RESEARCH ARTICLES Chinese Immigrant Families ...

NHSA Dialog, 15(4), 303–318 C 2012, National Head Start Association Copyright ISSN: 1524-0754 print / 1930-9325 online DOI: 10.1080/15240754.2012.721025

RESEARCH ARTICLES

Chinese Immigrant Families and Bilingualism Among Young Children Alice Sterling Honig and Yili Xu Syracuse University, Department of Child and Family Studies

Thirty-five children (17 boys and 18 girls, 4 to 8 years old) in 2-parent Chinese immigrant families had attended English-speaking facilities for 35.0 months (boys) and 32.9 months (girls), respectively. They were tested at home with the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test–Revised (PPVT-R) and the Mandarin version of PPVT-R. No gender differences were found. Maternal English PPVT-R vocabulary (M = 112.9) correlated positively with child PPVT-R scores (r = . 35, p = . 04). The longer the children attended English-only educational facilities, the higher were their English PPVT-R scores (r = .327, p = .059), even when controlling for maternal scores. Children (n = 12) who had spent about 2 years (22 to 26 months) in English-speaking educational facilities had English PPVT-R standardized scores (M = 94.8, range = 71–110) close to the average (M = 100) score of English monolinguals. Chinese receptive language scores increased during the preschool years and were normative with monolingual Chinese children until about age 6, and then they decreased. The younger the children, the higher their Chinese PPVT-R vocabulary (r = −.73, p < .00005). Chinese immigrant families, whose goal is bilingual proficiency, may need to provide special culture/language after-school instruction or make efforts to continue to speak Chinese with their children during daily routines. Keywords: bilingualism, Chinese children, receptive language

Bilingual/multilingual families in the United States increased by 103% since the 1980s (Shin & Bruno, 2003). Indeed, in the United States, one fifth of schoolchildren speak a non-English home language. Yet, most bilingual researches and prescriptive materials focus on English-Spanish programs in the United States and English-French immersion programs in Canada (Li, 2006; Macrina, Hover, and Becker, 2009; Tabors, 2008). Although Chinese is the third largest mother tongue in the United States (Shin & Bruno, 2003) with Mandarin being the most common language spoken in China, few studies examine EnglishChinese bilingualism. Spanish and French are similar to English phonologically (sounds) and Correspondence should be addressed to Alice Sterling Honig, Department of Child and Family Studies, Syracuse University, 323G Lyman Hall, Syracuse, NY 13244. E-mail: [email protected]

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orthographically (writing), but Mandarin is not. The development of English-Chinese bilingualism can be quite different from English-Spanish and English-French bilingualism because Chinese and English “contrast sharply in their writing systems as well as their spoken forms” (M. Wang, Perfetti, & Liu, 2005, p. 68). Culture and parental beliefs may also contribute to differences in language development (Gleason, 2005). For example, many Chinese parents desire their children to master both English and Chinese well so that their children can attain high achievements in American society in the future and also maintain family cohesiveness (Luo & Wiseman, 2000). Because the Chinese population is growing in the United States, there is an urgent need for teachers to understand the language development of young children in Chinese immigrant families. Having peers who speak Mandarin in the classroom may support the positive involvement of second-language (L2) learners. In a classroom of English-speaking children that included Chinese 3 12 -year-old peers, the Mandarin-speaking children showed greater play initiation and organization. They could take on family roles comfortably together and increase their emotional well-being while they also learned English (Feng, Foo, Kretschmer, Prendeville, & Elgas, 2004). A practical concern of many Chinese immigrant parents is how to help their children excel in English and also practice and retain their Chinese language heritage at the same time. The dual expectation of two languages usually poses a dilemma for these parents. Here are some examples of the concerns they usually have: Should I speak Chinese all the time at home? Will that impede my children’s ability to catch up to their English monolingual peers at school? If I’m going to speak both Chinese and English at home, how should I balance them? At what age should I send my children to English-speaking schools or teach them English? Will the two languages interfere with each other? My English pronunciation is not native-like. Should I avoid speaking English to my children? This study attempts to add to our understanding of how children’s age; gender; age of first attending an English-speaking facility (age of enrollment); time children have spent in Englishspeaking facilities, such as childcare and schools; and language(s) used by parents in story reading influence both English and Mandarin receptive vocabulary abilities for children age 4 to 8 years old in Chinese immigrant families in the United States.

LITERATURE REVIEW There are several disciplines that are concerned with bilingualism—linguistics and child development are two of these. Linguists study how age of acquisition (AOA), gender, input (the exposure to a language), and children’s first language (L1) affect their acquisition of an L2. For example, there are no articles such as “the” or “a” in Chinese. The differences between the two languages can be an impediment for a Chinese child trying to acquire phonological competency as well as fluency in English as a second language (ESL). Child development specialists are interested in knowing how social factors, such as ethnic identification, parent beliefs and values, friends, and communities influence people to acquire or not to acquire adequate language abilities in an L2 (Place & Hoff, 2011; L. Wang & Hyun, 2008). Teachers with children whose primary language is not English also need to know about possible learning difficulties and how to help ESL children progress well in classroom learning. Let us examine what ESL studies have found.

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Age of Acquisition (AOA): Effects on Phonology and Syntax AOA refers to the age of onset of learning an L2. Linguists try to answer the question “Is there a critical period beyond which it is impossible for children to acquire a second language as fully as a native speaker?” Lenneberg (1967) proposed a critical period hypothesis arguing that L1 acquisition must occur during a critical period from early infancy to adolescence due to cerebral lateralization. In an effort to test if the critical period hypothesis applied to L2 learning, that is, if there was age difference in L2 acquisition, Snow and Hoefnagel-Hohle (1978) tested the natural acquisition of Dutch by English speakers of different ages three times during their first year in Holland with tests of pronunciation, auditory discrimination, morphology, sentence repetition, sentence translation, sentence judgment, vocabulary, story comprehension, and storytelling. Children 12 to 15 years old and adults scored highest during their first 3 months of arrival, and children 8 to 10 years old and 12 to 15 years old scored the highest at the end of their first year. However, 3- to 5-year-old children scored lowest at each time period. Thus in this study, young children did not show an advantage in L2 learning. Johnson and Newport (1989) obtained different results when they tested English grammar skills of 46 native Korean or Chinese speakers who had arrived in the United States between the ages of 3 and 26 years at the time of testing. For people who had arrived before puberty, those who arrived at younger ages did score higher in syntax (grammar) tests compared with people who had arrived at older ages. For people who arrived after puberty, there was no significant correlation between age of arrival and test performance. Their study supported the critical period hypothesis as did a study in England by Tahta, Wood, and Loewenthal (1981). These researchers recruited 109 participants ages 9 to 77 years old in London who had lived in the United Kingdom for a minimum of 2 years. All had learned ESL between age 6 and age 15. Participants read a paragraph in English and three independent judges assessed whether the person reading had a “foreign accent.” Those who had learned English by age 6 had no accent. But participants who had started learning English after 12 to 13 years of age invariably had an accent, usually quite marked. Some people who had started learning English between 7 and 11 years old had either no accent or a very slight accent. Thus, learning accentless English phonology was indeed a function of how young children were when they began studying ESL.

Gender and Culture “In research of the monolingual English-speaking population . . . girls often outperform boys in language skills, in particular on vocabulary measures starting at an early age” (Duursma et al., 2007, p. 185). Gender can play a significant role in language and school attainments among immigrant families, especially those coming “from countries whose culture is characterized by a traditionally sharp differentiation of sex roles and distinct socialization patterns for males and females” (Portes & Hao, 2002, p. 893). For example, Gibson (1989) reported that Indian Sikh parents in California strongly encouraged their boys to excel in school in preparation for college while simultaneously steering their daughters toward traditional homemaking activities in preparation for their culturally prescribed future roles as wives and mothers. Wolf (1997) reported similar patterns of divergent gender socialization in his study of Filipino Americans.

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This phenomenon has also been observed in Chinese immigrant families. That is, even though current Chinese parents no longer deprive girls of education chances as most parents did a century ago, families may still “hold certain attitudes and beliefs about these issues, depending on their cultural heritage” (Tabors, 2008, p. 172).

Language Input Language input refers to “the language to which learners were exposed” (Gass & Selinker, 2001, p. 259). The amount of language input significantly influences children’s vocabulary growth (Place & Hoff, 2011). In the United States, marked differences in the vocabulary abilities of 14- to 16month-old children have been reported as a function of amount of maternal talk (Huttenlocher, Haight, Bryk, Seltzer, & Lyons, 1991). Vermeer’s (2001) study of 1,600 Dutch monolinguals and bilinguals ages 4 to 7 years old reported a high correlation between the probability of knowing a word and teachers’ language input frequency in primary education classrooms. However, the effects of the amount of input on syntax learning are not obvious. Friedlander, Jacobs, Davis, and Wetstone (1972) studied a 1-year-old child who had developed a rudimentary grasp of the Spanish language, even though her father spent very limited time with her, less than 5% of the child’s overall “language listening opportunities” (p. 735). When he came home from work, the dad spoke to her in her crib every day in Spanish. In another study, Schiff (1979) studied five hearing children of deaf parents and noted that children spending fewer than 20 hrs weekly with hearing adults still developed normally. Thus, for vocabulary building, the amount of language input may not always influence language acquisition. The learning of each word needs only a threshold amount of exposure, which is called a “critical mass” (Pearson, 2007, p. 401). That is, once a child figures out the meaning of a new word, then further input may have no effect. But input must provide new words or else children’s vocabulary size will not grow, no matter how many old words they hear every day (Pearson, 2007). Real-world experience with words, rather than raw amount of exposure, may influence bilingual children’s vocabulary learning (Oller, Pearson, & Cobo-Lewis, 2007). For example, the word pillowcase is more likely to be used at home than elsewhere, whereas blackboard is a word heard more often in school than at home. Bilingual children in minority families may possess a lot of “singlets”; that is, they know a word in one language but not in the other. This characteristic of bilingual knowledge helps to explain why bilingual children have lower vocabulary test scores in both L1 and L2 (Oller et al., 2007).

Community and Social Factors Social factors play an important role in the acquisition of languages by children who are bilinguals. Families, peers, schools and the community all exert an influence. Children in every culture invariably learn the language of the community, even when their parents do not speak that language (Pearson, 2007). However, a minority language that is not spoken in the community is usually at risk of not being spoken by the children with parents. For example, De Houwer (2007) studied 4,556 children in 1,899 families in a Dutch-speaking region of Belgium where at least one of the parents spoke a language (other than the majority language) such as French,


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Turkish, English, Arabic, Berber, German, Spanish, and Italian. All the children spoke the majority language of the community, but use of the home language was not universal. When the language of the community changes, for example, when children move to a new country with their parents, rapid acquisition of the new language and a halt in the development of the original language has been noted. Caldas and Caron-Caldas (2000) tape-recorded family mealtime conversations weekly over a 3-year period. The children’s language preference switched between French and English as their residing community changed between family residence in Quebec and Louisiana. What is interesting is that the switch was abrupt and occurred in a short period of time. What is more interesting is that the competence in their other language remained intact throughout and was recovered equally rapidly as they returned to the community. This rapid catch-up in fluency in two languages, depending on community living situation, has been reported in case studies of two French-German children, Christophe and Francois, in the DuFDE (German and French-Simultaneous First Language Acquisition) project (Meisel, 2007). Both children have a French mother and a German father and lived in Germany. Christophe hardly spoke any French at age 3 years 0 month (3;0). Three months later, he started using French again after visits to his grandparents in France. At age 3;10, he again avoided speaking French. Similarly, Francois spoke very little French since 2;8 and refused to speak at 4;0 after he attended a monolingual German kindergarten. But he resumed speaking French at age 4;3 after a stay in France. The mean length of utterance (MLU) is a measure of the average length of the child’s utterance in morphemes to gauge children’s syntactic development. Analysis of child MLU during the period of silence in French revealed that the French MLU values for both children did not drop; they did stay lower than in German. How important is the influence of community on quick language acquisition? Studies suggest that immersion in the language environment of a community encourages rapid learning of the L2 for immigrant children. Immersion has been adopted in China (Qiang & Zao, 2000). It is of interest that in Hong Kong, when teachers in immersion classrooms received special training to improve their own English, children’s L2 learning in English also improved (Lim, 2004). Immersion works best when teachers are fluent in the L2. Thus, social and linguistic contexts including social class, community language usages, language status, and national multilingualism make a big difference in children’s bilingual proficiency. Bialystok (2007) has argued that immigrant children in Germany acquire languages differently from children in Canada because German is the only language heard in German neighborhoods, whereas “a wide range of non-English languages” can be heard in Canadian streets (p. 395). Different social environments result in various experiences that affect developmental capacities of bilingual children in important ways.

School Influences Education in schools usually triggers the switch from minority language to majority language by children raised in language-minority families. In Kuo’s (1974) study of Mandarin-speaking families in the United States, children shifted from Mandarin to English when they reached preschool age despite parents’ efforts to maintain the ethnic language. Li (2006) pointed out that “when schools devalue students’ first language and enforce an English-only policy, this often results in students’ negative attitudes toward their first language and culture and their rapid

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language shift to English” (p. 359). The quality of a child’s relationship with the L2 speaking adult, whether family member or teacher, may play a crucial role in how well an immigrant child learns the new language. Even when teachers do not devalue the home language, children themselves may feel that the neighborhood playground and classroom language is more desirable.

Parental Influences Although their influence seems to decrease as children grow up, parents are the most significant of all language-learning resources in a child’s early life. The family is the child’s first school for language learning (Honig & Brophy, 1996). Parents’ attitudes toward the family language, their language use pattern at home, and their proficiency in the L2 influence the language development of children in immigrant families. When parents explicitly display positive attitudes toward the heritage language, such as enforcing “a heritage-language-only policy at home, children tend to develop a more positive attitude toward and higher levels of proficiency in the language” (Li, 2006, p. 360). In studies of 250 first- or second-generation Chinese immigrants, parent–child cohesion mediated the influence of parents’ attitude on children’s ethnic language retention (Luo & Wiseman, 2000). Parental language use may play a major role on the maintenance of minority language across generations. When both parents of 96 Latino English-language learners spoke only Spanish at home, their children, who received English instruction only at school, tended to have higher scores on Spanish vocabulary (Duursma et al., 2007). Parents’ proficiency in an L2 also predicts children’s language ability. Jia, Aaronson, and Wu (2002) studied 44 Mandarin-English bilingual adults and reported that “mothers’ English proficiency uniquely explained the same amount of L2 performance variance as did AOA. [Supplementary interviews with bilinguals revealed that] their language choice when interacting with their parents was based on their parents’ English proficiency” (p. 616). Mothers have proved to be more influential in shaping immigrant children’s ethnolinguistic identity than fathers (Luo & Wiseman, 2000). The researchers explained that this result, in their study of 250 Chinese Americans ages 1 to 21 years, may be due to the traditional roles played by Chinese fathers and mothers. Chinese fathers are supposed to be “stern, distant, and less approachable than the mother, [whereas a Chinese mother is supposed to be] the emotionallydevoted caretaker” (p. 320).

Grandparent Influence in Chinese Families Grandparents may also play an important role in the maintenance of ethnic language, especially in Chinese immigrant families, because Chinese culture encourages grandparent help with childcare (Luo & Wiseman, 2000). During the home visits to Chinese immigrant families in the United States in this study, most Chinese parents reported that they either invited grandparents to the United States to take care of infants and toddlers or they would leave young children with grandparents in China until the children reached preschool age or school age. As grandparents often speak only the ethnic language and have limited knowledge of English, they provide children


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in immigrant families with more opportunities to learn and to use their ethnic language. Luo and Wiseman (2000) observed that children in [the] highly cohesive grandparent-grandchild group tended to use Chinese more frequently, more proficiently, and have [a] more positive attitude toward Chinese language maintenance than those in [the] low cohesive grandparent-grandchild group. . . . Liking and respect towards their grandparents may trigger the immigrant children’s positive attitude towards their ethnic language and culture [as they] identified with their grandparents. (p. 321)

Family Literacy Practices Some immigrant parents worry that speaking the minority language at home or reading stories in minority language might inhibit children’s English acquisition in later schooling. Yet in a longitudinal study of 121 Spanish-speaking children in the United States, early literacy experiences supported subsequent English literacy development regardlessof whether the family literacy practices were in Spanish or English (Reese, Garnier, Gallimore, & Goldenberg, 2000).

Family Socioeconomic Status (SES) Family SES affects children’s literacy development, especially vocabulary building, through availability or paucity of printed materials in the home and as a function of family literacy practices such as writing and storybook reading. Social class affects vocabulary outcome (Hoff, 2003). Low-education mothers in the United States talked far less at home to their toddlers and preschoolers compared with mothers who had higher education, and children whose mothers provided richer talk had increased vocabularies (Hart & Risley, 1995). Family SES is also related to parents’ expectations of bilingual children’s language development. Middle-class (high SES) mothers may encourage competence in both languages, whereas some low-SES parents may value English, the majority language, more highly and others strongly wish the child to retain the ethnic language (Pearson, 2007). For Latino families in the United States, a composite of parents’ education and occupation significantly predicted family literacy practices, which in turn predicted early Spanish literacy and later English achievement (Reese et al., 2000).

Birth Order Effects As an unexpected by-product of their studies of 386,114 nineteen-year-old males in The Netherlands, Belmont and Marolla (1973) discovered that intelligence (correlated with language ability) was strongly correlated with birth order. Within each family, the last born showed a greater decline in intellectual performance than any other birth order. Zajonc, Markus, and Markus (1979) proposed a “confluence model” to explain the interesting findings of Belmont and Marolla. They put major emphasis on the intellectual environment, especially the intellectual level of siblings and parents, during the course of a child’s development. Our research only included children in first or second birth order. Future research, with larger samples of children than in the present study, may need to include additional “birth order” ranks.

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Heterogeneity of Outcomes for Bilingual Learning Depending on When Bilingualism Begins Bilingual children do not form a homogeneous group. Multiple factors affect children’s ESL learning. Indeed there are various types of bilingualism. Simultaneous bilinguals differ from sequential bilinguals. Simultaneous bilinguals are children raised, beginning from birth, in homes where two languages are spoken. Sequential bilinguals are children “who learn their second language after they learn their first language” (Gutierrez-Clellen, Simon-Cereijido, & Wagner, 2008, p. 5). Infants exposed to two languages from birth can phonetically process each as a native language with no delay or compromise in phonetic representation (Burns, Yoshida, Hill, & Werker, 2007). However, sequential bilinguals who acquire their L2 after some critical period (5 or 6 years of age) are vulnerable to cross-linguistic influences and often find it difficult to reach native-like competence in phonology or in expressive use of language (Francis, 2005). Among sequential bilinguals, two types can be distinguished. One includes children whose L1 is a minority language in the new country and L2 is a majority language, such as is the case for Chinese immigrant children in the United States. The other includes children whose L1 is a majority language and L2 is an additive language, such as children in China learning ESL. The linguistic distance between two languages also makes bilingualism different depending on the languages that are paired. For example, the bilingual advantage was found more pronounced for Turkish-Persian bilinguals than for Kurdish-Persian bilingual children (Kormi-Nouri et al., 2008). Turkish and Persian are completely different, whereas Kurdish and Persian are linguistically related. The researchers suggested the possibility that “dissimilarity between two languages may provide more distinct information and thereby increase the bilingual advantage. By contrast, similarity between two languages may provide more confounding and overlapping information, and thereby decrease the bilingual advantage” (Kormi-Nouri et al., 2008, p. 106). Similarly, Bialystok (1997) found that Chinese-English bilinguals outperformed French-English bilinguals in print concepts, whereas French-English bilinguals obtained exactly the same scores as their monolingual peers. Research has revealed complex relationships among a variety of variables that account for children’s ability to learn an L2. As noted earlier, these variables include family SES, frequency and quality of family language interactions and book reading, degree of distance between the orthography and pronunciation of the L1 and L2, child gender and birth order, age at which the L2 is introduced, availability for peer interactions using the L1 and L2, and extent of child exposure to the L2. This study sought to examine L1 and L2 receptive language achievement among young male and female children in Mandarin-speaking families. The children had attended English-speaking educational facilities for varying amounts of time.

METHOD Questions This study focused on young children in educated immigrant Chinese families living in two midsize American cities. Study questions were as follows:


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• Do comprehension scores differ by gender, birth order, or maternal language level? • Does language comprehension differ by timing or age of enrollment in English-speaking educational facilities? • Does it make a difference whether parents read storybooks in English or in Mandarin in terms of young children’s bilingual abilities?

Participants and Measures Children 4 to 8 years old, 17 boys (M = 71.4 months) and 18 girls (M = 71.3 months) had attended English-speaking facilities for 35.0 months (boys) and 32.9 months (girls), respectively. Children were tested at home first on Mandarin and then on English receptive vocabulary with the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test–Revised (PPVT-R) and the Mandarin PPVT-R. Both PPVT-R versions have excellent psychometric properties. The PPVT-R does not require child verbal responses, is easy to score, correlates highly with Stanford-Binet IQ scores, has high reliability, and has a very high ceiling. That is, it can be administered to persons from early childhood through older adulthood with norms available for each age group. The examiner presents a child with four simple line drawings per page and says, “Put your finger on the picture of the word I have said.” As further pages are shown, the words proceed from quite easy and common to more complex and rare. The middle-class Chinese immigrant families in this study represent a sample of convenience. Mass e-mail solicitations sent out to members of the Chinese community in each of two midsize cities (one in the Midwest and one on the East Coast) resulted in very few responses. Thus, each family was contacted in person or by telephone. In each of the cities, through church affiliations and in a Chinese culture school, additional parents were recruited by the “snowball” method by asking participating parents to refer other families. Each family was offered a small “thank you” gift for participating: either a Chinese foot massage for one family member or $10. Two families in the sample (one in each city) refused a recompense for participation. Data were gathered in two urban areas in order to increase the external validity of study findings. During recruitment, a brief introduction to the research was made. After a family consented, an appointment was scheduled. Most families chose to meet in their homes for this study, although some chose to meet at their church or at the children’s Chinese Sunday school. All data were collected during a single session except for one family, where the mother worked long hours and two sessions were required to gather the data. One of the researchers began first by reading the Institutional Review Board consent form in Mandarin to the parents, who could keep one consent form. The other form was kept for research records. The consent form for children was read aloud to each child, either in Mandarin or in English, depending on child preference. Each child was told that participation in the study was voluntary.

Data Collection Data collection proceeded in several steps. First, parents were asked to fill out a questionnaire requesting basic demographic information including level of education for each parent; how long

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the parents had been in the United States; the language(s) spoken at home during daily life, such as mealtimes; and parental storybook reading practices with the child. Information was gathered on child gender, age, and duration of attendance in English-speaking educational facilities, such as childcare or kindergarten. Next, the official Mandarin version of PPVT-R, Form B (Lu & Liu, 2002) was administered in order to assess the child’s Mandarin receptive vocabulary. This test took about 10 to 15 min. Each child was presented with a series of cards, each of which has four pictures, and the child was asked to name one of the four pictures that matches the examiner’s word spoken in Mandarin. The child needed to point to the picture that matches the spoken word. The next procedure was to assess the children’s English receptive vocabulary in response to items on the PPVT-R Form L (Dunn & Dunn, 1981). Again, the children were shown four pictures, and the examiner asked the child to point to one picture that matches the spoken English word. Each child was praised and positively encouraged as much as possible during each test and after the tests. Parents were present during the child testing but were asked kindly to stay quiet during the tests and not to give the child any hints. After the child assessment, the PPVT-R in English was administered to each mother in order to assess maternal receptive English vocabulary. This procedure with the mother usually took about 15 to 20 min. Many children expressed great interest in how their mothers would “play the game” and they wanted to stay in the room. They were gently asked to stay quiet so mom could answer on her own. All the children were present during the mothers’ assessments. A few of the younger preschoolers did blurt out an answer for their mothers, but those mothers ignored the hints and explained later that they believed their children were only guessing randomly. After all the assessments were completed, each child was invited to choose, from a gift box, a small decoration as a present. After mothers reported which language they used most in daily living situations and in story reading and completed the English PPVT-R, some requested knowing the PPVT-R scores. The examiner then stayed and calculated the scores and explained the results to those parents who made this request. When parents requested more information about how to help with their children’s language development, the examiner spent time providing specific tips on how to enhance children’s language development (Honig, 2001, 2004, 2007; Honig & Brophy, 1996) and again thanked the families for their participation. RESULTS AND DISCUSSION PPVT-R Scores and Child Gender Contrary to data from studies in Western cultures (Moore, 1967), no PPVT-R differences were found for first- and second-born children; nor were there any PPVT-R score differences for girls versus boys (see Table 1). However, in this study only receptive language was measured. Often, young female children, compared with male children, have been found to have advanced expressive language (Moore, 1967). Therefore, future studies will need to examine both receptive and expressive language in children who are living in Chinese-language families to see whether there are any gender differences across a broader range of language measures.


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TABLE 1 Children’s English and Chinese PPVT-R Scores, Maternal English PPVT-R Scores, and p Values of t tests Comparing Groups of Boys and Girls PPVT-R Scores Child English PPVT-R standardized score M SD Range Child Chinese PPVT-R standardized score M SD Range Maternal English PPVT-R raw score M SD Range

Total (N = 35)

Boys (n = 17)

Girls (n = 18)

t Test p Value

98.4 15.2 55–124

101.1 17.6 55–124

95.8 12.5 71–112

.317a

93.9 21.0 55–130

95.4 22.7 55–130

92.4 19.8 55–121

.688a

112.9 28.6 59–166

110.2 22.3 75–147

115.3 33.9 59–166

Note. PPVT-R = Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test–Revised. aOne-tailed t test.

Relationship of Maternal and Child English Vocabulary Raw Scores Maternal English receptive vocabulary (M = 112.9) did not differ whether the child tested was a boy or a girl, but maternal PPVT-R scores did correlate positively with child English PPVT-R scores (r = . 35, p = . 04).

Time Spent in English-Speaking Facilities The longer children had attended U.S. schools, as to be expected, the higher were their English PPVT-R scores (r = 3.27, p = .059) when controlling (by hierarchical multiple regression) for maternal PPVT-R scores. Children (n = 12) who had spent about 2 years (22 to 26 months) in English-speaking classrooms attained English PPVT-R standardized scores (M = 94.8, range = 71–110) close to the average (M = 100) level of English monolinguals. Parental positive encouragement for their children to learn English possibly played a key role. Analyses from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study (Han, 2012), tracking more than 16,000 Latino and Asian students from kindergarten through fifth grade, found that when children did not become fluent in English, they lagged considerably in both language and math scores by fifth grade. School and family supports for children to learn English may both be crucial factors for school success (http://nces.ed.gov/ecls/Kindergarten.asp). Thus, outcomes may differ for children living in families where parents may not realize how important their efforts are both for keeping the home language flourishing and also actively encouraging their children to learn English well. Schools need to reach out more actively to non-English monolingual families and partner with them (with the help of translators) so that parents can understand that bilingual fluency has been shown to have positive effects in children’s abstract thinking skills and cognitive abilities that promote school success (Bialystok, 1988).

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Children’s Mandarin Receptive Vocabulary Scores The average standardized score of children’s Mandarin receptive vocabulary was 93.9 (range = 55–130, SD = 21.0). Boys’ (M = 95.4) and girls’ (M = 92.4) scores did not differ significantly. Children’s Mandarin PPVT-R scores increased during the preschool years and were normative with monolingual Chinese children until about age 6, when their Mandarin PPVT-R scores decreased. Table 2 shows a significant negative correlation (r = −.64) between the amount of time children spent in English-speaking educational facilities and their receptive competence in Mandarin. This finding of possible loss of language in the second generation has been noted by others (Portes & Hao, 1998). In the present study, the younger the children, the higher their Mandarin receptive vocabulary scores (r = −.73, p < .00005). Maternal Story Reading Mothers reported that initially they read to children in Mandarin, but as their children had more experience in English educational environments, the mothers reported that they then switched to reading stories both in Chinese and English, and then, even later on, they read more in English. However, their story-reading language was not related (one-way analysis of variance [ANOVA]) to the children’s PPVT-R scores in English or Mandarin.

RECOMMENDATIONS TO HELP BILINGUAL CHILDREN FLOURISH How Teachers Can Help Early childhood educators have available curricula to facilitate English-language and literacy learning among bilingual children (Tabors, 2008). Based on the findings of this study, teachers will find it helpful to talk with parents about the progression of L1 and L2 language development that may be typical for young children raised in English-speaking childcare environments and elementary schools but living in families who speak another language at home. Parents may be TABLE 2 Pearson Correlations Between Children’s Language Scores, Maternal English PPVT-R Scores, Time Spent in English-Speaking Facilities, and Child’s Age Measure 1. Children’s English PPVT-R standardized score 2. Children’s Chinese PPVT-R standardized score 3. Maternal English PPVT-R raw score 4. Time spent in English-speaking facilities 5. Age of enrollment 6. Child age

1

2

−.116 .353∗ .342∗ −.104 .287

.022 −.638∗∗ −.041 −.734∗∗

Note. PPVT-R = Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test–Revised. ∗ p < .05. ∗∗ p < .01, two-tailed.

3

.107 −.147 .007

4

−.500∗∗ .653∗∗

5

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very eager that their children do well in English-speaking classrooms. Yet, in addition, families who wish their children to become proficient in English want their children to maintain proficiency in the language of the child’s culture. Maintaining both languages can prove challenging, particularly when educators do not know any words at all in a particular home language, such as Vietnamese, Hmong, or Mandarin Chinese. Teachers need to encourage parents to continue to use the home language. They also need to ask parents to teach them some familiar easy words and phrases (such as “hello,” “book,” and “do you need to use the potty?”) as well as some endearing words and encouraging words in the child’s home language. Suggestions for teachers include supporting English vocabulary by using pictures, gestures, and props to give a clear meaning to new words (Macrina et al., 2009; Tabors, 2008). Teachers can also set up a special chart in the classroom with English phrases plus home language translations (with pictures, if possible) that a child may need (such as asking to go potty, asking for help, or asking a classmate to share toys or to play together). Teachers in schools where children are mastering English grammar and orthography need to be particularly sensitive to the difficulties young children encounter in learning to write an L2 with very different orthography and language construction.

How Parents Can Help Even if a bilingual child has spent more time in English-speaking educational facilities and has begun to prefer to respond in English, parents can decide to continue speaking the home language at mealtimes, bath times, and during bedtime routines. A parent may feel discouraged that the child prefers to respond in English, but daily talk during intimate interactions is a wonderful way for the child to continue to hear the words and expressions of the family language.

Parent Story-Reading Practices. In this research, parents reported that they read stories in Chinese to children who had spent the least time in U.S. schools. As the children had more experience in English educational environments, the parents reported that they changed to reading more and more in English. However, their story-reading language was not related (one-way ANOVA) to the children’s PPVT-R scores in English or Mandarin. These findings are similar to results for families where Spanish is the home language (Reese et al., 2000). Parents may want to consider that if they switch completely to English in storybook reading over the early elementary school years, then perhaps later child Mandarin PPVT-R and/or expressive language scores may indeed decrease as the children’s scores increase in English. Parents can continue to tell family and culture tales and read storybooks in the home language with their young children. Having grandparents and other family members visit and speak in the native language with children or inviting children for summer vacations to the home country are other ways in which to help children sustain their language of origin.

How Programs and Communities Can Help The Office of Head Start (2008) has affirmed that “Head Start staff should share specific strategies to promote language expansion and to ensure an enriching language environment at home” (p. 21).

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Thus, Head Start program handbooks should specially advocate for parental storybook reading to children daily, regardless of the storybook language used. Daily reading to young children is the single most powerful predictor of children’s early success in school learning (Jalongo, 2007). Head Start directors may want to ask local libraries for help in compiling lists of children’s books available in a variety of other languages and then share these resources with parents. In some communities, after-school or weekend programs exist to help children maintain home language fluency as well as learn writing skills when the children are immersed daily in English-language schools. Some communities offer the opportunity of Sunday-morning Chinese language and culture school lessons, where teachers may be well attuned to children’s difficulties with Mandarin tones, word order, and orthography and thus can be particularly helpful as their students learn the complexities of writing in their home language as well as become proficient in English in their U.S. classrooms (Wang & Honig, 2010).

CONCLUSIONS Schools need to encourage family literacy supports in bilingual families regardless of which language parents use in daily activities or when reading to their children. Chinese immigrant families whose goal is bilingual proficiency may need to provide special opportunities (such as culture/language instruction on weekends) to support children’s Chinese vocabulary growth so children do not lose proficiency in Chinese (Wong, 1991). Early childhood teachers will be happy to learn from this study that within 2 years of attending English-speaking preschool classrooms, Chinese children’s receptive language performance in English was about the same level as U.S. monolingual children. With encouragement from teachers and parents, Chinese youngsters can retain their primary language and also become proficient in English to ensure success in early grade school work. And all of this is important because the United States is becoming more and more a multicultural society. Indeed, in some urban schools, dozens of different home languages are represented. Increased awareness of the needs of bilingual children for specific language supports and increased creativity in meeting the needs for children to flourish in their home languages as well as in English present an urgent and creative challenge for teachers and programs in U.S. schools. ACKNOWLEDGMENT This article originally was a poster presented at the 10th National Head Start Research Conference, Washington, DC, June 21–23, 2010. REFERENCES Belmont, L., & Marolla, F. A. (1973). Birth order, family size, and intelligence. Science, 182(4117), 1096–1101. Bialystok, E. (1988). Levels of bilingualism and levels of linguistic awareness. Developmental Psychology, 24, 550–567. Bialystok, E. (1997). Effects of bilingualism and biliteracy on children’s emerging concepts of print. Developmental Psychology, 33, 429–440. Bialystok, E. (2007). Language acquisition and bilingualism: Consequences for a multilingual society. Applied Psycholinguistics, 28, 393–397.


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