“Si le Entiendo, le Respondo”: Parents’ Practices to Support Bilingual Development During Transition to School

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

Abstract

Introduction: More than one third of U.S. children are born to Latine families (U.S. Census Bureau, 2019), and an estimated 85% of Latine parents speak Spanish with their children (Lopez et al., 2018). For this growing group of emergent bilinguals, developing and maintaining Spanish is critical for family communication, identity development and subsequent learning (Arredondo et al., 2016; Marchman et al., 2020; Schofield et al., 2012). Spanish-speaking parents in the U.S. tend to value their child’s bilingualism but have questions about how to support their child’s Spanish development (Author, 2021). A common dilemma is how to respond to their child’s code-switching (CS) to English in Spanish-language conversations. Seminal studies of bilingual parent-child interactions classified parental discourse strategies in response to child CS on a spectrum from high-constraint (requesting the child to translate) to low-constraint (continuing the conversation in the other language) (Lanza, 1997). High-constraint strategies were found to be more effective for sustaining children’s use of the minority language. However, little is known about the degree to which Spanish-speaking parents in the U.S. use such strategies, and if they contribute to children’s Spanish development. Grounded in Family Language Policy (FLP) (e.g., King et al., 2008), this multi-method study explores the language beliefs, practices, and planning of Spanish-speaking parents in the northeastern U.S. It also investigates the alignment between parents’ reported and observed language practices, and their relation to children’s concurrent and later Spanish skills.

Hypotheses: We expected that parents would view bilingualism as valuable for their child but vary in their language practices and FLPs (i.e., expectations about when, where, or with whom their child used each language). We expected that parents who used high-constraint strategies and articulated an FLP would have children who grew more in their Spanish expressive language skills.

Study Population: Spanish-speaking parent-child dyads in the greater Boston area (n = 35) were visited at home on 1-3 occasions spanning more than two years. At wave 1, children were 3-4 years old, and parents reported no language development concerns.

Methods: Visits consisted of a 15-20 minute video-recorded observation using the three bags task (Ware et al., 2000), child assessments in Spanish and English, and a structured parent interview. Open responses to interview questions were transcribed and coded. Video observations were transcribed using CLAN (MacWhinney, 2000) and coded for parent responses to child CS.

Results: Parents reported that their child’s bilingualism was “extremely important” (77%) or “very important” (23%). Thirty-one percent reported having a FLP (e.g., “only Spanish at home”). Fifty percent reported using only high-constraint strategies in response to their child’s CS, 32% reported using only low-constraint strategies, and 18% reported using both high and low-constraint strategies. In contrast, observed responses to child CS were primarily low-constraint (78%) and fewer were high-constraint (22%). Few significant associations were found between parent language practices and child language skills. However, parents who were observed to use more response strategies overall tended to have children with lower Spanish vocabulary scores, likely because children with less-developed Spanish code-switched to English more frequently.

Author

• Sarah Surrain, University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston
  Presenting Author