Introduction

On a recent flight from Seoul to Shanghai, I sat near a 5-year-old Korean girl, Choon-Hee and her mother, Mrs Pak. The mother and daughter were on their way to join the girl's father in China. They planned to settle there because of Mr Pak's job relocation. During the nearly 2-hour plane ride, little Choon-Hee was keenly making drawings and experimenting with different ways of forming Korean Hangul1 letters and Hanja (Chinese characters). From time to time, Mrs Pak modelled the details of how to write Hangul letters and Hanja strokes. The mother and the child seemed to enjoy immensely what they were doing.

Watching the interactions between Mrs Pak and her child, I realised that I was witnessing the little girl's multilingual literacy development in the making. I imagined that with this level of child engagement and with this level of parental support, Choon-Hee would certainly become multiliterate in the years to come.

However, as much as I was impressed with the mother-child enthusiasm and as much as I wanted to be optimistic about the girl's future multiliterate development, I could not help but worry if the child would remain so eager down the road and if the child's multilingual reading and writing skills would be thriving a few years from now. My seemingly pessimistic outlook for this child's future multilingual literacy development may not be entirely baseless. You will probably understand my concern after you read an e-mail that I received from a mother.

Anna's frustration is not unusual. Many parents who attended my parents' workshops or corresponded with me have substantiated Anna's sentiment based on their experiences of raising multilingual and multiliterate children. Below are some of their challenges and concerns.

Challenges of Developing Multilingual Literacy

Time constraints

It takes a great amount of time for a child to develop reading and writing skills in one language. Needless to say, those children who grow up with more than one language require even more time to develop the skills in multiple languages. It is already difficult for busy parents to cope with the mundane routines of their everyday lives and it is even harder for them to find time to teach their children to read and write their heritage language. Many parents commented that even though they wanted to engage their children in heritage language literacy activities, there was simply no time.

Moreover, there is always a competition between the time needed for heritage language literacy activities and the time needed for other events, such as sports, leisure and regular school assignments. Thus, the time constraint is often the major issue that prevents children from continuing with their heritage language literacy development.

Lack of pedagogical information

Parents who are determined to help their children develop heritage language literacy skills often have two options. First, there are community-based language schools. When they are available and affordable, parents may choose to send their children to these schools. Alternatively, some parents opt to teach their heritage language literacy at home. The issue, however, is that most teachers who teach in the community language schools are parent volunteers (I call them parent teachers). Even though some may be well educated, they have never gone through any teacher preparation programmes. Some of them simply teach by drawing on their recollection of learning to read as children. As a result, many parent teachers may lack the skills necessary to engage their students. Even if some parent teachers had teaching experience in their heritage country, they may not be familiar with the teaching pedagogy in their current country of residence. Therefore, these parent teachers may not be quite aware that their students experience a different kind of world from that of their own. Many parents who teach their children at home face a similar situation.

Hence, while almost all children are ready to learn, not all parent teachers are ready to teach. Consequently, many children grow exasperated and lose their motivation for heritage language learning. The lack of adequate heritage language teaching pedagogical skills of some parent teachers and parents may be one of the reasons why some children do not make progress or continue with their heritage language literacy development. Research has long indicated that teacher qualification is positively related to student achievements and teachers and their teaching methods do matter.

I want to stress that some parent teachers' lack of pedagogical information does not mean that all parent teachers in community language schools do not contribute to children's heritage language learning. Many of them have greatly contributed to children's success in their heritage language development.

Conflicting teaching styles

The teaching styles of many teachers in community heritage language schools and parents are sometimes drastically different from the ones their children are used to. As a result, their teaching styles unintentionally conflict with their children's learning styles and hinder the children's heritage language literacy skill development. The following is a quote from a 10-year-old boy who attended a community Chinese language school in Montreal in Xiao-lan Curdt-Christiansen's study:

I don't like the Chinese school, it's boring and the characters are too difficult to remember. Plus, there is no action in the class. I feel like sleeping. But my mom says I have to go. I like action. But in the Chinese school, we are not allowed to do anything. We are not allowed to talk or to write except dictations. So all the Chinese I have learned, I forget it all when I come home. In my French school, we are allowed to make up stories, we can talk about our stories in front of the whole class, and the teachers are nice.

This boy's comments pinpoint the obvious differences in teaching styles between his teachers in the community language school and his teachers in his mainstream language school. It is clear that when children are not used to the teaching styles in their community language school or at home, their motivation to learn subsides. I have recently taken my two children out of a local Chinese language school for fearing that they would lose motivation to read and write Chinese because the teaching style there is drastically different from the one in their regular school.

Teaching materials are remote from children's lives

The literacy materials used by community language schools or parents are often textbooks imported from the heritage countries. Frequently, the contents and vocabulary in these textbooks are too...