Lehigh University Building Bridges Across Language and Culture

Lehigh University’s College of Business and Economics published an article on its blog by Margie Peterson detailing research into a cutting-edge educational program designed by Lehigh faculty. The program tackles communication barriers that tend to manifest in dual language learners when English-speaking early childhood education practitioners and bilingual parents interact.

Across cultures, there is often tension when parents and teachers encounter each other for the first time, which tends to be when a student’s classroom conduct or performance is being scrutinized. These interactions have the potential to be obstructed by cross-cultural assumptions when the teacher only speaks English, the parents’ mother tongue is Spanish, and the student in question is a dual language learner.

Brook Sawyer, Lehigh Assistant Professor of Teaching, Learning, and Technology elaborates: “The parents may not seem to be as involved because they may not speak English very well or they may have had a poor schooling experience themselves, and they are working a lot so those parents might not be as visible to the teachers as other parents.”

Project TAPP (Teachers and Parents as Partners) was devised by Sawyer, along with school psychology program director Patricia Manz and psychology graduate student Kristin Martin to tackle communication hurdles that dual language learners often encounter.

The trio used a sample comprised of 14 parents and 17 teachers taken in late 2013 from four Lehigh Valley early childhood centers. According to the blog post, the subjects were surveyed about “how children learn a second language, the roles of teachers and parents in supporting children’s language development, and how parents and teachers can collaborate to provide strong language environments for dual language learners.”

After they evaluated all the early childhood centers, Manz and Sawyer assembled a community practice with two parents and three teachers in which they all worked to develop “strategies for facilitating the language development for DLL children.”

One exercise included screening videos Sawyer and Manz made of parents of DLL children reading a children’s book aloud in Spanish before teachers would read the same book to the pre-school aloud in English. When this strategy was implemented, Sawyer and Manz found that not only did DLL children exhibit a greater understanding of the material and a more positive perception of their parents’ language and culture, but the views of their English-speaking teachers also changed for the better.

Manz and Sawyer asked two parents in another experiment to take everyday expressions that often crop up in lessons and translate them into Spanish. Teachers would then incorporate the Spanish translations into daily discussions. As the blog post explains, Manz found the results remarkable: “Parents who had been largely invisible at the early childhood centers felt more comfortable conversing with teachers about their children’s education, which in turn altered teachers’ assumptions about the families.”

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