Transcript
The issue of how children's first language relates to the learning of the second language is one that has a long history. Not so very long ago, the assumption was we had to immerse the student in the second language context and the first language somehow interfered with the learning of the second language. And so teachers would sometimes tell students or tell parents not to use the first language in the home. If a student was having some problems, if there were some concern that there might be some special education need it was quite common for teachers to advise parents to switch to English in the home. This was quite problematic because in some cases parents did not have access to fluent English and yet they were being told that their interaction with their children was potentially jeopardizing his or her academic progress. What this likely did in some cases was to reduce the quality and quantity of interaction in the home.
What we know now from a lot of research that has been done over last 30 years is that first and second languages are positively related when it comes to academic development. There's a strong positive relationship between, for example, reading comprehension in the first language and the second language. We also know that there is transfer across the languages. The common sense concern with this is what if they are only getting half amount of instruction through English; surely they're not going to do as well in English. We know from huge amount of research that students who are taught bilingually where part of the time spent through minority language do at least as well in the majority language as students who have had all their time in the majority language.
The strategy that we should be pursing as the school is encouraging parents to develop their children's first language as much as possible in the home, to read to them, to provide opportunities for them to use it and if they do that the more the first language develops, the more transfer there will be to English and hopefully, vice versa.
