Parental Attitude Towards Their Children Becoming Bilinguals

Abstract

First language acquisition of a child is determined by the attitudes of the care takers in the choices of which languages to teach their children, how to teach them and when to begin. Mostly the parents who use more than one language at home have to face with this decision and bilingualism has become a good solution to their decision. Therefore, the present case study illustrates the topic by interviewing the care takers and observing a child of 3 years old over a period of 2 months. The observations were done while the child was interacting with his primary and secondary caregivers in order to investigate the language they use. The main findings of the study were that all the interviewees had positive attitudes to bilingualism and they were very much involved in motivating their child becoming a bilingual in Sinhala and English. They believed that bilingualism would assist the educational progress of their child. In the following case study, care takers’ strategies for the language skills in the home and their attitudes to bilingualism will be presented in detail.