Simona Montanari

Between September and December 2023, Babylonia collected questions from parents regarding their children's language development. This article aims to answer the following questions: We are parents of two children (9 and 6 years old). At home, we do not follow an OPOL approach, but use both family languages flexibly based on communicative moments. The children almost always respond in their stronger language, which is also the dominant language in their environment. On one hand, we understand that this is normal; on the other hand, we feel that their skills in one of the family languages are not sufficiently developed. Should we adopt an OPOL approach? But how can we avoid constraints and frustrating impositions? If I speak to my child sometimes in Catalan and primarily in english , will I create confusion? I want her to acquire this language but it’s hard for me to stick to it 100%. My partner speaks only english to her We are an English speaking family living in the United States. My husband is a native French speaker, but has never spoken French to our boys who are now 5 and 8 years old. He would like to start teaching them now but they get easily frustrated and try to avoid engaging with him if he’s speaking in French. What’s his best bet for getting them to learn at this point? What can I do as an English speaker to help? [summary generated by Claude-3-Haiku-200k - we refer the reader to the article in PDF format for a complete answer] This article discusses the importance of cultivating the minority language to ensure children's bilingualism, in response to the questions from parents facing this challenge.Traditionally, the "one person, one language" (OPOL) approach has been recommended for raising bilingual children. However, recent research shows that this method is not always the most effective, especially when both parents speak the dominant language at home in addition to a minority language.In fact, for the child to truly develop skills in the minority language, it is necessary to maximize their exposure to and use of this language in daily life. When the dominant language of society is also present at home, the chances that the child will master the minority language decrease significantly.The author therefore recommends that parents "protect" the time spent using the minority language, even if this may feel less natural. They can use it in specific contexts while continuing to use the dominant language in other situations.Parents can also involve a relative who speaks only the minority language with the child or enroll them in an educational program that uses this language. Additionally, they should value bilingualism with their child so that they understand its importance.The author illustrates these strategies based on her personal experience of raising her two trilingual daughters. She and her husband have adopted the OPOL approach since birth, utilizing media and seeking a "community of practice" for their minority languages.While this may seem challenging, it is essential for parents to assess whether bilingualism is a priority for them and whether they are willing to adjust their family language practices. The goal is to enable a harmonious development of bilingualism that is beneficial for all.

Purposes: This study examines English vowel perception in Spanish–English bilingual preschoolers, comparing bilinguals' perception patterns to those of monolinguals and examining how child internal (age) and external variables (input quantity and input diversity) predict perceptual performance. Method: Sixty children between 3;6 and 5;6 (years;months) of age participated in the study, 28 of whom were Spanish–English bilinguals and 32 English monolinguals. Perception was assessed through a forced-choice minimal-pair identification task in which children heard synthesized audio stimuli (i.e., “sheep” and “ship”) that varied systematically along the /i–ɪ/ continuum and were asked to match them with one of two pictures. The data were analyzed with Bayesian mixed-effects logistic regression analyses, modeling responses as a function of continuum step, language background (monolingual or bilingual), age, English exposure (i.e., input quantity), and number of English input providers (i.e., input diversity). Results: The results indicate that, despite displaying nonnative English stop voicing perception in a previous study, the same bilingual children showed English /i–ɪ/ perception patterns that did not differ from those of monolinguals. While age did not predict vowel perception, input quantity and diversity jointly interacted to moderate how well children perceived the /i–ɪ/ contrast. Specifically, diverse input promoted perceptual performance in children who received high levels of English exposure—and who presumably had more advanced English language skills, whereas it limited perceptual performance in children with more limited English exposure and skills. Conclusions: This study shows that bilingual children can show monolingual-like perception patterns for some sounds while displaying nontarget perception for others. This is the first study to demonstrate that language exposure mediates the role of input diversity on speech sound development, suggesting that varied input can be more or less beneficial for speech sound development based on the learner's language learning stage.

This study explores the demographic/background, academic, and environmental factors that predicted student retention after stopping out at a large Hispanic-serving institution in Southern California. The results show that (a) gender, (b) academic background, experience, readiness, and performance, and (c) personal and financial issues predicted retention. We interpret these findings in the context of existing literature and provide suggestions to help institutions develop intervention strategies to promote student retention and “servingness” at HSIs.

While educational language policies have been shown to have a stronger influence on school-aged children’s multilingual outcomes than Family Language Policy, California provides an example of how parental motivation and activism can also have a profound impact on educational language policies. This paper has two goals: first, it provides an overview of the legislative changes that affected California’s educational system between the 1970s and the present, which resulted in an overall shift in public opinion and attitudes towards multilingualism and in a transition from promotion-oriented to restriction-oriented to again promotion-oriented educational policies with regards to multilingual education. The second part of the paper exemplifies the agency of Californian families in shaping their children’s education by describing the history of an Italian/English two-way immersion programme born out of parental activism. The paper then presents the results of a preliminary study on parental attitudes within the programme, highlighting parents’ strong appreciation of multilingualism and their renewed enthusiasm for Italian proficiency, bilingualism, and biliteracy in this Southern California’s community.

This study examines the content and function of parent-child talk while engaging in shared storybook reading with two narrative books: a wordless book versus a book with text. Thirty-six parents audio-recorded themselves reading one of the books at home with their 3.5–5.5-year-old children. Pragmatic and linguistic measures of parental and child talk during both narrative storytelling and dialogic interactions were compared between the wordless and book-with-text conditions. The results show that the wordless book engendered more interaction than the book-with-text, with a higher rate of parental prompts and responsive feedback, and significantly more child contributions, although lexical diversity and grammatical complexity of parental language were higher during narration using a book-with-text. The findings contribute to research on shared storybook reading suggesting that different book formats can promote qualitatively different language learning environments.

Empirical work has shown that maternal education is related to children’s language outcomes, especially in the societal language, among Spanish-English bilingual children growing up in the U.S. However, no study thus far has assessed the links between maternal cultural orientation and children’s speech sound production. This paper explores whether mothers’ orientation to American (acculturation) and Mexican culture (enculturation) and overall linear acculturation are related to children’s accuracy of production of consonants, of different sound classes, and of phonemes shared and unshared between languages in both English and Spanish at age 4;6 (4 years and 6 months). The results reveal a link between maternal acculturation and children’s segmental accuracy in English, but no relation was found between mothers’ enculturation and children’s speech sound production in Spanish. We interpreted the results in English as suggesting that more American-oriented mothers may have been using more English with their children, boosting their English production abilities and promoting English speech sound development. At the same time, we speculate that the results in Spanish were possibly due to the high and homogeneous levels of Mexican orientation among mothers, to language input differences attributable to distinct cultural practices, or to the status of Spanish as a minority language.

This paper presents a longitudinal examination of Spanish and English phonological, lexical, and morpho-syntactic abilities in 20 low-SES bilingual preschoolers with mothers who had either completed primary or secondary education in Spanish in their country of origin, Mexico. We focused on the link between maternal education and the following spontaneous production measures: (1) phonological accuracy as measured by Percent of Consonants Correct-Revised, (2) lexical variety as measured by Number of Different Words, and (3) utterance length as measured by Mean Length of Utterance in words; the relation between maternal education and spontaneous production was examined both (a) at preschool entry, when children were on average 3;6, and (b) a year later, after one year of exposure to the majority language (English) and culture. The results showed that although children of more educated mothers performed significantly better on all English measures than children of less educated mothers, maternal education was not related to Spanish outcomes. The same differences persisted a year later. These results suggest that maternal education may play a different, but long-lasting role in English compared to Spanish development possibly due to language input differences attributable to distinct cultural values and practices associated with different languages.

This study examines language mixing in 26 Spanish–English dual language learners over the course of their first year of preschool. The children's patterns of language choice while interacting in monolingual language contexts were analyzed at age 3;6 and 4;5 to examine: (1) whether the frequency of language mixing changed during the year; (2) whether mixing was related to proficiency as measured by utterance length and lexical diversity; and (3) whether there were different subgroups of children, among the participants, with similar proficiency and language use patterns. The results indicate that language mixing, which was low at both ages, was related to limited lexical resources only at 3;6. However, by age 4;5, language choice was more constrained by sociolinguistic variables – children's awareness of the language prescribed by the majority culture – than by proficiency. An exploratory cluster analysis further reveals different profiles of learners sharing similar proficiency and language mixing characteristics.