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This article discusses a comparison of the two focal primary school third-grade Korean bilingual students' language use with their previous language use when they were first-graders by examining their heritage language (HL) use at a Korean language school. For children of immigrant families in the U.S., there has been a pervasive hypothesis that their heritage language (HL) might be jeopardized due to their minimum exposure to it and its reduced status in the U.S., which can easily lead them to experience HL shift or loss (Montrul, 2018; Valde´s, 2014). However, the present study shows that the focal third graders who were attending all-English schools during the week did not appear to lose their HL. Instead, the comparison of findings indicated that they had developed a certain degree of oral proficiency in their HL, including vocabulary knowledge, thanks to the parents' involvement and practices towards their children's HL learning as well as other socio-cultural influences on the students' HL language use and development over the years.

This qualitative study utilized sociocultural and heteroglossic perspectives to examine the oral translanguaging practices of four Korean-American first-graders in a Korean heritage language (HL) classroom. The research method was discourse analysis. The students attended all-English American schools during the school week and a Korean HL school on Saturdays. All four students drew from their integrated linguistic resources to translanguage for sociolinguistic, metalinguistic, metacognitive, and sociocultural purposes. The three students who preferred English and who had older siblings translanguaged more and for a wider range of translanguaging practices than the student who preferred Korean and who had a younger sibling.