Recently the Read lab conducted a preliminary survey of local parents who are raising young English and Spanish learners to find out more about the choices parents make when sharing books with their young dual-language learners that support both languages. We discovered that categorizing children’s home language and shared reading experiences is not an “either/or” (or “esto/aquello”) dichotomy, and that locally there are many different flavors of what it means to be a bilingual family!
Parents of varying proficiency themselves in each language helped us with the survey. And, while there were no overall differences in the amount of shared reading parents do with their children based on their primary language at home, and no differences in the variety of regular readers or the likelihood that it is usually mom who is the primary reader (go madres!). Parents in primarily English speaking or primarily Spanish speaking homes reported reading with their kids much more frequently in their own more proficient language. However (this is the fun part), parents who identified their household as equally bilingual reported reading in their less proficient language more often than the other two groups, often commenting that they did so in an effort to bolster their child’s dual-language learning, even if it meant challenging themselves or making mistakes in front of their child. Also, we found that in each group, parents’ attitudes and rules about language mixing also ranged from a strict policy of non-mixing (e.g., “we only Speak Spanish at home, no English allowed!”) to frequent and enthusiastic translating between Spanish and English.
The results from our survey so far are already interesting, as they spark new questions about how cross-language shared reading and mixing and translating may all be influencing what young children learn from stories in dual-language learning homes!
We will be presenting some of these findings at the Association for Psychological Science meeting in San Francisco in May, and also at the Jean Piaget Society Meeting in Amsterdam in June – so stay tuned for what our academic colleagues think of this work 🙂
But in the meantime, the survey responses we have collected are also helping us with the Spanish/English storybooks study we are just getting started here at home in San Jose. Knowing more about the language practices and preferences of parents who read with their preschool-aged dual-language learners will help us find the right books for the right kinds of learners in our local community.
If *you* are raising a dual-language learner (of any language pair, not just Spanish and English) what do you think? How do you use storybooks to support either or both of your child’s languages? Do you have strategies that involve translating, mixing, or immersion? Let us know! And also, if you’d like to participate in the Spanish/English storybooks study, send us an email and we’ll tell you more about it: childresearch@scu.edu