Research supports the use of vernacular language at home

A recent research by the Pacific Resources for Education and Learning or PREL supports the concept that parents should communicate with their children at home in their first language as it is their stronger medium of communication.

“When parents and children speak the language that they know best, they are working at their actual level of cognitive maturity,” according to PREL’s research.

The PREL report, entitled Language Use at Home and School: A Synthesis of Research for Pacific Educators, provides an overview of several research findings that relate to the context of education in the Pacific region, which has an estimated 30 different languages.

A study cited in the PREL report indicated that most parents in the Pacific believe that “the more children are exposed to English, the better and quicker they will acquire the language.”

Worried that using the vernacular at home will result in sufficient exposure to English, parents in the Pacific therefore, speak to their children in English rather than in their indigenous language, the study said.

However, PREL research found that children do better academically when they come from homes that maintain their first language.

Language experts attribute this to observations that indigenous-speaking parents who talk to their children in English are less able to elaborate their thoughts specifically those that with deal with complex ideas.

“Their relatively weaker ability to speak in English may cause them to speak less to their children,” the PREL report said. “Some may avoid interaction entirely.”

According to previous studies, constant communication between parents and children should be maintained at home because it is where children obtain richer language development.

“Loving verbal interaction between parents and their young children has been found to promote the development of cognitive as well as linguistic skills,” the PREL report stated.

It was found that language skills cannot be totally developed in school because there is hardly a constant one-on-one communication between the teacher and the students.

“Teachers have been found to do the great majority of talking in school, with three teacher utterances to every one made by a child,” the PREL report stated. (MCM)