Emma Chen

Emma Chen is a doctoral student in the Department of Curriculum Studies at the University of Saskatchewan, engaged in a narrative inquiry into immigrant children’s heritage language education, in the context of home, community, and school. Originally from China, Emma is an immigrant parent to two young bilingual children who speak both English and Mandarin-Chinese. Every day, Emma walks alongside her little girls exploring the wonderful (and sometimes challenging) worlds of language and culture.

Proposed Doctoral Research

My research will explore the relationship between home literacy environments (including parent engagement) and immigrant children’s first language skills. My interest is in inquiring into the methods used and attitude held by immigrant parents who promote their children’s first language skills in the home environment. Drawing upon the literature on first language education, family literacy environment, and parent engagement, the following research questions will be addressed:

1. What ideologies do immigrant parents hold with respect to their children’s first language development?

2. What strategies do immigrant parents employ to practice their first language at home?

3. How do different attitudes toward the priority between first language and English influence their home literacy environment and their children’s first language levels?

4. What kinds of support do immigrant families need from communities (e.g. schools, government, non-profit organizations) to maintain and develop their first language at home?

5. How would immigrant families’ experience of first language education result in greater educational outcomes for both immigrant children and the bigger community?

The growing diverse population in Canada is changing the face of language education (Zhang, Pelletier, & Doyle, 2010). Taking Saskatchewan as an example, almost 10,000 New Canadian children aged one to nine arrived in Saskatchewan between 2008 and 2014 (Government of Saskatchewan, 2015). Bilingualism and bilingual education have received increasing attention in recent years; however, the focus has mostly been on immigrant children’s English skills. Studies show that the acquisition of the English language can benefit from rich concept development in the first language (Kim, Liu, & Cao, 2017). There is research evidence that children’s early language skills are related to their experiences with language input in the home literacy environment (Aarts, Demir, & Vallen, 2011). 

Immigrant parents are the first and best qualified teachers of their children’s home language education. The language skills and parent knowledge (Pushor, 2015) they hold are valuable resources. Compared to school teachers, who might find it difficult to embrace bilingual education in school settings due to a lack of knowledge about how first language education is practiced in home settings (Li, 2006), immigrant parents are able to contribute not only to home language education but also provide informative funds of knowledge to educators.