Poster #56 - Enrichment Class and Children’s Bilingual Language Learning in Singapore

• In Event: Poster Session 06

Abstract

Enrichment Class is a billion-dollar industry in Asia (Wong, 2021). Many parents in Singapore sent their children to enrichment classes for better English and mother tongue language performance. Despite the heavy investment, it remains unclear how much children could benefit from such exposure. The current study explores this critical question with 125 four-five-year-old English-Mandarin bilingual children. The number of hours that children spent in the language enrichment classes, together with a series of well-established internal (e.g., age, nonverbal intelligence) and external factors (e.g., children’s English and Mandarin input at home, SES), were used to predict children’s receptive vocabulary and word reading skills in English and Mandarin Chinese respectively with linear mixed effects models. The results indicate that 36% of the children participated in English or Mandarin tuition classes, and 22.4% have enrichment classes in both languages. The amount of English enrichment class is not found to significantly predict either children’s English receptive vocabulary or English word reading skills (Table 1). Mandarin Chinese enrichment class, on the contrary, is found to be significantly related to children’s Mandarin word reading skills (Table 2). The differential impact of language enrichment classes on children’s dual language learning is probably attributed to the general bilingual setting in Singapore, where children’s mother tongue language is taken as a subject to learn at preschool and children have fairly limited exposure to mother tongue language on average (Sun et al., 2018, 2020). The social relevance of the results will be discussed.

Author

• He Sun, Nanyang Technological University
  Presenting Author