The Role of Parent-Child Interactions in Dual Language Learners’ Home Language Development

• In Event: Promising Scholarship in Education Research: Dissertation Fellows and Their Research

Abstract

The Role of Parent-Child Interactions in Dual Language Learners’ Home Language Development

Children whose families use primarily a minority language at home (dual language learners, or DLLs) often experience declining skills in their minority language after beginning school in the socially dominant language. A growing body of research has shown that the quantity and quality of parental input is predictive of child language outcomes, yet less is known about the role of parental input in bilingual contexts. Using home-based, structured observations of 32 Boston-area Spanish-speaking parents and their 3- or 4-year-old child at two timepoints nine months apart, the current study asks whether parent input and child usage in each language change or remain stable following DLLs’ transition to English-medium preschool, and whether features of parent input predict DLLs’ expressive language skills in their minority home language. I found that 1) parents used primarily Spanish with their children at both timepoints (>95%), but increased in their English use in Time 2; 2) children used significantly more English than parents on average, increased in their English use over time, and varied in their relative English and Spanish use by activity; 3) parents’ syntactic complexity (but not overall quantity of talk or lexical diversity) significantly predicted children’s Spanish usage and skills before and after preschool entry. These findings add to current understanding of how contextual factors influence DLLs’ development in a minority home language during the transition to school in early childhood, and suggest that caregiver input containing longer, more complex utterances promotes DLL children’s minority language skills alongside the socially dominant language.

Author

• Sarah Surrain, The University of Texas - Health Science Center at Houston