Taking ownership and control over language learning

I'm always somewhat surprised at how many parents assume that the school will take care of all aspects of their children's education. Perhaps I've been around the block (or world) too long to take anything for granted, or maybe I care too much or have made too many mistakes along the way.  Or it could be that I'm at the point where a "little knowledge is a dangerous thing" (Alexander Pope, 1709).

Anyway, here are a couple of images from the parent's forum I put together with our self-taught language coordinator (the whole presentation can be found here).   The main points I'd like to make are

• Language pathways need to be planned consciously and not left to chance
• you only have control over what and how much language your child is exposed to for a brief period of time - what then?
• your language community is no longer bounded geographically
• you have many community allies where you can exchange best practise irrespective of the language
• Digital tools are not the enemy - you can use them to create a language immersion environment

 Avoid type 1 at all costs by investing in your mother tongue and working towards abstract language in both languages. Types 2 & 3 are OK, and result if you have up to 20% input in mother tongue. If you want types 4-6, ensure at least 30% input in the language that is not taught  / dominant at school. Work with the teachers on this. Can your child read 1:3 books in their mother tongue (MT)? Are their pieces of work they can research in their MT? Work with the system and enhance it.  There is no "better" type of bilingualism after 4, it's semantics and circumstance.

 Think about what type of family you are and what roles you assign to your language and to English.

Do a language audit for your family so you have a realistic idea of what you can do to ensure success. Look at all aspects that contribute to success including the child, family, school and community. Make some strategic choices and frame your goals and priorities as a result of this.  You can see my audit here.

Getting back to the question of control and ownership: 

Personal Learning Environment (PLE)

Use some digital tools to create your personal learning environment. You can ensure input and output for listening, speaking reading and writing. Do you know what the current best books are for your child right now? Does your language have literary prizes for picture books and young adult books? Are your children reading them? Are they keeping up to date with radio programs, TV shows? Movies?  

Personal Learning Network (PLN)

Which people and organisations are in your network? Both physical and virtual proximity can be created. Your students can find people to add to their community, from their family, peers, older or younger students in the same country or other countries. In their school and in other schools. 

Community of Practise (COP)

This is where you find out what is best practise and what other people are doing. The "experts" or people who may have experience in one or more aspects of learning. They may be people with children learning the same language, or other parents struggling with the same socio-emotional issues with priority setting and time and logistical constraints. 

There are a number of language communities online - you just need to find their champions and tap into their resources. And then it's a question of sharing and community building.
On twitter try: #langchat (WL teachers) #frimm (French teachers)#ClavEd #WLteach #flteach

The two sites below have some great resources:
http://catherine-ousselin.org/technology.html 
http://www.cybraryman.com/foreignlanguagelinks.html

Digital Tools

Just because a tool was created in English doesn't mean it's exclusively for English use. The whole point of Web 2.0 is you can create and curate to suit your need in ANY language.   Don't complain about a lack of (age appropriate) resources - create your own. Borrow and extrapolate from material in other languages. Share and share and share. This is not an exhaustive list, just a sampling.

Flipboard can be used to curate any digital material on any topic in any language. This one is specifically on bilingualism, mother tongue and language, however there is no limit! Football in Dutch, Fashion in French Philosophy in German, rock music in Swedish. Start a flipboard with your language community or have your kids start one with theirs.



 Subscription based apps like PressReader can provide families access to their local newspapers and magazines in their home language. It is also a useful tool in the language classroom.

A linguistic trio - Part 1 - Rojas

Virginia Rojas

Before I embark on my summary, here are a couple of links written by other people quoting her, from Patana, the Telegraph,  and some very useful myth busting on language (worth a read).

Rojas commenced her talk by going through the common myths on children and language (see myth busting above). She then explained the 5 types of bilinguals (for more you can read this summary)

• Compound bilingual / Dominant Bilingual (A person being more proficient in one of the two languages).
• Co-ordinate bilingual (person develops two parallel linguistic systems, usually when the two parents have different mother tongues and each parent speaks only his or her own mother tongue to the child. In response, the person constructs two separate linguistic systems and can handle each of them easily.)
• Balanced bilingual (people who are more or less equally proficient in both languages, but will not necessarily pass for a native speaker in both languages).
• Ambi-bilingual / Equilingual (person who passes in any situation in both languages for a native speaker, i.e. he or she is indistinguishable from a native speaker). 
• Passive Bilingual (A person who is a native speaker in one and is capable of understanding but not speaking another language.)
• Semi-bilingual (not strong in either language)

and explained that with the exception of semi-bilingual (not desirable at all), each the type of bilingualism your children ended up with was a matter of choice and planning for the families and children concerned depending on circumstances and goals.

At school

She went on to explain that every teacher is a language teacher - not just language teachers as language comes with content, and pointed to research done at Stanford University on language and literacy learning in the content areas.  A positive learning environment for bilinguals is one where the home language and culture is regarded as an asset, instruction is adapted to meet different needs, children are "immersed but not submersed", progression is seen from speaking to reading and writing and the child is monitored to ensure growth and progress.  In a later session for teachers she went into detail about "being nice with high expectations" for students who were learning English, and distinguished between the three kinds of vocabulary: basic (T1); high frequency, multiple meaning, cross disciplinary (T2) and low frequency discipline specific (T3).  The most important were the T2 words, which were necessary for bilingualism and achievement and were transferable and allowed for connections (e.g. describe, observe, explain, illustrate, on the other hand, contrast, compare, similar, like, prove etc.). Strategies should include distinguishing between shades of meaning among verbs differing in manner and adjectives differing in intensity. T1 words were the domain of language teachers and T3 of subject specific teachers.

At home

Parents should work on maintaining and improving the home language and not leave this to the school (even if the school provides the language).  Children should be given a "wait-time" of 5-7 years for language to develop, allowing each child it's own time and way of achieving bilingualism. Parents need to be informed and act accordingly, and to plan their childrens' bilingualism. In her opinion at least 3 hours a week had to be spend on formal lessons in the home language including reading and writing with additional time during the summer vacation.  Texts and materials should be provided in the home language at home.

In the library

I asked her separately about the library and what role it could play. She reiterated the need for books in other languages to be visible, to have text books in mother tongue available, and to integrate (non-fiction) books into the collection.

Practically for us it wouldn't make sense to integrate the non-fiction books as we've concentrated on fiction except for the odd donated book. It would probably be a good idea to try and get a used text-book donation drive to add to our collection.

The myth of "reluctance"?

I went to a professional development session the other day on motivating secondary students to read. It was a pretty good session with lots of interaction and ideas.  But it did give me pause for thought. About the premise. Yes I agree that reading is important - fundamental in fact to any kind of academic life at any level above primary school. I love an applaud meditations such as those of Alain de Botton on what literature is for (see below).  I think it interesting and noteworthy that numeric goals are being given to just how many books a student should read (20-25) in order to benefit from all these wonderful things.  And yet ...

All through the discussions I kept hearing the term "reluctant readers" - they were to be shaken up and motivated and enticed and if we just found the right "entry drug" book, the right set of incentives, the right way to monitor it all, if we showed them how important it was, how much we valued it, then hey presto! They'd go from reading 2 books to 20 books and voila!

The first thing that got me thinking was a name.  Not an idea.  The name "Lars" - a success story in this battle against reluctance.  I have a nephew called Lars.  He's Dutch. I know a couple of people called Lars who are Danish and Swedish.  And then I wondered.  Could it be that Lars was not reading 25 books in English in his English class because he was perhaps reading them in his mother tongue?  Had anyone asked him about his reading in other languages?  Did anyone care?  Because caring is important.  I know, I have two children reading in their chosen tongues, Dutch and Chinese respectively.  And it's a balancing act.  One in which you're teetering on a beam of approval - that of your English teacher on the one hand and your family and / or language tutor/teacher on the other.  And that language teacher / tutor may not even be part of your school community, so if you're too shy or to nervous or just plain don't understand that reading is reading and that all reading counts in whatever language you're reading in - well you're not going to get credit for that reading.  NOT ONCE in the entire PD session did anyone at any point mention mother tongue reading (except me to my learning partner - but she knows me, and she's one of us bilingual and multicultural types).  I looked around the room at the pretty homogenous bunch of language teachers around me and it wasn't surprising. I wonder how many of them were bilingual? Of course that is not what they'd be selected on, but, their class demographic is built up of at least 50% bi- or multi-lingual students. Why are we not talking about this? I suspect because we are not even thinking about this.

Research shows, if you're interested in it and if you want to acknowledge it, that languages at a CALP (Cognitive academic language proficiency level) scaffold and complement each other.  And if we've been doing our job correctly as parents and educators, by the time kids are in secondary school they should have a CALP level in at least one of their languages so it shouldn't matter too much which language is being read most.   But are we even thinking about this? Is it even on our teaching horizon?  

Dr Jim Cummins explains the differences between BICS and CALP. from Teach Away Inc. on Vimeo.

But then again, how many of our students are not at a CALP level when they enter secondary school? Even if they're mono-lingual.  With the best intentions and the best resources and all the rest, some students just don't get there. And no amount of monitoring or encouragement will get them there. It requires more.  Kids don't wake up one morning and along with acne and hormones decide to be reluctant readers. It's something that probably creeps up on them.  Mel Levine in his book "The Myth of Laziness" attempts to look behind why students do not succeed in an academic environment.  He finds labels of learning problems and then he tries to look behind those labels and to break down very specific issues that then can be worked on.  So too I think when we are confronted with a reluctant reader we need to look underneath that big label and work out where the reluctance stems from.  Is there an underling difficulty with reading? It is said that if a child is not a competent reader by Grade 3, s/he will struggle for the rest of school.  So what about our children in the expatriate environment who are snatched from their native language environment with the assumption that "they're young, they'll pick up xxx language easily" and who don't establish the competencies early on, and then may or may not get help, or may get language help when the problem is learning or learning help when the problem is language.  Who are more or less forced to drop and ignore their mother tongue at great cost in order to fit into a new environment.

Students don't just lose a language. They may shed bits of their identity along the way.  One student I spoke to was a success story by all accounts.  Rapidly rising from an EAL (English Additional language) to the mainstream English class in a year.  The picture of diligence.  But who felt in the process she'd lost her self and her voice.  And that wasn't the worst of it, the worst is that no one around her would acknowledge that her success had come at a cost and that the cost disturbed her.  As an educator one may rather be concerned when a student does not notice or express this frustration and anxiety at the apparent ease of substitution of self.

Back to reading.  I've become somewhat enamoured of late of the potential of digital storytelling as a way to allow students to reclaim their identities and voices.   How about we take the immensely successful Lizzie Bennett diaries? Celebrated as having taken the themes of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice and translated them to modern time North America.  Why should we not in our schools have those themes expressed from a Korean, Japanese, Chinese, Indian, African view point? And why just vlogging? It can be vlogging, or twitterature, or multi-media film and text and picture.   We like our "World Literature" we do.  But too often our world literature is a voice that suits a western audience.  We like our stories of China to involve the cultural revolution, of Vietnam the escape to the non-communist west, of Afghanistan something to do with boats and difficulties at the Australian border.  But what about the stories of our students who are a little like us, part of that global cosmopolitan elite, but then not quite. Where the mirror by which they reflect themselves distorts ever so slightly that it is not always perceptible. That is what we should want to hear and what as educators we have a role in eliciting.  And perhaps when that takes place our literature and our world views will be enriched.

I recently suffered through "To rise again at a decent hour" - the self-absorbed rantings of a middle aged white baseball loving north american male tinged with crazed religious passages was more than I could bear. And yet supposedly it was literature having been on the man booker long list. And had I been a student, I would be first in the "reluctant reader" line.  So a lack of identification and interest may foster reluctance.

How about time?  As an idealistic mother I so totally bought into that half hour of reading in bed before lights out.  Easy when you're doing the reading and setting the bedtime and there is no homework or after school activities that eat into the late afternoon and then munch past dinner time and gulp up the hours past the absolute latest time that you know a child should be asleep. There are always deliverables. 

There are some good things going on.   I'm really gratified to see that some teachers are setting time aside in class for reading. I hope that's working.  I hope students can read on demand.  I really like the concept of class libraries, the easy availability of books at the point of demand. I also hope we have dedicated enough budget to have that in all our language classrooms as well and to think about how we are meeting the needs of our multi-linguals.  For now just even thinking about them. Just mentioning them in a seminar or workshop would be a huge step forward.

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.

Research summary on Language

The post below is based on the background research I did for INF538 Value Added-information Services in June 2014.  Please cite me as the author should you wish to quote / use any of this.

Bailey, N. (2014, November 12). Research summary on Language. Retrieved November 23, 2013, from http://informativeflights.blogspot.sg/2014/11/research-summary-on-language.html

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Background Research

This study has presented the typical knowledge management dilemma – there is a considerable amount of information and research, both academic and practical but it is widely dispersed and personal experience is often not documented.

History

Most research into BML (bi- and multi-lingualism) concerns itself with assimilation of immigrants (Fillmore, 2000; Slavin, Madden, Calderon, Chamberlain, & Hennessy, 2011; Slavin et al., 2011; Winter, 1999); maintaining minority (or majority) languages in a dominant language environment (Ball, 2011; Dixon, Zhao, Quiroz, & Shin, 2012) or language immersion or bilingual programmes; (Caldas & Caron-Caldas, 2002; Carder, 2008; Cummins, 1998; Genesee, 2014; Hadi-Tabassum, 2004; Soderman, 2010) aspects of which may or may not be relevant to this study or its population.

Until fairly recently the situation of high socio-economic status (SES) students in international schools is given at best a glancing mention and appears to have been a marginal area amongst researchers, as they are considered to be a privileged elite with more options and choices and greater economic means than immigrant or minority students (Ball, 2011; Carder, 2006; de Mejía, 2002). There are calls for “celebrating diversity” in the classroom, (Stauft, 2011) mentions of international food fairs, the involvement of the Parents’ Association and ensuring that the school conveys the message to parents on the importance of maintaining MT  (Hayim-Bambe, 2011), while most research looks into integration and scaffolding to English.  

Bilingualism

Researchers distinguish between three types of bilingualism. Simultaneous bilingualism - exposure to two languages from birth; early successive bilingualism - first exposure aged 1 - 3 years; and second language bilingualism - first exposure aged  4 - 10 years. There is considerable debate as to what exactly the “critical” ages are for successful language learning. As Kirsten Winter pointed out “Language learning is a continuum and bilingualism is not a perfect status to be achieved.” (Winter, 1999, p. 88).  Typical language learners cycle through alternating stages of passive (receptive) and productive (expressive) skills, usually in the order of listening, speaking, reading and then writing.

Figure 1: Continuum of language learning

Initially children learn phoneme production, syntactic competence and build vocabulary while phonological awareness then helps to develop literacy skills. The ability to understand both the ‘microstructure’ of sentences and a ‘macrostructure’ of the relationship between ideas results in language comprehension (Beech, 1994).

An important distinction is made between the surface skill of listening and speaking, which is usually acquired within two years (BICS - Basic Interpersonal Communication Skills), and the literacy skills of reading and writing at an abstract academic level (CALP - Cognitive Academic Language Proficiency), a targeted five to seven year process - as will be discussed later under “concerns” (Cummins, 1998). Due to transferability, concepts learnt and established in one language are more easily learnt in another language but only if a child has achieved CALP (Cummins, 1998; Dixon, Zhao, Shin, et al., 2012; Shoebottom, n.d.).

Figure 2: Elements of CALP

Factors Impacting Acquisition

Researchers agree on a number of factors which impact on the successful acquisition and retention of a second or subsequent language in the BML population. These relate to the student, family, school and the community or society.

Student

A child’s language learning aptitude is a mixture of cognitive and personality factors (Ehrman & Leaver, 2003; Stauft, 2011).  Cognitive factors include learning style and strategy while personality factors include “motivation, self-efficacy and affective self-management” (Hayim-Bambe, 2011, p. 59). Low motivation, low self-esteem, and high anxiety result in a 'mental block' and impede language acquisition (Krashen, 1982). Extroverts tend to monitor their language use less than introverts, perfectionists and children who lack self-confidence.  Moving beyond individual differences, considerable research has been done on the strategies that so-called “Good Language Learners” (GLL) employ, particularly in the field of second-language acquisition (Abhakorn, 2008; Griffiths, 2008; E. Le Pichon, de Swart, Vorstman, & van den Bergh, 2010; Emmanuelle Le Pichon, De Swart, Vorstman, & Van Den Bergh, 2013; Wang, 2013).  These competencies, which improve with age, include directed attention, control of emotions, anticipation, mime, cooperation, imitation, clarification and asking for assistance, can arguably be taught or encouraged in a learning environment by teachers or parents.

Research often attempts to identify critical periods or ages of language acquisition, with inconclusive results, as motivation and meta-cognitive skills can be confounding variables since older students have better developed meta-cognitive skills (Barac & Bialystok, 2011; Beech, 1994; Bowden, Steinhauer, Sanz, & Ullman, 2013; Cummins, 1998, 2003; Genesee, 2014; Granena & Long, 2013; Emmanuelle Le Pichon et al., 2013; MacSwan & Pray, 2005; Saito, 2013).  Less has been written about the socio-psychological aspects, including the impact of the teenage years where adolescents disengage from the family and identify with their peer group in an attempt to construct an identity outside of the family, which may or may not include their cultural/linguistic identity as a bilingual. Ensuring ample venue or context based immersion in the MT with access to meaningful peer relationships (particularly during vacation time) can help with the maintenance of the MT in this period (Caldas & Caron-Caldas, 2002).

Family

A large vocabulary in any language contributes to overall “oral proficiency, word reading ability, reading comprehension, and school achievement”(Dixon, Zhao, Quiroz, et al., 2012, p. 542). Vocabulary is influenced by the parent’s level of education, access to and availability of resources, and the quality and quantity of parent-child interactions, including shared reading, frequency of story telling and conversations.

Parent’s level of education influences language aspirations and is often correlated with a positive view of bilingualism, ensuring the quantity and quality of resources and amount of support provided to children (Lopez, 2005, cited in Dixon et al., 2012). Whether the child was born in the home country, and the length of time they lived there, impacts on the level of language maintenance.  Many children in the international school environment were born in a third country (neither the home nor resident country).

In looking at the role of parental involvement it is important to acknowledge and cater for the diversity of families within an International school (Sears, 2011). Table 1 below is based on Sears’ analysis of the types of families, their views on the role of English versus MT and what types of maintenance effort can be expected, with advice to the school.  Caution should be exercised in interpreting these generalisations, since within a family siblings may be different depending on their linguistic and birth country history, and the existence of a strong national curriculum may influence choices.

Table 1: Families and Languages

School

The International school context results in a number of issues that complicate MT provision, including the multicultural and multilingual nature of the student population, resulting in ‘fictive monolingualism’ and the transience of both the student and teacher population, with the resultant socio-psychological implications on learning (Caldas & Caron-Caldas, 2002; Hacohen, 2012; Hornberger, 2003). However, where the “cultural capital” of the school included valuing language diversity in its environment and teaching practise, students had an increased sense of belonging, higher levels of reading literacy and they scored significantly higher academically. Continued development of ability in two or more languages on a daily basis resulted in a deeper understanding of language across contexts. Best practice includes a well structured MT program with at least some inclusion in the school timetable and fee structure, inclusion of other subject matter in MT lessons, support for English acquisition through a daily ESL/EAL program, a socio-culturally supportive environment, better awareness and training for subject teachers, affirmation of students’ identity as bi- or multi-lingual and collaboration with parents, while block scheduling was not optimal for language learning (Carder, 2014; IBO, 2011; Tramonte & Willms, 2010; Vienna International School, 2006; Wallinger, 2000).  Research in heritage language (HL) teaching and learning indicates that macro-approaches and other specific strategies that build on learners’ existing language skills could be leveraged to improve reading and writing abilities, increase motivation and participation and validate students’ identity although specific teacher training for HL is recommended (Lee-Smith, 2011; Wu & Chang, 2010).

Figure 3: Success of MT based education policies

Source: (Ball, 2011, p. 46)

In her work for UNESCO, Ball suggested a number of policy dimensions that enhance the success of an educational policy. These are depicted in Figure 3above. 

Literacy is seen as crucial for development of CALP. External and internal factors affect literacy motivation in language learning.  Factors in schools include classroom environment, appropriate text availability and teachers. Collaboration among teachers and in the school-home nexus can enhance the perception of reading and writing as a pleasurable activity outside of the learning context. Although research generally favours intrinsic motivation, in the case of language learners, extrinsic motivation including recognition, grades, social acceptance, competition, rewards related to reading and compliance can play a role in creating a positive association with and nurturing literacy while not negatively impacting on intrinsic motivation (Fong, 2007). A well equipped library, organisation of international book fairs, other tongue events, culture clubs, reading hours with older to younger / parents to students a language buddy system and national days at school are other ways literacy can be focused on (Brewster, 2011; Krashen, 2004).

Community and Society

The support of a locally based language community, including faith and cultural communities had a positive impact which could mitigate socio-economic status (SES) factors and enhance learning through beliefs and practises, classes and cultural and religious activities (Dixon, Zhao, Quiroz, et al., 2012). Finally the availability of and access to learning resources, complementary schooling, books and other materials impacted on acquiring and maintaining language(Scheele, Leseman, & Mayo, 2010)

While languages associated with upward mobility and high SES thrive, languages considered to have a lower SES risk being neglected or suppressed by dominant or higher SES language (Gulf News, 2013; Srivastava, 2012). The profile of parents’ language use at home as well as peer pressure in the adolescent years impacts on children’s language use, in this context parents may speak just the MT, the MT plus English, just English or a third “common” language – irrespective of what their MT may be or a combination of these depending on the context, while at school, English dominates (Caldas, 2006; Dixon, Zhao, Quiroz, et al., 2012; Scheele et al., 2010). In this respect, the languages Hindi and Mandarin form a special case.  They are considered to be higher status languages than other Chinese “dialects” and Indian languages, and also serve as a “common” language in those populations. If parents are not proficient in these languages, or have a lower vocabulary, they are less likely to use them at home, which in turn impacts on the child’s language proficiency (Dixon, Zhao, Quiroz, et al., 2012; Saravanan, 2001; Srivastava, 2012; Wei & Hua, 2010). Amongst Chinese diaspora the dominant view was “to qualify as Chinese, one must know the language, and to know the language means to be able to read and write the written characters” (Wei & Hua, 2010, p. 159). While: “Young Indians with high SES and high educational achievement generally changed their primary language to English” (Saravanan, 2007 cited in Dixon et al., 2012, p. 558).

The final factor is the function attributed to that language by society.  In Singapore, the government “has assigned different functions to English and the ethnic languages. While ethnic languages constitute cultural identity, intra-ethnic communication, and ethnic solidarity, English is promoted for interethnic communication, national unity, and to facilitate science learning, higher education, and economic advancement” (Bokhorst-Heng, 1999, cited in Dixon et al., 2012, p. 547).  The question is whether international schools similarly assign these functions to language.

Concerns

Although the value of BML has become more widely accepted and most parents and educators appreciate and encourage the process, a number of concerns have rightly been voiced on the process and efficacy of reaching the goal of a BML child. In the first instance, the quality of the productive language - oral and or written skills - of one or all of the child’s languages may not develop to a sufficiently high level for academic or employment purposes  (Cummins, 1998). 

Figure 4: Context / cognition matrix

Source: (Carder, 2014, p. 72)

As Figure 4 shows, there is a significant difference between cognitively demanding and undemanding tasks, and the ability to use language in a context reduced environment (Carder, 2014). Secondly, studies have shown that speech and language problems that underlie both or all languages may be misinterpreted as natural delays in learning English and children from a BML background compared to monolingual children with the same problem, are often referred much later, or not at all, for help (Winter, 1999). Related to this, other research has found that behavioural or emotional problems may result from language problems including speech disorder, isolated expressive disorder, mixed receptive-expressive high level language disorder, specific language impairment and other language disorders and delays. They emphasize the importance of fully assessing language skills in these BML populations (Grizzle & Simms, 2009; Toppelberg, Medrano, Morgens, & Nieto-Castañon, 2002).

Figure 5: The "thin ice" of BICS vs. dual-iceberg of CALP

Source: (Carder, 2014 p.72)

Then there is the “drop-out” risk.  Literature distinguishes between early-exit bilingual education which is seen as “subtractive” and late exit or “additive” bilingual education (Ball, 2011; Cummins, 1998).  Subtractive bilingualism is where children do not develop language beyond the BICS stage due to suppression by the dominant school or societal language and their MT cannot be used to leverage learning in the school or societal language.  These children run the risk of not having high, abstract and academic level in any language which impacts negatively on their academic proficiency.

Another problem can be misguided parental interference and effort. Research has found that parents mainly rely on their own experiences in language learning in making choices for their children, referring to a combination of popular literature and expert advice to justify these decisions. BML families tend to form “family language policies” on home communication.  Parents’ efforts could be better supported, their uncertainties addressed and misconceptions clarified as few parents were properly aware of the challenges, issues, consistency and effort of raising BML children, nor of the fact that children raised in bilingual homes often become active users of only one language depending on the context (Caldas & Caron-Caldas, 2002; King & Fogle, 2006).

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