Relationships Among Language Ideologies, Family Language Policies, and Children's Language Achievement: A Look at Cantonese-English Bilinguals in the U.S

Abstract

This article examines the reported language ideologies and family language policies of the parents of Cantonese-English bilinguals in the U.S. in relation to their children's achievement scores in Cantonese and English. We explore the relationships first by language of instruction. Results show children in bilingual classrooms scored higher than those in mainstream (English-only) classrooms on the Cantonese tasks, but significantly more children in bilingual programs had Cantonese as a home language than children in mainstream classrooms. Parents from mainstream classrooms were significantly more satisfied with their children's English-language attainment than parents from bilingual classrooms. Using cluster analysis, we then identify four new groups of children based on their language proficiency: (a) English-dominant, (b) Cantonese-dominant, (c) “balanced bilingual,” and (d) “ideal bilingual.” Results show all children scored at or above the monolingual English mean on English decoding, but the ideal bilingual cluster had the largest Cantonese vocabulary. The English-dominant group heard significantly less Cantonese in the home, while all children in the ideal bilingual and Cantonese-dominant clusters heard only Cantonese. Findings point to the integral component of the family unit in children's bilingual development and bring up timely issues relating to family language planning and policy.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

We gratefully acknowledge the support from the Foundation for Child Development given to the second author. We would also like to thank the three anonymous reviewers for their valuable insight and feedback.

Notes

¹The term early-exit transitional bilingual classrooms refers to the alternative instructional program where there is some initial instruction in the child's primary language. Over the course of two or three years, the primary language is phased out so that virtually all instruction is in English. Students participating in these programs are expected to exit into mainstream, English-only classrooms (Cummins & Genzuk, 1991).

²At the time when we collected the data, the only standardized measure of Chinese vocabulary available that was equivalent to the English PPVT was developed and standardized in Taiwan. Together with language-development experts, who were also native speakers of both Mandarin and Cantonese, we went over every item on the test and assured that it would be appropriate for children speaking Cantonese. We made adjustments to less than 2% of the items. Therefore, we deemed it appropriate to rely on the standard scores as a comparison guideline for our study, but the interpretations should be treated with caution.

³The term balanced bilingual is used here only in the respect of describing these children's similar levels of Cantonese and English PPVT scores. The authors are aware that there are pitfalls for this term (see Baker, 2006).

⁴We borrow the term ideal bilingual from Weinreich (1953), who uses it to describe bi/multilinguals who are able to code-switch according to different speech situations, that is, being able to successfully deploy their linguistic repertoires. We extend this term to our research to describe the children in our study who seem to similarly translate their linguistic resources into high Cantonese and English scores.