V.  HOME ENVIRONMENTAL FACTORS

¡°Reading begins at home¡± is an
 adage that is generally accepted by
educators and researchers.
Most parents recognize how
important it is for their children to begin
acquiring reading and writing skills before
beginning kindergarten (Olson & Logan, 1989). Parental involvement in the reading process
actually begins long before the child arrives at school and continues throughout
the school years (Vukelich, 1984; Hughes, 1999).

Parentally controlled home environmental factors that have been strongly recommended by scholars to help hesitant readers increase their interest in reading include: literacy interaction (i.e., reading aloud, tutoring and sharing literature), providing a rich print environment, parental attitudes toward reading, and parental modeling of reading (Anderson, Hiebert, Scott, & Wilkinson, 1985; Routman, 1991; Trelease, 1995). Parental modeling in a cross-linguistic milieu, i.e., one where the parents speak a different language from the one in which their children are being instructed in school, was chosen as the focus of this study primarily for the following reason: In a cross-linguistic milieu a more accurate measurement of the efficacy of parental role-modeling as readers can be obtained than in a monolingual milieu because parents who have a poor command of English are unable to provide encouragement in the form of tutoring, reading aloud, or answering questions their children may have about material they are reading in English. Moreover, such parents typically will not provide a print environment rich in English material. Thus only two of the four parentally controlled home environmental factors listed above tend to be operative in a cross-linguistic milieu. Furthermore, those two factors are likely to be closely interlinked at least in cases where the parents do a lot of reading at home: in such cases it is likely that they have a positive attitude as to the value and importance of reading. Finally, while the effect of home environmental factors on children¡¯s reading attitudes and behavior has been studied very extensively in monolingual situations, hardly any studies of the effect of those factors in cross-linguistic situations have been published.6

The cross-linguistic milieu examined in the present study is the Korean-American community in the Greater Los Angeles Area. This is the third largest immigrant community in the United States; its center is a district in the City of Los Angeles called Koreatown that has at least 400,000 ethnic Korean residents. The community is served by two daily Korean-language newspapers, four Korean-language television channels, and a large number of Korean commercial establishments, including 70 Korean bookstores. These resources not only provide ready access to Korean literature and cultural artifacts but also allow people who speak only Korean to satisfy their daily needs.