Community Language Schools Conference

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Learning in a community-organized language school: Parents' expectation for their children's acquisition of cultural and language

Language is a representation of culture. Throughout the learning process of language learning, what students can gain is not only the ability to read and write, but also the culture of their unique community. Therefore, learning language has special meaning for most immigrant families. To focus on this issue with regard to second generation Taiwanese American immigrants, this presentation examines specified expectations that immigrant parents’ have for their children’s learning at weekend language school. Utilizing three interviews with a Taiwanese American family and four observations of a local language school in southern California, this presentation focuses on complicated cultural-language issues faced by second generation children, indicating how parents and the school act and react in the process of children’s language learning. Providing different approaches to the culture issues, this research plans to answer four sub-research questions: 1.Why parents send their children to language school? 2. What is parents’ expectation about cultural learning? 3. What is the outcome of students’ cultural learning? 4. Does what is taught in the school really meet the parents’ expectations for the cultural education of their children?