Abstract
Many parents in the US are interested in raising bilingual children and supporting their bilingual development. This is due to various reasons such as parents’ desire to increase children’s opportunities, capitalizing on cognitive benefits of bilingualism, and maintaining the heritage language and cultural identity for bilingual children (Kwon, 2017). Moreover, research has indicated that many parents have a strong desire for their children maintaining Chinese as their heritage language thus they seek a variety of resources and apply different strategies (Pham & Tipton, 2018). Specifically, research has shown that children’s books play an important role in bilingual children’s language development as it provides opportunities for bilingual children to expand vocabulary, develop comprehension skills, and improve narrative abilities in multiple languages (Paradis & Jia, 2017; Yang, 2016). Also of importance, parent-child book-reading interactions play an important role in supporting bilingual language development (more specifically bilingual literacy development) although not all reading strategies are the same in terms of their effectiveness (Bitetti & Hammer, 2016; Schick, 2015; Yang, 2016). Further, few books consider parents’ need for instructions and explanations of applying useful strategies inside the book (Gilkerson, Richards & Topping, 2015; Hammer et al., 2014). To date, no strategies-integrated bilingual children’s book that guides parents on how to use effective reading strategies to support bilingual language and literacy development has been created and examined for parents’ perceived effectiveness. Therefore, for the current project, a strategies-integrated Chinese-English bilingual children’s book was created based on four research-based strategies, and a workshop was given to teach parents how to use the book to support children’s bilingual language and literacy development. Participants were 12 parents of Chinese-English bilingual children ages 3-5 years recruited on social media as well as through Chinese-English bilingual daycares. After participants attended a 45-minute workshop through Zoom, they completed a survey two weeks after the workshop to explore their perception with regards to the book and the workshop. The findings suggested that parents considered the book as an effective tool to practice strategies and as an example of a way to use other books they have at home. In addition, parents reported children as more engaged when they used the strategies included in the book—strategies such as explicitly teaching vocabulary words and creating new stories. Parents also provided suggestions for future use of the book and workshops training, which are discussed here along with implications for researchers, parents, and educators to understand how to apply and modify the strategies from the book.