This study involved surveying 649 families in Livingston Union School District in Livingston, California, to ascertain parents' motivating factors which led them to enroll their children in a dual-language program at school and to see if there are different motivating factors for English-speaking parents and Spanish-speaking parents. A dual-language program involves integrating students who speak two different languages into a class or program where students learn in both languages. The survey return rate was 41.2%. Of the 268 respondents, 52.9% indicated that they spoke to their children at home in Spanish, 41.4% indicated that they spoke to their children at home in English, 2.6% spoke to their children in Punjabi, 0.3% said they spoke to their children in Urdu, and 2.6% of the respondents declined to answer this question. When asked what motivated the parent to enroll their child in a dual-langauge program, the responses from Spanish-dominant parents were as follows: 90.11% of the respondents enrolled the child in the program because they wanted their child to be able to speak, read, and write in two languages, 67.10% enrolled because they wanted their child to be successful in a global economy, 62% said they enrolled because they wanted their child to be more successful in school, 59.60% said they wanted their child to be comfortable relating to different people and cultures, 57.70% said they wanted their child to be able to relate to his/her heritage, 36.30% enrolled their child because they wanted the child to be with teachers that spoke their language. Approximately 11% wrote in other reasons for enrolling their child in a dual-language program. English-speaking parents chose their reasons for enrolling their child in a dual-language program in almost the same order as the Spanish-speaking parents. However, there are significant differences in the percentage of parents that chose those answers. For example, though the desire to see their child speak, read, and write in two languages was the top choice of both sets of parents, 94.5% of the English-speaking parents chose this answer while only 86.60% of Spanish-speaking parents chose this as their top answer. In addition, there was a significant difference between the two sets of parents when analyzing the choice of wanting their child to be comfortable relating to different people and cultures (English-speaking at 54.90% and Spanish-speaking at 63.3%) and the choice of wanting their child to be with teachers that spoke the same language (English-speaking at 25.20% and Spanish-speaking at 45%). The study ends with recommendation for practice and recommendations for further studies.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:pacific.edu/oai:scholarlycommons.pacific.edu:uop_etds-1101 |
| Date | 01 January 2011 |
| Creators | Silver, Barbara L. |
| Publisher | Scholarly Commons |
| Source Sets | University of the Pacific |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Source | University of the Pacific Theses and Dissertations |
| Rights | http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ |
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