Mother Tongue - How to assess your likelihood of success

One of the things I did as part of my research was to summarise the factors that contributed to a family being able to teach and maintain their mother tongue in their children while living / being educated in an English dominant environment.

First I present the table of factors, and then I present myself filling in this table as an exercise in my own home.

Analysis: The theories of MT acquisition and maintenance versus the reality of our situation

	Theory	Reality - Chinese	Reality - Dutch
Child	Age (start as early as possible with formal MT education)	Both started Chinese immersion in Grade 1 (age 6)	Son started formal Dutch in Grade 5 (age 10)
	Prior & current formal exposure to MT	1 hour per day class in International School	None
	Prior & current informal exposure to MT	Not much – Hong Kong is Cantonese not Mandarin speaking. Daughter did learn characters through observation on the street.	Dutch spoken at home, exposure through paternal grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins.
	Interest / Motivation	Daughter – High; Son - Low	Daughter not particularly interested, speaks on holiday and to family Son - High
	Aptitude	Daughter – excellent memory which is necessary for amount of memorization necessary Son – difficulties with working memory due to ADHD doesn’t rely on memory for learning	Son – very good ear and pronunciation, has taken well to spelling and grammar as it’s taught in a formal structured way (unlike English)
	Available time	In HK had ample time (27/28 hours a week in class plus a lot of homework) Daughter: in SG 5x 40 minutes a week class time, 90 minutes a week tutoring, 100 minutes a week required homework plus whatever time she has for self-motivated study and reading	5 x 40 minutes a week class time (1x of which is self-study) 1 x 120 minutes after school tutoring. Homework around 60 minutes Daily reading expected 15-20 minutes (doesn’t always happen)
	Access to language role models	Limited to school and tutor and one family friend who we see irregularly	Parents speak Dutch at home to each other, Father speaks Dutch to him, Mother speaks English unless in Dutch context
	Personality / resilience	Very determined, sees events as challenges rather than setbacks, competitive, responds well to reward systems, perfectionist, introverted and shy	Very sociable, extroverted, not scared of making mistakes. Quite emotional, inclined to give up when things get difficult, or need help to keep going
Family	Anticipated period of time abroad	Indefinite	Indefinite
	Plans for tertiary education	Undecided, probably English medium	Considering studying film or photography in Netherlands (early thoughts)
	Availability of language role models / support at home	Mother studied Chinese but level is not sufficient to support high level language and literacy needs practically, only in abstract	Both Mother and father speak Dutch in the home
	Language level of parent(s)	Mother - Low level Father - none	Mother – Fluent speaking reading, listening, written poor Father – Fluent speaking, reading, listening, writing
	Willingness / ability to finance choice	Yes	Yes
	Culture of reading at home	Yes - but needs prompting and encouragement as slow difficult process and access to the right leveled material is difficult.	Yes – when father is home do co-reading as well
	Help from extended family	None, only moral support	Yes – regular phone calls / FaceTime, visits during vacation and go to school with cousins for a few days
School	Language offered at MT level	Yes in theory.  However in practice the amount of time and level is not adequate, plus not enough leveled reading resources and mentoring	None in curriculum until G9. In G7 & G8 offered after school.  His Dutch classes are an exception and privately arranged and funded
	Language community in the school	Yes, however she is not particularly a part of it.	Yes
	MT support after school or other proviso	Yes, 90 minutes private tutoring after school, school provides walk in clinics 2x a week	Only from G7, however he’s not at the level required yet
	Accommodations for MT (reading or writing in MT, creating identity texts)	Yes, in school (since middle school only) and tutor supplements	Yes, but still limited due to level
	Sufficient BML teachers and administrators as role models	Administration & non-language teachers traditionally English / mono-lingual with some exceptions. This is changing a bit.	Administration & non-language teachers traditionally English / mono-lingual with some exceptions. This is changing a bit.
	Access to parents and older children as role models	In principal – but need to tap into this more. No formal structures.	Yes, cultural events organized by Dutch Teacher.
Community	Existence of language community in country	Yes, large Chinese speaking population, however local families are not part of school	Yes, Dutch club and fair sized community with events
	Accessible MT community on-line or through home visits	Possibly – not investigated yet	Yes
	Community based formal language classes	Many tutoring schools that cater to the Chinese curriculum of local schools	Yes
	Community based fun and cultural activities	Not as many as in Hong Kong	Yes through Dutch club and school
	Community pride in the MT	Many classmates in MT group are not very motivated to learn Chinese, within SG community Mandarin is the formal standard Chinese while most families speak a dialect at home	Generally yes, however many Dutch people speak English well and will switch in mixed groups

This work by Nadine Bailey is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.