| Summary: | An exploratory study was conducted to investigate Chinese parents' attitudes toward their
children's first language maintenance. Interviews were conducted to collect data from a
total of 30 parents who came from two distinct socioeconomic and educational
backgrounds. Fifteen parents sent their children to a university lab preschool (ULP group)
and the other fifteen enrolled their children in a community-based day care (CDC group)
in a Chinese-speaking neighborhood in Vancouver. The Family Environment Scale (FES)
(Moos, 1974) was also used to collect information about the family social and emotional
dynamics. All parents from both groups felt that it was important for their children to
maintain their Chinese. However, it was found that parents and children from the CDC
group used more Chinese than parents and children from the ULP group in most
situations. Furthermore, the CDC parents were more concerned about the academic and
literacy aspects of the language learning while the ULP parents were more personal and
social oriented. These two groups of parents had similar scores in almost every sub-scale
of the FES except for the sub-scales of active-recreational orientation, organization, and
conflict. In the sub-scales of active-recreational orientation and organization, the ULP
families had higher scores than the CDC families and there was a statistical significance
between these two groups. The CDC group scored higher than the ULP group in the subscale
of conflict and the scores of these two groups were statistically different. It was also
found that there were positive correlations between some sub-scales scores in the FES and
the language use patterns in the ULP group. === Education, Faculty of === Curriculum and Pedagogy (EDCP), Department of === Graduate
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