Probability of Heritage Language Use at a Supportive Early Childhood Setting in Australia

Paola Escudero,Criss Jones Diaz,Eline Adrianne Smit,Gillian Wigglesworth,John Hajek

doi:10.3389/feduc.2020.00093

Paola Escudero, Criss Jones Diaz + Show 3 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3389/feduc.2020.00093

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Abstract

© Copyright © 2020 Escudero, Jones Diaz, Hajek, Wigglesworth and Smit. Despite well-established research that documents the intellectual, linguistic, sociocultural and familiar benefits of early childhood bilingualism, Australia's provision of heritage language (HL) support in early childhood (EC) settings is fairly minimal, resulting in little to no access to the HL outside of the home. We report on language data from a long day care preschool that has an open bilingual policy, where two languages (HL and English) are used in naturalistic interactions between children and educators. While the quantity of language input and output is known to impact on language proficiency, there are no prior studies which focus on establishing the quantitative nature of naturalistic language production in a bilingual preschool. Our goal was to document the relative language input and output of HL and English and to examine whether there are differences across age groups in the EC setting, and during different activity types. We followed a quantitative approach in data analysis, with child and educator observations over a period of 8 weeks and an analysis of targeted videos amounting to close to an hour of recordings per child. We used Bayesian modeling to test the probability of HL use in the different age groups and per activity type. Overall, HL input was higher for toddlers than preschoolers and toddlers received more HL input than English, while preschoolers received comparable input in both languages. The higher probability of HL input in toddlers was particularly evident during story time and playing activities. Our results indicate a high level of HL use in this EC setting, suggesting success in HL maintenance and promotion of early bilingualism. Further research should explore the children's relative language output in relation to their input, individual differences, as well as extending the current methodology to other similar settings in Australia.

Highlights

Like many English-speaking countries, Australia has an estimated 6.8 million overseas-born inhabitants representing 35% of Australia’s population with over 21% speaking a language other than English at home, with even greater numbers doing so in large urban centers (ABS, 2016)
The present study presents a quantitative description of the relative language use of English and an heritage language (HL) in an early childhood (EC) setting in Australia to document how the two languages were used in this setting, which overtly promotes a balanced use of two languages
Since the aim of the study was to examine the relative language use in the setting, we focused on age groups rather than individual children

Summary

Introduction

Like many English-speaking countries, Australia has an estimated 6.8 million overseas-born inhabitants representing 35% of Australia’s population with over 21% speaking a language other than English at home, with even greater numbers doing so in large urban centers (ABS, 2016). Language Use in Bilingual Preschools should lead to the active practice of government policy which favors multilingualism, but this has hardly been the case (Nicholas, 2014; Eisenchlas and Schalley, 2019) This situation is, slowly changing for school-age children, with the increasing provision of community (or heritage) language teaching in schools and in community-based programs (Cardona et al, 2008). Despite well-established research that documents the intellectual, linguistic, sociocultural, and familial benefits of early childhood bilingualism (Blom et al, 2014; Nicolay and Poncelet, 2015; Chang, 2016), Australia’s provision of heritage language (HL) support in early childhood (EC) settings, such as preschool, remains limited, as well as little researched with children typically learning or being exposed to English at the expense of their HL. This can result in subtractive bilingualism (cf. Fillmore, 1991; Cummins, 2014; Verdon et al, 2014)

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