Immigrant Parents' Linguistic Pragmatism

• In Event: 56.052 - International Perspectives on Bilingualism in Early Childhood Education and Care Programs

Abstract

This paper presents findings from “Children Crossing Borders,” a study of immigrant parent and preschool teachers’ perspectives on early childhood education in five countries. The method of the study was to make videos of typical days in preschool classrooms serving a significant number of recent migrant children in England, France, Germany, Italy, and the United States and then use these videos as cues for focus-group interviews with parents and teachers. This focus of this paper is what immigrant parents in the study had to say about language issues in their child’s preschool.

A key finding of the study is that immigrant parents tend to be pragmatic and strategic in the way they think about their children’s early education, including their attitudes towards bilingual education. Rather than having fixed ideas about what should happen in their children’s preschools, immigrant parents make calculations about what their child needs now, the world he/she will encounter in the near and more distant future, and the kind of person they want to see their child become. This parental calculation includes a consideration of both their hopes and their fears, and reflects their assessment of the affordances and constraints of the local context in in which they live, and their understandings (correct or incorrect) about bilingualism, language learning, and language loss.

The pragmatism of immigrant parents helps to explain, for example, our finding that while almost all of the immigrant parents’ we interviewed expressed the desire that their children grow up retaining fluency in their home language, for many parents this desire was trumped by the urgency they feel for their children to quickly acquire fluency in the language of their new country, which leads many of them to favor a mono-lingual approach over a bilingual one. Immigrant parents’ frequently express concern about their children’s academic readiness for primary school, thinking that leads them to wish for the school to do all it can to help their children “catch-up” with their non-immigrant peers. Parents see the gap as resulting not just from their child’s lack of fluency in the national language when he or she starts preschool but also from their own lack of cultural capital. This leads them to want the preschool to compensate for what they can’t provide for their children, such as preparing them to speak, read, and write in a new language.

We also found that immigrant parents in different regions of a country may want different things in their children’s preschools as, for example, Mexican parents near the Mexican border in Arizona wanting English-only used in school while parents in Iowa want bilingualism. This makes pragmatic sense when we consider that there is a realistic risk of children living in a mostly Spanish speaking community near the border failing to become totally fluent in English and of Mexican children growing up in Iowa, surrounded by a sea of English (only) speakers, losing their Spanish.

Author

• Joseph J. Tobin, University of Georgia