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ABSTRACT
‘Should I talk to my child in a language that I am not good at?’ This question reveals the dilemma that many bilingual parents are facing. In the current study, 301 English-Mandarin bilinguals’ mothers in Singapore self-evaluated their Mandarin proficiency and we assessed the 4–5 years old children’s Mandarin receptive vocabulary and grammar. We also investigated children’s bilingual language exposure with a parental questionnaire and children’s phonological short-term memory with CTOPP. The results indicated that mothers’ Mandarin proficiency would affect the amount of Mandarin they speak to their children. Those mothers with a medium- or high-level Mandarin proficiency demonstrated a significantly stronger influence on children’s Mandarin vocabulary and grammar than the mothers with lower Mandarin proficiency. Specifically, mothers’ Mandarin proficiency mediated the relations between familial SES and children’s Mandarin skills after controlling children’s Mandarin exposure at home, gender, and short-term phonological memory. Our findings suggest the unique role that maternal Mandarin proficiency plays in early heritage language learning. It indicates that mothers who have a decent command of heritage language should be encouraged to use this language more often with their children, considering maternal heritage language proficiency as a promotive factor from the influence of low SES.
Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank Dr. Adam Charles Roberts for his comments on data analysis of the paper. This study was funded by Singapore Ministry of Education (MOE) under the Education Research Funding Programme (OER 13/16 HS; OER 17/17 SH) and administered by National Institute of Education (NIE), Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Singapore MOE and NIE. The current paper is derived from the following conference presentation: Sun, H. (2021, July). Maternal heritage language proficiency and child bilingual's heritage language learning. Paper presented at the 13th International Symposium on Bilingualism, Warsaw, Poland (online).
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Correction Statement
This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.
Notes
1 The pattern has been generalized for immigrants by García and Diaz (Citation1992). They pointed out that many US immigrant groups finished their shift from HL to English over three generations. The first generation maintains the HL while learning English; the second generation starts to shift to English for better social integration and cultural assimilation; the third generation stops using the HL, becoming monolingual English speakers.
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Notes on contributors
He Sun
He Sun is an education research scientist at the National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. Her major interests are 1) individual differences in early bilingualism from the perspective of cognitive and environmental factors, 2) early bilingual teaching and learning with shared paper book/eBook reading, and 3) harmonious bilingualism. Her publications have appeared in various journals, such as Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, Child Development, and Studies in Second Language Acquisition. She is an Associate Editor of the Journal of Child Language and Journal for the Study of Education and Development.
Jiamin Low
Jiamin Low is a research assistant at the National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. Her research interest lies in student motivation, particularly in uncovering the bioecological factors influencing one's learning. She is also interested in evaluating intervention effects and promoting self-regulated learning.
Ivy Chua
Ivy Chua is a senior research assistant at Duke-NUS Lien Centre for Palliative Care. Her key research interests include pediatric health, end-of-life care, and doctor-patient communication. She has presented several papers about terminal illness narratives at conferences hosted by universities in Asia and the United Kingdom and conducted multiple workshops and talks in local hospitals. Apart from the healthcare sector, Ivy also has roots in linguistics where she finds interest in conversation and discourse analysis, children's language acquisition, and early childhood bilingualism.