Parents Role in Children Bilingual Development

Abstract

Language development of a child is believed to be highly influenced by environmental conditions. Parents are the closest individual to children's growing and development of self-skill, especially linguistic skill, which is essential to provide them the ability to socialize with others. The purpose of this study is to examine parents' roles in children's bilingual development. Specifically, this study seeks to have a deep investigation on how the parents play their roles in children's bilingual development. This research is adopting qualitative design and the family with bilingual use of language was targeted as the data source. The data of this study is the utterances collected from the interview which is used as the technique of collecting data. Then the data will be analysed by applying the theory of parents' role suggested by Anderson. The result of this research found that from five of roles suggested by Anderson, four roles were found, they are the role as a motivator (40%), a feedback provider (30%), a facilitator (20%) and a controller (10%), meanwhile the role as threatener was not found. This study also found that the subjects on this research were categorized as unbalanced bilinguals due to their ability to speak one language dominantly over the other language.