Affirming and displacing: the simultaneous endorsement of heritage languages and Korean-only adaptation among elementary teachers in South Korea

While South Korean schools have diversified rapidly, the classroom remains institutionally configured as a monolingual Korean space in which English holds uniquely valorised status. Previous research on these ideologies in the Korean context has been predominantly qualitative and grounded in policy or document analysis, locating them largely at the societal and institutional level. What has yet to be examined at scale is whether individual teachers endorse such ideologies, how strongly, and what happens when that endorsement meets the constraints of everyday practice. Drawing on a mixed-methods survey of 207 elementary in-service teachers across South Korea, this study finds that teachers endorse asset-oriented and assimilationist beliefs concurrently, a pattern consistent with the coexistence of plural ideologies rather than with a single asset-deficit continuum. Teachers recognised the English/non-English hierarchy, most strongly at the level of macro-social valuation. Reported multilingual practice fell below professed belief, and pedagogical self-efficacy was the strongest correlate of that gap, while teachers’ open-ended accounts located the shortfall in pacing, staffing, and materials rather than in disagreement with multilingual pedagogy. Findings suggest that where a monolingual national school system meets new linguistic diversity, the more promising lever may be institutional and pedagogical capability rather than teacher conviction.