Effectiveness of a Bilingual Cultural Education Program in Korea: Testing the Mediating Effects of Process Outcomes

Background and Purpose: With the rapid increase of international marriage rate in Korea, multiple programs have been developed to assist these families. ‘Hana Kids of Asia’ is a curriculum-based bilingual, cross-cultural education program targeting school-aged children who live with at least one parent coming from Vietnam. This study aimed to evaluate its effectiveness for improving children’s bicultural identity and parent-child relationship, process outcomes believed to positively affect ultimate developmental outcomes such as school adaptation and self-esteem.

 Methods: A sample of 112 children who participated or have participated in the program was compared with a comparison group of 73 children. Data was collected by one-on-one interview, and Vietnamese language proficiency, knowledge on Vietnamese and Korean culture, bicultural identity, parent-child relationship were measured to assess process outcomes. Between-group differences in these process outcomes as well as in children’s adaptation outcomes were examined, and finally a mediating model to verify the intervention’s effectiveness was tested by structural equation modeling. Sex and age of participants were statistically controlled.

Results: Findings of between-group comparisons suggested that there were significant differences in Vietnamese language proficiency, cultural knowledge-both Korean and Vietnamese, and in the process outcomes of bicultural identity and parent-child relationship. No statistically significant between-group differences were detected in final developmental outcomes such as self-esteem and school adaptation. The findings of structural equation modeling suggested that children's language proficiency and cross-cultural knowledge affected children's developmental outcomes, mediated by the process outcome of bicultural identity. Increase in Vietnamese language ability and Vietnamese-Korean cultural knowledge resulted in increase of bicultural identity, and the positive change in the process outcome led to positive changes in children's outcomes such as school adaptation and self-esteem. In addition, bicultural identity had a positive impact on parent-child relationship and this was significantly associated with positive changes in children's school adaptation and self-esteem. Comparing the full-mediation model and the partial-mediation model, we selected the full-mediation model as the final model. All of the path coefficients in the final model were statistically significant, and bootstrapping results indicated that the indirect effect through the mediating outcomes were also statistically significant.

Conclusions and Implications: The results suggest that this intervention program is effective in increasing children’s bicultural identity and parent-child relationship and that these process outcomes were the critical components that brought changes in children's ultimate developmental outcomes. These findings suggest that interventions focusing on increased language proficiency and cultural knowledge might not directly affect developmental outcomes such as school adaptation or self-esteem, but have indirect effects through changes in bicultural identity and parent-child relationship. This study shows the importance of testing process outcomes when evaluating program effectiveness, and that between-group comparisons focusing on direct effects might fail to capture the interconnectedness of process variables.