Heritage speakers at very low levels of heritage language (HL) proficiency often do not receive focus in the literature because of their at-chance performance on many tasks their level of (dis)comfort with the HL and lack of self-selection in HL studies. However studying low proficiency heritage speakers—emergent heritage speakers henceforth—provides us with novel linguistic strategies that may not often be seen at higher levels of proficiency. Additionally these linguistic strategies may be even more unique when the language pairings that are typologically and genetically distant as is the case for Korean and English. In the present study we investigate the productive oral skills of emergent Korean heritage speakers. Korean is a head-final prodrop SOV language with case marking classifiers transitivity markers and agglutinative verb morphology none of which is supported by the dominant language English. In the present study our goal was to investigate (1) what areas of the heritage language provided the most difficulty in production of a narrative and (2) what linguistic strategies emergent heritage speakers of Korean use when faced with a task requiring their HL. Thirteen Korean heritage speakers ages 7-14 were recruited to participate in a story elicitation. The students in this study were emergent heritage speakers with very low levels of proficiency in Korean. The students attended a Saturday morning Korean heritage school as their only source of formal Korean instruction; all students came from homes where Korean is spoken occasionally but for not as the primary and only home language. In a one-on-one task with a Korean-speaking researcher each participant was asked to orally narrate 3-5 simple stories in Korean based on a sequence of pictures. Findings indicated that even with low proficiency emergent heritage speakers larger syntactic elements like SOV word order and agglutinative morphology was not compromised. The area that provided the most difficulty with overall fluency is vocabulary; not having sufficient vocabulary creates the largest hindrance to completing the task and provided the most frustration for the student (e.g. not having words like walk run walk chase park in a story about a dog who escapes its owner during a walk in the park is fraught with difficulty). As a strategy to overcome the lack of vocabulary students used typical methods like code-switching semantically similar words (e.g. ipta ‘to wear-generic’ instead of sseta ‘to wear on head’) and creating new words out of existing Korean words (e.g. creating the word “play” from a combination of “fun” and “make”).  Most notably once the researcher prompted the student with the correct vocabulary in dictionary form students were able to conjugate the vocabulary. Despite the typological distance between Korean and English emergent heritage speakers struggle predominantly with lexical—not grammatical—elements of the language. Implications for teaching Korean heritage language students at the beginner levels of instruction will be discussed.

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