Educational Research AY2015/2016

My research study focused on the role of the school and home linguistic environments in relation to early bilingual skills in receptive vocabulary and expressive language. The research study is part of a larger longitudinal project, and takes on a mixed-methods approach. Twelve children were examined from the larger project of one thousand and five hundred pre-schoolers from various pre-schools across Singapore, regardless of their Mother Tongue languages. Owing to this, the participants may come from very different types of pre-schools and may have different home linguistic backgrounds. Although Mandarin, Malay and Tamil skills were assessed across the larger sample, this paper will only focus on findings among children who spoke Mandarin. The findings indicate that the types of school did not have a strong relation to young children’s abilities in the receptive vocabulary and expressive language skills in both English and Mandarin. On the other hand, home linguistic backgrounds did play a vital role in young children’s acquisition and development of receptive vocabulary and expressive language skills of both English and Mandarin.