The Impact of Online Learning on Home Languages

Sophie Barré, Head of French, Garden International School Kuala Lumpur

I am a language teacher, a language learner and the mother of trilingual children. Saying that last part I feel obligated to add a disclaimer and say pre-covid they were thriving trilingual, now they are just aspiring trilingual, or maybe I am the one who is still hoping that they will be trilingual. Everything is a bit blurry these days; on the language front it is no exception.

We live in Malaysia and we have started our 3rd year of academic learning online, as in other countries in Asia where schooling in general has been very disrupted.

Online education has meant for many parents getting involved in the academic input of their children, to their dismay. Even as educators and experts in our field, we find teaching our own children a kind of torture, and a test to our patience and pedagogical skills. It changes the family dynamic, it strains relationships, it means more conflicts, less lines between home and school, less breathing space for parents and children. Definitely, no space for children to express their personality outside of a very timetabled and controlled environment that has become home.

Everybody has experienced this at different levels in their own home, but one thing I was not expecting to experience in my house was the phasing out of our home languages. I speak French with my children, my husband speaks Arabic with them, and they are schooled in English. That was our paradigm that was supposed to stay that way. We had very clear lines of which language was used in our house. Home Learning has shattered these lines and distinctions, making English surreptitiously and unexpectedly the main language in our house.

I found myself looking back and thinking how did that happen? What happened is we started to do home-schooling, or should I say we started supporting our children with online learning. To help our children with their schoolwork, we started explaining things to them in English, because doing it in our home language may have confused them. But mainly it also meant we had to make more effort and spend more time explaining concepts in our home language before making sure they understood it in English, and that took a lot of time. Time with two parents working online is something we did not have a great deal of to start with. So little by little, they started speaking in English more and more outside of learning time because the words came much more easily, and we replied in English because we were too tired to even notice or make the switch between languages. We did not notice how bad it all got, until our families on the other side of the world mentioned the difficulty they were having in trying to understand what our children were saying on their weekly call, because every other word was in English. Speaking to other multilingual families, which is the main bulk of my students’ background, I know I am not alone facing this problem.

The difficulty is to assess how much damage is done and to know how to recover from that? In terms of damages, we could argue that as long as the educational language has been practiced, it should not be an issue on children's academic outcomes, particularly as Ellen Yeh demonstrates in her studies that involvement of nonEnglish speaker parents has a positive impact on EAL students. Involved, parents were (unwillingly) and they probably got taught a few things along the way (I know I did), so is it a lot of noise about nothing? However, it cannot be denied that it has created a gap between the EAL support provision children get online, and that would not have happened in faceto-face school. Children with less English proficient parents wouldn’t get support, or a lower quality support at home, and in an international school setting we tend to forget that.

The other thing to consider is: Does it really impact their academic learning that their home language is being phased out for now? Most studies that have been conducted on home languages show the importance of learning the home language for ESL and EAL students because it helps develop their understanding of English as it improves their metalinguistic awareness and increases their understanding of how language works. So, no matter which way we look at it, it has an impact on their English proficiency on top of having an impact on their home language proficiency.

The other thing we often forget is the emotional impact that a language has. Nancy Cohen demonstrates the importance of language development for social emotional learning, and that difficulties in language skills can be transferred to difficulties in emotional and social learning. It is also something that is normally to the advantage of multilingual children as D. Cobb-Clark's study suggests, but not in our actual context where emotional and social learning has already been put on hold with schools closed and all social activities being postponed until further notice.

There is no surprise here that online learning has amplified difficulties for multilingual families, the difficulty to keep alive the home language, the difficulty to close the language gap for EAL learners, and the difficulty to develop healthy emotional and social behaviours. The real question that is still to be answered when we go back to school is: How do families go back on track on using home language and how do schools support families to recover from that? This is where the implementation of a home language programme will be crucial to help students and families as it values their own heritage and language as worthy of being studied. It also helps parents to be more involved in school activities. These programmes will need to be further developed on the road to recovery.

as long as the educational language has been practiced, it should not be an issue on children's academic outcomes