Bilingual children in UK classrooms by

Interviews

ncjbrown — 2015-11-22 07:53:44 UTC

The children were video-recorded during the semi-structured interviews. In order to make the experience as pleasant as possible for the little ones they were provided with colouring pens, paper and mandala patterns. The interviews did not last longer than 20 minutes with the first and last five minutes doing art without being questioned.

Ethnography using the Mosaic approach

ncjbrown — 2015-11-22 07:53:58 UTC

Over the space of two years I got very involved with my research participants. The individual mosaic tiles were interviews, observations, children's work.

I built a strong relationship with the bilingual families that were the research participants and I spent a lot of time talking to children and their parents to find out about approaches to bilingualism and perceptions relating to identity and learning.

I also worked closely with classroom teachers in a primary school and in addition to my volunteer work within the classes I also interviewed them to find out their perceptions and views.

Research focus and rationale

ncjbrown — 2015-11-22 07:54:09 UTC

For this enquiry I wanted to find out how having bilingual children in a UK classroom would impact the dynamics of that classroom and ultimately affect teaching. My interest stemmed from my own experiences as a mother of a bilingual. As my son grew up I realised the specific needs he had due to his bilingualism and therefore started asking myself what that would mean for a classroom teacher in a primary school.

Literature about bilingualism provides guidance for best practice and ideas for language approaches, but I found that there was a gap in literature as the actual families' and teachers' voices were not represented strongly enough.

Outcomes

ncjbrown — 2015-11-22 08:04:59 UTC

From the data I gathered I was able to conclude the following:

If their English is strong enough teachers treat bilinguals like monolinguals.
Being bilingual does not result in being bicultural.
Language learning and attitude to languages amongst the bilinguals varies within a family depending on the child's personality.

Limitations and challenges

ncjbrown — 2015-11-22 08:05:04 UTC

My enquiry was not rigorous enough and I lacked consistency during my data collection process.

The primary school I worked with changed headmasters and with the new headmaster not wanting external visitors, I was not able to continue my work within the classroom.

The bilingual families

ncjbrown — 2015-11-22 08:07:08 UTC

I worked with three bilingual families, who over time have all become close friends to our own family.

Two families raised their children as bilinguals of English and French, one family was speaking English and German.

Three different approaches to bilingualism were represented:

one-parent one-language
English outside the home, second language inside
any language as and when

Impact

ncjbrown — 2015-11-22 08:16:17 UTC

Unfortunately, I was not able to make the difference I was intending, as I was not able to complete my research within the primary school.

I was able to inform participating families of my findings, and I have been able to provide relevant information for other bilingual families.