This study examined immigrant parents' role in their young children's language learning and development in linguistically different contexts in Chicago. At home the children lived with parents who spoke little or no English. At school the children were taught by mostly English speaking teachers, occasionally with teacher aides who spoke some of the other languages the children understood. The children had to operate in two linguistic worlds that were considerably different. The study sought to explain the means by which immigrant parents helped their children learn English effectively and also maintain their mother tongue.Five data collection instruments were used in the study: a parent questionnaire, an activity chart, audio recorders, an observation guide during home visits and parent interviews. The parent interviews were conducted towards the end of the study as a means to triangulate information and to crosscheck and clarify meanings of the data from the other instruments.The study revealed that parents' roles included different factors that supported children's learning of the languages. The factors included: the parents' attitudes towards language in general, parents' interest in both mother tongue and English, joint parent-child activities and direct, linguistic exchange between child and parent. Other factors included teacher flexibility, teacher-parent communication, parents' English classes school support, and parents' sensitivity to school support.Problems faced by parents and teachers included parents' lack of English proficiency to communicate effectively about children's school learning, and lack of effective linguistic link between home learning and school learning.
McCosh Even Start, a federally funded project located at McCosh School in inner-city Chicago neighborhood, is a partnership between Northeastern Illinois University and The Chicago Public School. The parent/child components of the program are: home visiting, an after school family literacy program, parent/child field trips, computer classes, and the use of videotaping and photography to document learning. The adult literacy component includes computer, photography and video classes, a parent club for literacy career development skills and parent field trips. Computer, video technology and photography were used as tools to develop literacy, but they were also used to document the literacy progress of parents and children. To evaluate the results of the program, staff, parents, children and a video documenter collaborated to use a wide range of evaluation. These strategies used to show literacy improvement included video documentation and interviews, parent interest questionnaires, observations and book logs, photo collections with personalized captions, portfolios, information reading inventories and parent self-evaluations.
This paper examines the teaching of English in Tanzania under four main headings, (1) changing view of language and language syllabus design; (2) the role of sociolinguistic environments in second language learning; (3) the role of objectives in second language teaching; and (4) the emerging trend of documenting second language teachers' classroom practices. In Tanzania there are major obstacles under each of these areas, to the application of new principles and ideas that inform second language teaching around the world. A rigid, structural syllabus dominates, the sociolinguistic context for the use of English is misconstrued and therefore the environment is not conducive to learning, contradictory objectives are pursued in the teaching of English, and there is a lack of awareness about, or motivation to document, teachers' classroom practices. The paper discusses some implications for the preparation of English teachers in Tanzania, and suggests some possible remedial strategies.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.