Abstract
In view of the political and practical difficulties encountered in realising bilingual education for young language minority children, the present study – a secondary analysis of data from a more comprehensive study – reconsiders the role of parents in providing cognitively challenging first language contexts. The study reports the results of an intensive two-year home-based educational programme for 4–6-year old Turkish minority children in The Netherlands. The mothers who worked with their children at home carried out the structured programme in Turkish. There were modest but statistically significant effects on general cognitive and pre-mathematic skills tested in Dutch, on Turkish vocabulary, and as a trend but not statistically significant on Turkish syntactic skill. There were no effects on Dutch vocabulary and Dutch syntactic skill. Overall the results indicate that involving parents in their children's education through a structured home-based educational programme may add to the effects of preschool education. It may be a means to promote balanced bilingual development and to avoid first language loss.
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