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First language maintenance : the comparison of Chinese immigrant parents’ attitudes, the children’s language use patterns and their family environments

University of British Columbia

An exploratory study was conducted to investigate Chinese parents' attitudes toward their children's first language maintenance. Interviews were conducted to collect data from a total of 30 parents who came from two distinct socioeconomic and educational backgrounds. Fifteen parents sent their children to a university lab preschool (ULP group) and the other fifteen enrolled their children in a community-based day care (CDC group) in a Chinese-speaking neighborhood in Vancouver. The Family Environment Scale (FES) (Moos, 1974) was also used to collect information about the family social and emotional dynamics. All parents from both groups felt that it was important for their children to maintain their Chinese. However, it was found that parents and children from the CDC group used more Chinese than parents and children from the ULP group in most situations. Furthermore, the CDC parents were more concerned about the academic and literacy aspects of the language learning while the ULP parents were more personal and social oriented. These two groups of parents had similar scores in almost every sub-scale of the FES except for the sub-scales of active-recreational orientation, organization, and conflict. In the sub-scales of active-recreational orientation and organization, the ULP families had higher scores than the CDC families and there was a statistical significance between these two groups. The CDC group scored higher than the ULP group in the subscale of conflict and the scores of these two groups were statistically different. It was also found that there were positive correlations between some sub-scales scores in the FES and the language use patterns in the ULP group.

Thesis/Dissertation

application/pdf

2009-04-16

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http://hdl.handle.net/2429/7278

Curriculum Studies

University of British Columbia

UBCV

DSpace