Journal article
Probability of Heritage Language Use at a Supportive Early Childhood Setting in Australia
P Escudero, C Jones Diaz, J Hajek, G Wigglesworth, EA Smit
Frontiers in Education | FRONTIERS MEDIA SA | Published : 2020
Abstract
Despite well-established research that documents the intellectual, linguistic, sociocultural and familiar benefits of early childhood bilingualism, Australia's provision of heritage language (HL) support in early childhood (EC) settings is fairly minimal, resulting in little to no access to the HL outside of the home. We report on language data from a long day care preschool that has an open bilingual policy, where two languages (HL and English) are used in naturalistic interactions between children and educators. While the quantity of language input and output is known to impact on language proficiency, there are no prior studies which focus on establishing the quantitative nature of natura..
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Awarded by University of Western Sydney
Funding Acknowledgements
The initial stage of the project including a literature review and a survey was funded by an internal grant from the MARCS Institute for Brain Behavior and Development at Western Sydney University. Project development and data collection were funded by a Seed Grant from the Centre for Educational Research from the School of Education at Western Sydney University. Data coding, analysis, and publication fees were funded by the Australian Research Council (ARC) Centre of Excellence of the Dynamics of Language (CE140100041) of which PE and GW were Chief Investigators and JH and ES are affiliates. PE's work was supported by an ARC Future Fellowship (FT160100514).