“Learning Cantonese will help us”: Elementary school students’ perceptions of dual language education

ABSTRACT

Though Cantonese has been spoken in the United States since the 1880s, very little is known about the attitudes of younger Cantonese speakers and learners and their ideas about their bi/multilingual identities. We fill this gap by reporting findings from focus group interviews with 14 fourth and fifth graders attending a Cantonese-English DLI school. We asked participants to discuss their beliefs about bi/multilingualism, their experiences with the DLI program, and their future aspirations using Cantonese. Three main themes resulted from the focus groups: utilitarian and intrinsic ideologies, the need for contextualizing language learning, and their general perceptions about their schooling experiences and building communicative repertoires. Specifically, findings show that students were expressive in discussing languages as a resource, the role of Cantonese in Chinese American immigration history, and the tensions between Cantonese and other more “economically useful” languages like Mandarin. Our data call for heightened attention to young learners’ language ideologies and the need to better understand the complex ways learners see themselves as bi/multilingual individuals and their various intrinsic and instrumental perceptions of language learning and use.

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank our research assistants, Melissa Chen and Michaela Ruiz, for their help on this project. We also want to extend our thanks to the anonymous reviewers for their insightful feedback on our paper.

Notes

¹ We choose to use the term “partner language” for all non-English languages because “the aim is for students, regardless of their native language, to become bilingual and biliterate. This is achieved through teaching that encompasses both English and a classroom partner language, which is the first language for some students (especially those in two-way programs) and the second or third language for others” (Burkhauser et al., 2016, p. 429).

² Self-identified ethnicity choices were: Chinese/American, Other Asian (not Chinese), Not Asian. Self-reported language background choices were: native Chinese speaker, Chinese heritage learner, Chinese-English bilingual, native English speaker. We acknowledge that identities are flexible and dynamic and reach beyond these four categories. In an attempt to account for this, students were able to check more than one identity category.

Additional information

Funding

This research was funded by the Language Learning Small Grant and USF Faculty Development Funds.