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Family and Parent Involvement in Dual Language Development |
Liping Wang |
Abstract |
This ethnographic study with four Chinese and four Hispanic elementary school children and their parents revealed that both parents and children had a strong desire to learn English well and maintain their heritage languages, but were also concerned that they might lose their heritage languages due to the pressure to learn English well and the lack of support from the schools. Interviews with the parents and the children together, with participant observations of the children at play in their communities, suggested that most parents took a great effort to help their children improve their English, but the effort that they took to help these children to maintain the heritage languages were limited. Similarly, participants in this study took various strategies to improve their English skills but showed various degrees of reluctance to use their heritage languages at home. The diverse living environment of the participants and their younger siblings in their families might have helped these participants to maintain their heritage languages. |
Full Text: PDF |