How lockdown affected the children's languages usage and development - Primary Research



From the researches I have read in the past year, I could see how all the reliable methods had specific control variables. One control variable that almost every reliable research had was the child's education institute. Another one which was quite common is the child's parents level of education. This is because the researchers deemed important to understand how the environment around the child has an impact on their learning of languages. For example if the child is bilingual in Spanish and English however they spend more time in an English school then their English proficiency will be higher than the Spanish one. In the past years, lockdown gave bilingual and multilingual children the unique experience of potentially spending more time in an environment with their less proficient language. 

I decided to do a survey targeting parents with young bi/multilingual children to find out what was the impact of lockdown on their children's use of languages. This idea was inspired by an article I have read in the previous months which did a similar experiment and found promising results.

 Potential questions :

How many languages can you child speak?

What language/s are normally used in your household

Being multilingual is an important part of my personal identity.

Being multilingual is an important part of my child/children’s personal identity.

It is important that my child/children can read in their other language(s).

It is important that my child/children can write in their other language(s).

What language is used at your child's school if they attend school?

Does your child attend a complementary school (e.g. a Saturday School) , if so what language do they use there?

My child/children’s spoken English was negatively affected by school closures and social distancing measures.

My child/children’s spoken other language(s) was negatively affected by school closures and social distancing measures.

Overall my child/children heard their other language(s) more in lockdown than before lockdown

Overall my child/children spoke their other language(s) more in lockdown than before lockdown

I decided to focus this survey for children whose household language is not English. I will be sending this survey to a voluntary group and all of the children who attend school in this group go to an English school. I believe this is an important factor because it means there is an equal exposure to the 2 or more languages.

https://forms.gle/o3mb34A7Es8tp46W6                                            

This is a copy of the survey I plan to send to the voluntary group.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Final Evaluation

  What were the main strengths and weaknesses of the project?     Strengths:  - Many scientific sources and evidence - Covered both science and part of social side of being bi/multilingual - Included primary research (surveys) Weaknesses: - Not enough evidence to prove some of the theories mentioned in this project   What new skills did you learn? What new technologies did you learn?     Skills developed : - Reading, analysing and summarising academic papers and research papers - Organising and developing primary research   Technology used : - Google Scholar - University websites ( e.g. Cambridge )   In doing the project, what did you learn about yourself and the way in which you learn?           I learn that when reading academic papers, I need to break down all the information in order to understand the key findings of that specific study. For example I learn that colour
Read more

Abstract

  This research is focused on the bi/multilingual brain particularly during early stages, in children and it goes into detail on the various parts of the brain involved in the language comprehension and expression. There are many researches which prove that the adult bilingual brain is indeed different, in terms of structure and connectivity, compared to a monolingual one. However these studies do not answer the question of when the brain starts to change in bi/multilingual people and it also does not show the effect of two or more languages in a developing brain of a child. This research project is mainly focused on answering these questions and understanding if there is a structural difference between the developing monolingual and bi/multilingual brain.
Read more