Home Literacy Environment and Chinese-Canadian First Graders’ Bilingual Vocabulary Profiles: A Mixed Methods Analysis

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

This study presents an interesting research question: understanding the patterns of achievement in bilingual oral receptive vocabulary in Chinese-English first graders, by investigating also their underlying profiles and, crucially, the home-related factors that account for variability. Furthermore, I find very relevant the choice of authors of considering the role of attitude per sé, and the role played by siblings in a family.

I would suggest the paper to be accepted, but some issues need to be addressed:

-       Defining the speakers:

o    Heritage languages are not the same as migrant languages: heritage speakers might be simultaneous or sequentials, but they are raised in homes where the heritage language is not the same of the dominant/community language (see Polinsky and Scontras, 2019 among others). Therefore, this makes the difference between a child born in the dominant language country and an adult who was raised in the home country and then migrated to the host/dominant language country. The authors then should be clearer in the introduction to whom they are referring to;

o   Also the term “mother tongue” is not appropriate anymore and it is preferrable to refer to this language as “native language”. Please rephrase throughout the paper.

-       Page 2, line 4: “sociolinguistic environment, such as the home”. These concepts do not necessarily overlap, so please be more specific;

-       Page 2, end of Introduction “[…] comparing and contrasting parental practices of four children with divergent bilingual profiles”. At this point is not clear yet that you are going with focal groups, so I would rephrase it or specify it here, because it looks like you are going to test four children only

-       Page 3: you introduce the role of age, and I think it would be beneficial to refer also to recent literature which considers the role played by the age of onset of the dominant language (see for example Gagarina and Klassert, 2018)

-       On a more general view, I don’t understand why the authors chose the methodology of focal group: why should this be beneficial for a study on receptive vocabulary? Can the authors motivate more on this? And on the same line, why in the groups a big part is attributed to the role of the mother and not to both parents for example? I would understand that just in the case of a sole mother

-       Throughout the session of home factors, I would remodulate authors’ contributions and “reported” dialogues, although I understand they are not real reported dialogues. But they should be separated.

Author Response

Dear Reviewer,

Thank you for your helpful feedback. We have addressed all the suggestions and the following edits were made:

 

1. In response to the first feedback:

Heritage languages are not the same as migrant languages: heritage speakers might be simultaneous or sequentials, but they are raised in homes where the heritage language is not the same of the dominant/community language (see Polinsky and Scontras, 2019 among others). Therefore, this makes the difference between a child born in the dominant language country and an adult who was raised in the home country and then migrated to the host/dominant language country. The authors then should be clearer in the introduction to whom they are referring to;

We changed “immigrant children” to “children from immigrant families” to emphasize the L1 is heritage language to children but immigrant language to parents.

2. In response to the second feedback:

Also the term “mother tongue” is not appropriate anymore and it is preferrable to refer to this language as “native language”. Please rephrase throughout the paper.

The word “mother tongue” was used in the official data release in the Statistics Canada report, therefore, we use the term when citing the reports.

3. In response to the feedback:

Page 2, line 4: “sociolinguistic environment, such as the home”. These concepts do not necessarily overlap, so please be more specific.

We removed the sociolinguistic environment, and simplify the sentence to home literacy environment.

4. In response to the feedback:

Page 2, end of Introduction “[…] comparing and contrasting parental practices of four children with divergent bilingual profiles”. At this point is not clear yet that you are going with focal groups, so I would rephrase it or specify it here, because it looks like you are going to test four children only.

We removed “four” from the sentence.

5. In response to the feedback:

Page 3: you introduce the role of age, and I think it would be beneficial to refer also to recent literature which considers the role played by the age of onset of the dominant language (see for example Gagarina and Klassert, 2018)

We added a few lines in our lit review by synthesizing the research study of Gagarina and Klassert (2018).

6. In response to the feedback:

On a more general view, I don’t understand why the authors chose the methodology of focal group: why should this be beneficial for a study on receptive vocabulary? Can the authors motivate more on this? And on the same line, why in the groups a big part is attributed to the role of the mother and not to both parents for example? I would understand that just in the case of a sole mother

We added a few lines in page six under the cluster analysis section to justify our use of focal groups.

We also added a few sentences in the implication section to mention the imbalanced participation of mothers over fathers is one of our study limitations. 

7. In response to the feedback:

Throughout the session of home factors, I would remodulate authors’ contributions and “reported” dialogues, although I understand they are not real reported dialogues. But they should be separated.

We re-formatted the quotations as separated paragraphs.

Guofang Li, on behalf of the co-authors

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 2 Report

Dear authors, please, find attached the file with the improvements suggested. Amongst other, it is necessary to adapt the manuscript to Journal requirements. 

 

 

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

Dear Reviewer,

Thank you for the suggestions for style changes. We have made the changes throughout the manuscript to be consistent with the journal style. 

 

Thank you!

Guofang Li, on behalf of the co-authors

Author Response File: Author Response.docx