YOU REAP WHAT YOU SOW: PARENTAL INVESTMENT IN LANGUAGE LEARNING AND ITS REFLECTION IN A SEVEN-YEAR OLD'S WORLD

According to the 2000 Census, 329 different languages, including English, are spoken in the United States today. With the increasing number of immigrant and international groups, a number of topics such as language learning, language loss and maintenance, and bilingual education have started to follow an important line of investigation in the past few decades in the nation. Although language learning is a complex process and an outcome of the interaction between the cognitive processes and the social contexts attached to them, most of the research, especially in the field of Second Language Acquisition (SLA), concentrated on linguistic construction and simply overlooked the strong relationship between one's social identity and language learning. This study, by looking at the data from a case study of a South Korean family in the United States, calls attention to this disregard through an examination of Norton's view of "investment" as opposed to "motivation" in the participants' choices in terms of language learning.