Harmonious Bilingual Experience and Child Wellbeing: A Conceptual Framework

• In Event: Dual Language Development in the U.S. and Singapore: Multifaceted Experiences, Multifaceted Effects During Early Childhood

Abstract

Introduction. The notion Harmonious Bilingual Development has drawn increasing attention in recent years as it views children’s bilingual development in a wider scope, exploring the relations between bilingual experience and family members’ wellbeing. Compared to the relationship between child bilingualism and early cognitive development, significantly less is known about the benefits and obstacles that bilingual children and their family members may uniquely experience in their social life, and the impact of such experience on their social-emotional wellbeing.

Hypotheses. The current study operationalizes the concept with specific parental and child bilingual experiential factors and proposes a harmonious bilingual experience framework (Figure 1) on bilingual children’s social-emotional wellbeing, addressing 1) the influences of parental bilingual proficiency and perception on parental bilingual language use, 2) the impact of parental language use on children’s language use, literacy environment, and bilingual receptive vocabulary size, as well as 3) such bilingual experience and proficiency in relation to children’s wellbeing.

Study population. 123 English-Mandarin bilingual children (4-5 years old; 61 girls and 62 boys) were recruited: their parents filled in questionnaires on their bilingual perception and home bilingual environment and reported their own and children’s social-emotional behavioral skills.

Methods. Children’s and parents’ social-emotional and behavioral skills were assessed with the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire (SDQ) (Goodman, 1997). Children’s English and Mandarin receptive vocabulary sizes were assessed with a locally designed picture matching task, which is similar to PPVT in format. Children’s nonverbal intelligence was assessed with Raven’s Colored Progressive Matrices.

Results. Our bilingual sample generally supported the proposed conceptual framework. Specially, parental English and Mandarin proficiency has been found to significantly affect their language use in the respective language. Parental language use has been found to influence children’s language use, literacy activity, as well as receptive vocabulary sizes in dual languages. Lastly, children’s bilingual experience has been found to influence their own social emotional skills, after controlling the impact of parental social emotional skills (Figure 2). Specifically, better societal language skills and more frequent bilingual reading are found to promote children’s prosocial skills, while more children’s books predicted lower children’s total difficulty level.

Author

• He Sun, Nanyang Technological University
  Presenting Author