Carolina Barrera-Tobón and Sung Park-Johnson
Children’s Language Use and Development in a Spanish Immersion Early Education Classroom - by Carolina Barrera-Tobón and Sung Park-Johnson
The project was a longitudinal study of bilingual language and identity development of a group of children at a family-run Spanish Immersion School in the Chicagoland area. Barrera-Tobón and Park-Johnson sought preliminary answers to the following questions:
What patterns characterize the use of Spanish and English by young second language learners of Spanish and heritage (native) Spanish speakers?
In what ways are students invested in Spanish or English for their identity creation and how does this manifest itself in language choices?
In what ways do language practices and proficiency of caregivers inform language attitudes, use, and proficiency of preschool aged children?
Researchers recruited 37 of 80 preschoolers to participate in the study. Graduate and undergraduate research assistants worked closely with faculty on recruitment, data collection, and analysis. During Winter 2018, Professor Barrera-Tobón taught SPN 391 Sociolinguistics of Heritage Language Literacy where DePaul students directly contributing to the research study. Research questions were defined by all stakeholders and a high degree of rapport with the school led to recruitment of almost half of the preschool student population. Data collection involved weekly classroom observations as well as the picture elicitation method.