Bilingual and Monolingual Parents’ Beliefs About Bilingualism and Bilingual Education
- DOI
- 10.2991/assehr.k.220131.193How to use a DOI?
- Keywords
- Bilingual; Monolingual; Parents’ views; Early bilingual education
- Abstract
Whether children should be encouraged to acquire two languages at an early stage is a controversial topic. There are therefore huge individual differences in how parents may reason about bilingual education, and this can greatly impact their parental practices on bilingualism-related topics. To understand how parents think about bilingualism and bilingual education, the current study surveyed N = 178 parents from Prolific on their views about early bilingual education. The results show that all parents have a positive attitude towards early bilingual learning. However, there are also some differences between monolingual and bilingual parents. Specifically, bilingual parents are less likely to think that early bilingual learning is easy to cause confusion in grammar, reading, vocabulary and accent; whereas monolingual parents are less agreeing with that early learning second language promotes cognitive development and information processing efficiency. In addition, bilinguals generally were less likely to believe that bilingual learning is prone to stress and fatigue. But at the same time, monolinguals tended to believe that bilingual learning helps children understand their self-identity more so than bilingual parents. This study contributes to the understanding on parents’ views about child early bilingual education. Future directions and limitations are discussed.
- Copyright
- © 2022 The Authors. Published by Atlantis Press SARL.
- Open Access
- This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC license.
Cite this article
TY - CONF AU - Miaojing Zhang PY - 2022 DA - 2022/02/01 TI - Bilingual and Monolingual Parents’ Beliefs About Bilingualism and Bilingual Education BT - Proceedings of the 2021 International Conference on Education, Language and Art (ICELA 2021) PB - Atlantis Press SP - 1066 EP - 1072 SN - 2352-5398 UR - https://doi.org/10.2991/assehr.k.220131.193 DO - 10.2991/assehr.k.220131.193 ID - Zhang2022 ER -