Bilingual Ability And Executive Function Of Minority Children

Preschool stage is a critical period for the rapid development of children's language and executive function.The researchers discussed respectively the important role of family socio-economic status,home language literacy environment and other factors that affect the development of children's language and executive function.Family socio-economic status mainly includes parents' education level,parents' occupation and family income level,which has significant predictive effect on children's cognitive development and academic level.Home language literacy environment includes children's family language interaction,language activity background,reading environment,writing experience and other factors,which have a long-term impact on the development of children's early literacy,academic performance and cognitive function.Studies on the influence of Family socio-economic status,home language literacy environment on the development of language and executive function in early childhood are mostly concentrated in western countries,especially English and Spanish.Domestic studies are relatively fewer,and there is a lack of in-depth research on the internal relationship between home literacy factors and the bilingual level,cognitive development of minority children.Therefore,it is very necessary to explore the influence of various factors in the home language literacy environment on the development of minority children's bilingual ability and cognitive executive function in remote areas.It has certain theoretical and practical value.In the researches on the influence of home literacy environment on children's language and cognitive development,researchers emphasize the importance of rich and frequent language interaction on children's language and cognitive development.Among them,the "Dialogic reading strategies" developed by Whitehurst and his colleagues and the "Conversational intervention strategies" pioneered by Peterson have attracted much attention because of their significant effects.Dialogic reading is a kind of method about picture book reading that teaches parents to master and learn to use various strategies to successfully intervene children's language development in parent-child reading interaction.Many researchers have achieved remarkable results in the intervention of parents and school teachers by means of Dialogic reading training.The intervention program of home conversation interaction is a method that requires parents to use the way of topic extending to talk with their preschool children about personal life events,personal narratives and fictional stories that have occurred so as to promote the development of children's vocabulary and narrative skills.The intervention of these two parent-child language interactions in the monolingual environments have achieved remarkable results.There are few studies about the intervention in the bilingual environment,and further studies are needed to prove the effect.At the same time,many studies have proved that bilingual children have superior cognitive performance.Therefore,bilingual parent-child language interaction may not only promote the development of bilingual ability of bilingual children,but also promote the development of executive function.All of these need to be further verified by relevant studies.This paper involves three studies:In study 1 266 Kazak children aged from 2.5 to 7.5and the parents were selected randomly to examine the relationship between the home language literacy environment with the development of Kazak children's language and executive function;In Study 2 experimental group and control group were set up and the experimental design of “Pretest + intervention twice + posttest twice +follow test” were adopted.Taking 60 Kazakh children aged from 3.58 to 5.33 and their parents from middle class families as the participants,the Kazakh parents in the experimental group were trained to master the skills of dialogic reading in bilingualism,so as to promote the development of children's bilingualism and executive function via using the research paradigm of dialogic reading.In study 3 the conversational interaction strategies which is another important form of language interaction in home literacy environment was adopted.The experimental group and the control group were set up,and the experimental design of “pretest + intervention +posttest + follow test” was adopted.Taking 58 Kazakh children aged from 3.75 to 5.83 and their parents from middle class families as the research objects.Meanwhile,the Kazakh parents in the experimental group receive the training to master the conversational interaction skills so as to accelerate the development of children's bilingualism and executive function.The main research results of this paper are as follows:First,the education level and family income of the parents in the family social-economic status(SES)have significant predictive effect on the development of the Kazakh children's bilingual vocabulary and executive function;Under controlling the family social-economic status,there was a significant positive correlation between the mandarin reading environment in the family literacy environment with the development of the Chinese receptive vocabulary and expressive vocabulary,executive function,but there was no significant correlation with the receptive vocabulary and expressive vocabulary in Kazakh.There was a low positive correlation between Kazakh reading environment and mandarin vocabulary,and a significant positive correlation between Kazakh vocabulary and components of executive function;Under controlling the family social-economic status,the Mandarin reading environment and Kazakh reading environment in the home language literacy environment still have significant influence on children's bilingual vocabulary and executive function;The bilingual vocabulary and executive function of Kazakh children under different language backgrounds,such as Mandarin,Kazakh and bilingual,were significantly different.The development level of bilingual vocabulary and executive function of the Kazakh chindren in the bilingual background was significantly higher than that in the Mandarin and Kazakh background.Secondly,bilingual dialogic reading training can effectively improve the way that mothers read to their children.To be specific,mothers can add some information,wait patiently for positive feedback and often ask questions in bilingual reading,while the behavior of straightforward bilingual reading decreases significantly.Bilingual dialogic reading training can promote the development of bilingual vocabulary and executive function of the Kazakh children effectively.Thirdly,the bilingual conversation interaction training improves the narrative skills of the mother effectively and improves the narrative behaviors of the mother that are conducive to the development of children's bilingual language and executive function significantly,such as open prompts,context questions(wh-context questions)and backchannel responses,but it reduces those negative narrative behaviors,such as yes/no questions and change topics.The training of bilingual conversation interaction has a significant promoting effect on the bilingual vocabulary and executive function of the Kazakh children.To sum up,family language literacy environment is significantly correlated with the development of bilingual vocabulary and executive function to Kazakh children.The parent-child language interaction,which includes dialogic reading and conversational interaction training in home language literacy environment,can not only optimize the mother's reading mode and narrative skills significantly,but also promote the development of the minority children's bilingual vocabulary and executive function effectively.It is worth vigorously advocated in the family as a parent-child language interaction method.This study provides a reference method for the preschool home bilingual education in Xinjiang,and makes parental scaffolding bilingual interaction a viable way for executive function training.