The Effects of Educational Tools in Reducing Code-Switching in Child Simultaneous Bilingual Education

Abstract

Simultaneous bilingual education of a child is a dynamic process. Construction of linguistic competences undeniably depends on the conditions of the linguistic environment of the child. This education in a monolingual family, requires the practice of parenting tactics to increase the frequency of the language use in minority, during which, code-switching prevents child from keeping the monolingual rhythm in the minority language. This case-study focuses on a 41 month-old girl whose only interactive source for the second language, i.e., French, is her non-native mother, since birth; Persian is the dominant social language. Seeking to promote language acquisition by offering several opportunities for the weaker language, “animation”, accessible in every house, is introduced as an audio-visual educational tool. This paper experiments the application of a parental method to see if this passive tool can be used to create interaction and communication, how effective can such a document be on child language development while limiting code-switching and minimal level of expression and thus analyzing language learning of a child being exposed to two languages in a monolingual social environment. This research aims to prove the effectiveness of cartoon as an educational tool in improving the quality of a minority language acquisition by designing age-adapted activities that have been tested earlier to educational goals by the mother-researcher on primary school children. All sessions of this experiment were subjected to an audio recording which allows meticulous observation and data evaluation.