Parent participation

This mixed methods study investigated teacher, parent, and school leader
perceptions of the impact of parent communications and expectation on teacher practices, focusing specifically on four categories: grading, communication, instructional, and curriculum practices. Quantitative data were collected through online surveys from 25 teachers in second through fifth grades, as well as 96 parents of second through fifthgraders, in five private Jewish day schools located in the Southeastern United States. Qualitative data were collected from ten teachers, ten parents, and three school leaders who provided interviews, where they elaborated on the nature of parental communications and expectations at their own schools and their perceptions of their impact on teacher practices. The findings indicated that parent communications take place with high frequency, and are initiated fairly evenly between parents and teachers. Parents and teachers differ on their perceptions of negativity of communications, with teachers reporting more negative communications than parents. A t-test was conducted on the survey items that corresponded with the four categories to compare parent and teacher responses. There were some statistically significant differences in the perceptions of parents and teachers of the impact of particular types of parent communications on teacher practices in private Jewish day schools. These included requests for reviews of a child's grade or a grade change, as well as requests for changes in the content of homework. However, the qualitative data overwhelmingly indicated that parents and teachers have similar perceptions of the impact of parents communications and. They felt that parents occasionally request certain changes, but that these changes have minimal impact in the classroom, outside of isolated, individual events. expectations The school leaders who participated in the study agreed that, for the most part, the dayto- day practices of teachers were not greatly impacted by parent communications.

The current study addressed several questions about the use of language intermingling in child-directed speech and its influence on children's English and Spanish language acquisition on children's language code-switching, Participants were 65 children (Mean age=30.93 months, SD=0.44, 28 boys and 37 girls) who had been exposed to English and Spanish from birth and for whom at least one parent was a native Spanish speaker.... Measures of the children's lexical, grammatical, receptive, and productive language development in English and in Spanish were collected concurrently.... Consistent with sociolinguistic theories that propose that language separation is necessary for heritage language maintenance, children who were exposed to more language intermingling were more English-dominant. Both sensitivity to the language context and children's language dominance were related to children's production of mixed utterances. Children code-switched more when speaking in their less proficient language and when in the context of minority language use.

This study investigated the effects of family composition and properties of children's dual language exposure on bilingual first language acquisition. Mothers of 29 toddlers (13 boys and 16 girls, M age = 25.66 months, SD = .44) kept a language diary, providing measures of the amount, the contexts, and the persons with whom the children experienced English and Spanish. Measures of the children's vocabulary balance were obtained from English and Spanish language inventories. Results showed that only children with two native Spanish-speaking parents had larger Spanish than English vocabularies and experienced more hours of Spanish-only exposure and Spanish-only conversational contexts. Analysis of covariance demonstrated that the effect of family composition on vocabulary balance was completely mediated by the balance of English and Spanish in the children's language exposure. There was no evidence of a unique effect of experiencing Spanish-only conversational contexts or partners on children's acquisition of Spanish.