A Study on Mother Tongue Learning for Children of New Immigrants from Vietnam in Elementary School

• Main Authors: GAO,PEI-YU, 高珮瑜
• Other Authors: CHIU,LI-KUANG
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Published: 2017
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/50929270293780468119

碩士 === 國立臺北教育大學 === 社會與區域發展學系碩士班 === 105 === In the recent two to three decades, it has become difficult for many men in Taiwan to find their spouses, and quite a number of them turned to Southeast Asia and mainland China. Such being the case, cross-national marriage is getting common in Taiwan. Naturally the number of new immigrant children increases drastically and their percentage among all students also increases year by year. In the school year of 2015, 10.59% students were new immigrant children. Under the curriculum goal of "respect for multi-cultures",languages used in Southeast Asia will be included as one option in the required course of mother tongue learning in the school year of 2018. The researcher of this article interacted with students in their third year in elementary school during the unit of multiple life styles in their social classes. It was noticed that children of new Vietnamese immigrants in each class were unfamiliar with Vietnamese and used it infrequently so that these students had trouble fluently using both Mandarin and Vietnamese in a bilingual context. It is worthy of further study to understand how they learn their mother tongue at home. The purpose of this study is to understand the learning and use of mother tongue for children of new Vietnamese immigrants and to discuss the relationship between the two aspects and the instrumental value of their mother tongue as well as other influencing factors. We also try to identify the conditions or factors that may increase the motivation for children of new Vietnamese immigrants to learn their mother tongue. This is a qualitative study with purposive sampling based on interviews with five new Vietnamese immigrant families. These families were willing to be interviewed. Semi-structured in-depth interviews were conducted with parents of these families and teachers while focus groups were conducted for new immigrant children to understand questions we were interested in. Several findings were identified. First, the learning outcome of mother tongue for new immigrant children is poor. Second, the instrumental value of mother tongue is low, leading to poor learning of mother tongue. Third, the support is inadequate in new Vietnamese immigrant families regarding learning mother tongue. Fourth, Children of new Vietnamese immigrant families show low emotional connection with their mother tongue. Fifth, the language learning environment at school decreases student interests in learning their mother tongue. Sixth, increasing exposure to and support for their mother tongue can strengthen their motivation to learn.