Media and immigrant children (original) (raw)
Related papers
Revealing the Role of Electronic Media in Shaping Multilingual Children
Proceedings of the International Joint Conference on Arts and Humanities 2021 (IJCAH 2021), 2022
Natural bilingual children are those whose languages are acquired through their parents and community. However, this paper aims to analyse how bilinguals are shaped early within their life as children through the help of electronic media. This method aims to reveal the role of electronic media in shaping bilingual children using Piaget's cognitive development theory. This study applied the qualitative method, and the data were taken from a series of interviews of three subjects who were all avid media consumers as a child. The results showed that parents exposed their children to these media because it can help their children pass the time or simply do not have the time to play with their children. Children later processed the media through their cognitive ability, which in turn affects their behaviour and language development. Children mostly imitate the shows they watched either from behaviour or language. Lastly, this study also found that children who have the most exposure to foreign media have a better chance of becoming bilingual.
Media uses in immigrant families: Torn between “inward” and “outward” paths of integration
This study examines the roles of the different media -those in the host language, those in the mother tongue and those of the global media -in the lives of immigrant children and adolescents from the former Soviet Union in Israel, at a time when they are coping with complex and unique personal and social challenges as a result of the immigration process and the need to solidify a new identity. In addition, the study looks at the parents' role in their children's media choices and the roles fulfilled by the media in immigrant family conflicts and in bridging intergenerational gaps.
JPAIR Institutional Research
The study delves into the perception of the parents of learners whose first language is English towards Mother Tongue-based Multilingual Education (MTBMLE). The questionnaire accumulates the perception of parents as important stakeholders in MTBMLE implementation to provide insight into family language policy in the Philippines. Native English speakers in this study refer to Filipino children who use English more comfortably than any other language at home in the Central Philippines region, with Sinugbuanong Binisaya as the local mother tongue. The study uses Personality Implicit Theory, Threshold Theory, and Sociocultural Theory to describe how these parents feel about their children’s mother tongue acquisition. Findings revealed that parents whose children are native English speakers agreed to the benefits of the mother tongue in the language and sociocultural development of the learners. Thus, native English speakers may unconsciously learn the language of the environment (Sinugb...
Frontiers in Psychology, 2023
Migration is a complex process associated with a range of social, economic, and political reasons. In the U.S., almost one-quarter of the total population of parents are immigrant parents of children ages 0–10. Immigrant parents transmit values from their culture of origin as well as their language to their children. Additionally, they may undergo a process of cultural and psychological change known as acculturation. Research has shown that acculturation can be linked to parenting styles and adolescents’ psychological well-being and behavioral problems. However, little is known about the associations among immigrant parents’ acculturation, their home language and literacy practices, and their bilingual children’s language skills. This study explores the relationships among reasons for migration, parental acculturation, home language and literacy practices, and child expressive vocabulary in English and their heritage language (HL). A group of 190 Spanish-English (N = 66) and Chinese-English (N = 124) dual language learners (DLLs) (mean age = 48.98 months) and their Chinese and Mexican parents (mean age of migration = 18.57 and 21.38 years old respectively participated. Frequency counts revealed that Mexican American families migrated to the U.S. mostly for multiple reasons, including joining family members, getting married, and looking for better education or job opportunities, whereas most Chinese American families migrated for family reasons only. Path analysis models showed that, for both cultural groups, language input in Spanish and Chinese mediated the relationship between parents’ cultural orientations and DLLs’ HL expressive vocabulary. These findings emphasize that despite the heterogeneity of immigrant families and the variability in DLLs’ vocabulary skills in preschool, there exist some similarities across immigrant parents and bilingual children. A deeper understanding of acculturation practices and home language use can help educators better support children from diverse backgrounds and promote cultural awareness and sensitivity in the classroom.
Indonesian Journal of Applied Linguistics
Parents of transnational sojourner families, who stay temporarily in a country other than their own, navigate across online and offline spaces to mediate their children’s socialization into the linguistic competence they need for both contexts, namely the host country and the homeland. Simultaneously, their children establish agency in developing their own linguistic competence. However, language socialization studies have rarely examined the interconnection between parents’ mediation and children’s agency across both online and offline spaces of socialization. In this light, this study presents an ethnographic study that examined parents’ mediation and a child’s agency in the online and offline language socialization of an Indonesian-Muslim transnational sojourner family in the United States, which is underexplored in language research. Additionally, using Darvin and Norton’s (2015) investment model, it explored how the family’s identities, ideologies, and capital structured the c...
Canadian Journal of Applied Linguistics (CJAL)/ …, 2010
This qualitative study aims to explore the loss and maintenance of Spanish in Latin American children in Vancouver from the perspective of parents. It focuses on the experiences of children either developing bilingually (Spanish-English) or monolingually (English). The participating families were from Colombia, Guatemala, and El Salvador, and had children between the ages of three and seventeen. Drawing on semi-structured interview data, the article highlights the complexity of the issues affecting maintenance and loss of L1 and points to the multifaceted nature of the attendant consequences. The discussion mainly revolves around the issues of cultural identity, the role of family, intergenerational communication and the size of the L1 community.
Young children as intercultural mediators: Mandarin-speaking Chinese families in Britain
Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 2015
As a native Chinese person living overseas and a sociologist of education studying Chinese diaspora, I opened this book with great interest. After reading the first few pages I quickly became absorbed in Guo's work. It deviates from the bulk of literature about intercultural practices within the family milieu of Chinese immigrants. Much extant work interrogates the intergenerational reproduction of Chinese heritage in a diasporic context, where Chineseness is transmitted from older generations to younger generations, through a trajectory full of potholes and distractions, coupled with opportunities and benefits. Guo's work differs, however, in its contemplation of the culture flow in a reverse direction: How Chinese children help acculturate and socialize their immigrant parents in Britain. The first chapter frames the sociological domain of the book through a penetrating revisit of some key notions: migration, acculturation, and cultural codes. Building on this conceptual foundation, Guo argues the indispensable role that children play in the acculturation of immigrant parents, a phenomenon largely overlooked in research and often invisible to immigrant families. Hence, Guo reconceptualizes "childhood" and debates children's cultural mediation in Chapters Two and Three respectively. Chapter Two adopts an emergent sociological paradigm. Problematizing Piaget's developmental psychology that tends to stress children's biological immaturity, social dependency, and epistemological incompetency, Guo considers children to be active agents, engaged actors, smart negotiators, and decision makers within variable contexts. This gives rise to Chapter Three's discussion of children's cultural mediation in explicit and implicit forms, with different levels of visibility in family life, different levels of self-awareness of, and challenges for, being child mediators, as well as the various changes in child-parent power relationships. The next four chapters examine empirical data collected from six Chinese immigrant families. Vignettes and dynamics of these families are provided in
The research reported here is part of an overall study drawing upon a Vygotskian cultural–historical approach to explore Chinese-Australian families’ pedagogy in supporting children’s bilingual heritage language development. Imagination is a psychological process for the child, where the development of speech is linked to the development of imagination as a higher cultural function (Vygotsky, 1987a). This study gives insight to the links between imagination in play and language development through play pedagogy at home. In the larger study, from which this paper draws its data, the methods of data generation included video interviews and observations with three families. The focus was on interactions that contributed towards language development in the home context. Drawing on Vygotsky’s (1987a, 2004b) theory of imagination in children’s play, Fleer’s (2010) dialectical model of play, and Kravtsova’s (2009) subject positioning theory, this paper specifically investigates parents’ interactive support of children’s bilingual heritage language development in role-play.The paper analyses the play experience of a four-year-old girl, Lin, and her father in a park, in order to discuss the importance of imagination in adults’ instructions within the child’s zone of proximal language development through play. This provides the foreground for approaching language development within a dialectical process of collective and individual imagining in play. It is argued that Lin’s father uses play as a pedagogical tool to support Lin’s bilingual heritage language development.