Los Padres Monolingües Que Ayudan A Sus Hijos En Su Educación Bilingüe –Temores, Expectativas, Características
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Sarmiento Díaz, Isabel | 2013-09-28
This qualitative research is a response to the need to explore fears, beliefs and characteristics in monolingual parents, as part of the academic bilingual environment.
In order to answer some research questions on this subject, the study was carried out in a bilingual institution (Spanish-English) that implements an immersion approach. The work was carried out with a focal group of parents, and two mothers were observed at home tutoring their children. The data collection techniques were based on participative observation, focal group workshop on the method of co-active coaching and semistructured interviews with two foreign teachers. Additionally, some institutional documents and field notes were analyzed. For recording technological resources such as a video camera and a digital recorder were used.
The findings indicated that parents are motivated to choose English bilingual education, among other reasons, because of its importance in today's world, being a life skill and because it is a useful asset for future professional issues. Also they evidenced beliefs about their role in supporting their children´s academic tasks: parents wanted to help their children, therefore they asked to be informed in Spanish about what their children were expected to do. They also asked for tools such as translators and resources to enable them to understand better. Parents also indicated that they feared feeling at a disadvantage as consequence of not knowing the language. They wanted to have better communication with teachers. The results showed a certain similarity with those of a study carried in the United States by Quicho and Daoud (2006), which may indicate that Latino parents share a desire to support their children in their academic work and need to understand teachers by overcoming language barriers. In other words, they want to be involved and part of their children´s academic life.
LEER