Mother's Korean Language Ability, Self-Esteem and Academic Adaptation Among Adolescents from Multicultural Families

Background and Purpose

With the recent increase in international marriage, the number of adolescents from multicultural families (i.e., consisting of a foreign mother and a Korean father) has been rapidly increasing in South Korea. Adolescents from multicultural families often experience difficulties in academic performance. Poor Korean ability of their mothers can delay their academic development as those mothers have limited abilities to provide academic advice essential to them. Mother’s poor Korean ability can result in their children’s low self-esteem by delaying their Korean language development. Moreover, children with low self-esteem showed poor academic performance and adaptation at school in the previous studies. However, few studies have empirically investigated the self-esteem as a mediating factor between mother’s Korean language skill and academic adaptation among children from multicultural families. Therefore, this study examined the association between the mother's Korean ability, multicultural adolescents’ academic adaptation and the mediating role of their self-esteem.

Methods

This study used the sixth-wave of the Multicultural Adolescents Panel Study (MAPS, 2016) which include 1,329 third graders at the time of the survey. For this study, 1,287 students who have foreign mothers were included excluding adolescents whose father is a foreigner or whose parents are both foreigners. The dependent variable, the academic adaptation, was measured with five questions on academic performance of the school adaptation scale (Jeong, 2009; Kim, 2010). The independent variable, mother’s Korean ability, was assessed by adolescents, and they rated their mother’s speaking, reading, listening, and writing ability on the interval scale of 1 to 4. Mean scores of the four language skills were used in the analysis. The mediating variable, self-esteem, was measured with four items of self-concept scales (Park, Oh,1992). Gender, age, self-reported school grades, household income, and mother's age, country of origin, and educational level were included as covariates. Multiple regression analyses were used to examine the mediation model (Baron & Kenny, 1986), and the mediating effect was examined with bootstrapping method with the SPSS Macro Process.

Results

Foreign mothers in multicultural families have the biggest difficulty in writing (M=1.75, SD=0.87) in Korean than other language skills such as speaking (M=2.08, SD=0.91), reading (M=1.84, SD=0.90), and listening (M=2.12, SD=0.96). According to the result of multiple regression analysis, mother’s Korean ability had positive relationships with multicultural adolescents’ academic adaptation (β=0.09, p<0.001) and self-esteem (β=0.17, p<.001). The association between mother’s Korean ability and multicultural adolescents’ academic adaptation was fully mediated by their self-esteem (β=0.31, p<.001).

Conclusions and Implications

The findings suggest that the mother's Korean ability increases multicultural adolescents’ self-esteem which eventually promotes their academic adaptation. Mother’s Korean skills affect children’s language development which is important for multicultural adolescents to have confidence themselves in school life. Findings of this study emphasize that self-esteem of adolescents from multicultural families can be facilitated by promoting their mother’s Korean language skills. Hence, to advocate multicultural adolescents’ self-esteem and successful academic achievement, services/programs to improve their mother’s Korean ability can be necessary. In addition, establishing countermeasures for increasing multicultural adolescents' self-esteem is critical to empower their school adaptation.