Date of Award

10-30-2020

Publication Type

Master Thesis

Degree Name

M.Ed.

Department

Education

Supervisor

Zuochen Zhang

Rights

info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess

Abstract

Children’s multilingual education is a topic of vital concern among immigrant parents, and this topic has been addressed in different cultural contexts, such as European and North American. However, there is limited research focusing on the subject among Chinese immigrants in Canada. Therefore, the current study explores Chinese immigrant parents’ perceptions of their children’s language learning in a Canadian trilingual setting. This qualitative research utilizes the case study approach as its research method and semi-structured interviews as the instrument to collect information from research participants. Based on the data collected from eight Chinese immigrant parents with a total of 13 children, the findings demonstrate that the Chinese immigrant parents were actively engaged in their children’s language learning and that they held diverse and complex attitudes towards children’s learning of different languages. In response to the challenges the Chinese children encountered in their language learning, the parents took active and positive actions to help their children overcome the difficulties associated with language learning and cultural adjustment. The findings also reveal that the diverging proficiencies in different languages between children and parents did not impede the quality of parent-child communication and familial relationships.

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