such superficial approaches not only fail to meaningfully engage students, particularly older learners, but can also evoke feelings of disconnection or discomfort. This outcome contrasts sharply with educators’ expectations that these cultural experiences would help students develop deeper connections to their heritage identity. Thus, it comes as no surprise that students often show little interest in studying their HL when they enter Grace School. Having been educated in the Canadian context, these children find little value in learning and speaking Korean. The following conversation with students reveals this point:

During an informal conversation, the teacher inquired about the students’ motivations for attending Grace school. The first student candidly admitted to being forced to attend, eliciting surprised and amused laughter from the class. Other students cited various reasons, including their mothers’ desire for them to learn Korean, fear of negative consequences, and some positive motivations such as improved communication with family members. The students’ diverse responses indicate the complex dynamics of HL learning, where external pressures and personal motivations often intersect. That is, although most students acknowledged the necessity of learning Korean, their attitudes and motivations toward Korean are often mixed.

In response to these challenges, the teachers developed individual strategies, such as integrating cultural elements or using multimedia in their lessons. Mrs. Hwang, for instance, incorporated calligraphy, old proverbs, and songs to teach both the language and culture of Korea. She mentioned that on Korean holidays, such as New Year’s Day and Thanksgiving Day, her art projects were always related to Korea. According to her, this was the best way for Korean-Canadian children to experience Korean culture. Mrs. Hwang also found that using YouTube videos to teach culture and language was effective, as students could simultaneously see and listen, making the learning process more engaging and enjoyable. Similarly, Mrs. Jeong mentioned the use of mass media as a teaching strategy. She brought her own tablet to show students a Korean educational program for about three minutes each week.

Despite ongoing efforts, the director of Grace School reports a clear decline in the student participation rates. Given that Grace school receives annual funding from the government based on student enrollment, this is a concerning situation. For one thing, students with a serious interest in Korean language learning often opt for public school- based programs, which typically offer more structured and extensive instruction. On the other hand, parents enrolling their children in church-based language schools typically put a priority on developing and nurturing church-based social relations (see section 4.2). Further complicating the situation is the lack of communication channels for teachers to voice their concerns, compounded by the church’s ideological structure that frames dedication and sacrifice as offerings to God.