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Bilingual Children: Active Language Learners as Language Brokers

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Active Learning from Infancy to Childhood

Abstract

All children are active language learners, including those learning more than one language. Growing up bilingual offers children particular cognitive strengths and helpful patterns of interaction, along with some cognitive, perceptual, and academic challenges, particularly for children in families of low socioeconomic status. Many immigrants in the USA face language and cultural barriers in gaining access to resources. To overcome those barriers, families often engage in “language brokering,” in which children act as interpreters and translators between parents and US society. Parent–child interaction during language brokering resembles “dialogic reading” prompts and questioning strategies that have been successfully used to support vocabulary development among young children. This chapter outlines bilingual children’s active engagement with language in challenging cognitive and social situations, and describes promising innovations to promote bilingual language learning.

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Acknowledgements

Part of the research reported here was supported by an HRSA Bridging the Word Gap Challenge Award from the Health Resources Services Administration to Georgene Troseth and by an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship (1445197) to Israel Flores.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychology and Human Development, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN, USA

    Georgene L. Troseth & Israel Flores

  2. Department of Teaching and Learning, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN, USA

    Jeannette Mancilla-Martinez

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  1. Georgene L. Troseth
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  2. Jeannette Mancilla-Martinez
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  3. Israel Flores
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Correspondence to Georgene L. Troseth .

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  1. Department of Psychology and Human Development, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN, USA

    Megan M. Saylor

  2. Department of Applied Psychology & Human Development, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada

    Patricia A. Ganea

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Troseth, G.L., Mancilla-Martinez, J., Flores, I. (2018). Bilingual Children: Active Language Learners as Language Brokers. In: Saylor, M., Ganea, P. (eds) Active Learning from Infancy to Childhood. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-77182-3_13

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