Asian Immigrants' Family-School Relationships and Literacy Learning: Patterns and Explanations

• In Event: 16.060 - Roundtable Session 3
  In Roundtable Session: 16.060-19 - Exploring Issues of Parental Involvement for Immigrant Children in the United States

Abstract

This presentation reports on a comprehensive review of interdisciplinary research on Asian immigrant families’ relationship with mainstream schools and the impact of such relationship on Asian students’ bi-literacy learning and development. The review reveals inconsistency between the wildly recognized high education aspiration among Asian immigrant parents and low parental involvement in their children’s schools. While they engage less in visible involvement activities in school, they focus more on systematic teaching of their children at home. These distinctive patterns of family-school involvement often lead to home-school discontinuity between two domains of language and literacy learning. This study has significant implications for Asian immigrant parents and mainstream teachers to develop reciprocal cultural understanding to facilitate compatible home-school learning experience for their children.

Authors

• Guofang Li, University of British Columbia

• Zhuo Sun, The University of British Columbia