Trial lecture
Place: Auditorium 2, Helga Engs hus
Time: 13:00 - 13:45
Title: TBA
Public Defence
Place: Auditorium 2, Helga Engs hus
Time: 14:30-18:30
Adjudication committee
- 1st opponent: Professor Paul Leseman, Utrecht University, the Netherlands
- 2nd opponent: Professor Becky Huang, Department of Teaching and Learning, The Ohio State University, Columbus, USA
- Chair of committee: Professor Helge Ivar Strømsø, Department of Education, University of Oslo, Norway
Chair of defence
Professor and Head of Department Tone Kvernbekk, Department of Education, University of Oslo, Norway
Supervisors
- Principal supervisor: Professor Vibeke Grøver, University of Oslo, Norway
- Co-supervisor: Professor Joshua Lawrence, University of Oslo, Norway
Summary
The home environment is crucial for young children’s language development, especially for young Dual Language Learners (DLLs) who speak a home language while attending preschools in a societal language. This dissertation focuses on the understudied population of Chinese children in Norway and explores how home literacy and family interactions contribute to their oral home language development. Anchored in ecological systems theory and social interactionist theory, this dissertation utilizes a questionnaire-based survey study and an observational study. The survey collects information on the home literacy environment of 118 Chinese parents in Norway. The observational study involves naturalistic family interactions of 33 three-to-five-year-old Chinese-Norwegian DLLs, tracking their longitudinal receptive and expressive language skills in Chinese over three timepoints across one year.
The dissertation is a collection of three research articles. Article I presents findings from the survey study, examining the relationships among parental expectations regarding children’s Chinese learning, their home literacy environment, and children’s oral Chinese language skills. The results reveal a significant association between parental expectations and children’s oral language skills, indirectly linked by home literacy indicators. Namely, parents who manifested their expectations through abundant literacy practices and resources were more effective in supporting their children’s oral home language development.
Article II focuses on the observation of mother-child shared reading over a wordless picture book. Beyond the well-established maternal talk feature—lexical diversity, we discovered that maternal idiom usage is a stronger predictor for children’s receptive vocabulary growth. This novel finding underscores the cultural and linguistic aspects of maternal talk features and their association with child language development.
Article III examines family dinnertime conversations with a particular focus on child participation. The results demonstrate that the density of children’s wh-questions (e.g., questions with what, where, when, who, why, and how) correlated with their expressive vocabulary and narrative skills and predicted their receptive vocabulary growth over one year. The study emphasizes that children have an active role in shaping their social interactions and language learning.
The dissertation sheds light on various factors associated with DLLs’ oral home language development, including parental expectations, home literacy practices and resources, maternal language input, and children’s active participation in family interactions. The findings provide a comprehensive understanding of the dynamics in home literacy and family interactions that support DLLs’ oral home language development. Therefore, they have significant implications for parents, educators, and policymakers, highlighting strategies to enhance DLLs’ home language development in today’s diverse linguistic environments and mobile societies.