Bilingualism and Development of Social Competence of English Language Learners: A Review

Harmonious bilingual experience and child wellbeing: a conceptual framework

“…In a study of 805 Singaporean bilingual preschoolers, Sun et al (2021) discovered that the number of months children had been speaking both of their languages was significantly and positively related to their prosocial skills, even after controlling for multiple covariates such as socioeconomic status and gender. Similar evidence has been found for immigrant children, whose use of the societal dominant language is associated with positive relationships with peers (Chen and Tse, 2010) and teachers (Ren and Wyver, 2016). Beyond the use of societal dominant languages, children's heritage languages are critical for their social-emotional development.…”

“…For bilingual children, the ability to communicate in both societal and home languages is important to their social emotional wellbeing (Han, 2010;Sun et al, 2021). At home, the use of heritage languages is believed to be conducive to good family relationships (Ren and Wyver, 2016). Boutakidis et al (2011) found that adolescents' heritage language fluency among Chinese and Korean immigrant families was positively related to their respect for parents, a relationship mediated by quality of communication.…”

The relationship of language and social competence of preschool- and kindergarten-age single and dual language learners in Switzerland and Germany

“…Thus, children need to suppress the heritage language in the context where the societal language is immersive in order to focus on the acquisition of the societal language ( Gibson et al, 2012 ;Keller et al, 2015 ). However, the number of studies investigating the association between heritage language skills and social competence is scarce, and more research is needed to investigate the influence of DLL's heritage language on social development in different contexts ( Ren & Wyver, 2016 ).…”