The author examines the results of a study conducted on 40 second-generation Korean American university students living in the United States. The main topics of this article are the role of cultural identity and heritage language maintenance. She argues that in the United States, immigrant children's proficiency in English improves while their heritage language declines. The focus of this study is to determine the proficiency level and use of heritage language among second-generation Korean-Americans youths, how they identify themselves as culturally and the interrelationship between the two. Lee states that "cultural identity is formed by the complex configuration of one's awareness of one's own cultural and recognition of the social group
