Korean as a Heritage Language in the U.S. University Classroom

As one of the less-commonly-taught foreign languages in U.S. universities, Korean-language classes are often taken by students of Korean descent. Many Korean Americans with long-term exposure to the target language in a combination of naturalistic and instructional settings have developed proficiency in their heritage language through parental and community support, such as Saturday schools (Lee, 2002). However, upon closer examination, the bilingualism that many Korean-American learners achieve is unbalanced. These heritage learners often lack grammatical accuracy and precision despite high fluency, as the moniker "kitchen Korean" implies. As a way to facilitate the accuracy aspect of the heritage learners' language, this article suggests the benefits of corrective feedback, explicit and implicit, in the forms of metalinguistic comments, provision of an alternative correct form contingent on the learner's ill-formed utterance, and partial or full repetitions or reformulations of the learner's output when interacting with them in the classroom and beyond.