Great effort has been made in encouraging Singapore Chinese parents to speak more Chinese at home, in order to create a beneficial environment for their children to learn Chinese language (CL). However, parents still reported having trouble supporting their children’s CL learning, even though Chinese is the most used language at home. The current study aims to unveil the effect of HLE facets, other than language preference, on children’s CL learning. We invited 24 parents who reported mostly using Chinese at home to complete a home language environment (HLE) questionnaire and to provide recordings of their daily conversations with the children. The HLE questionnaire asked about home language preference in general, children’s oral language exposure and print exposure at home in English and Chinese, respectively. Chinese sentences from the daily conversations were analyzed for the quality of children’s spoken CL features. We found that although CL is reported as the preferred language in these families, children experienced different forms of language exposure. Children's CL language preference did not correlate with their spoken CL features. A “preferred activity” pattern instead of “language competition" pattern was found, that despite the language used/exposed, activities of print exposure compete with oral language exposure for children’s time. Children with more print exposure, in either language, exhibits higher oral language proficiency in Chinese. Children with more literacy related activities with their parents also tended to speak CL better. These findings highlighted the importance of quality over quantity of HLE in the Singapore Chinese-English bilingual families.

Authors:
Li Li, Singapore Centre for Chinese Language, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore

About the Presenter(s)
Dr Li Li is a University Postdoctoral Fellow or Instructor at Singapore Centre For Chinese Language in Singapore

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