Parent-Preschooler Kid’s Activities in the time of COVID-19 Outbreak: an Autoethnography on Child’s Second Language Acquisition

The present study reported a life experience of a teacher family in Indonesia with a 4-year-old daughter. The observation occurred from March 2020 to July 2021 during the COVID-19 pandemic. This stay-at-home moment became an opportunity to create more parent-kid preschooler bonding and interaction that could impact the developing children language. Indonesian is our family native language (L1); therefore, the exposure started earlier for the kids. However, as parent-kid interaction was enhanced during the pandemic, we boosted our kid English (L2) with a variety of Edu-home activities such as reading aloud, storytelling, role-playing, and watching YouTube-kid. Her language production was documented, and the progress was analyzed. The aim was to generate a more profound understanding of our roles as parents in scaffolding the acceleration of preschoolers' English development, especially in creating meaningful activities. Going through an autoethnography, we reflect on our practice to know how the family members played the role of a language catalyst and which activities were taken more into account.

Introduction

Since the closure of educational institutions and the limitation of social activities, we have noticed a definite change in the atmosphere. Limited movement across the city boundaries made the family explore replacements. Reading becomes routine activity besides other household work. As we read some articles dealing with home literacy, it triggered us to build a home reading environment by creating reading activities that led to more intensive parent-kid interactions. Those are good ways to improve language development in vulnerable young children. As Lian [8] argued, in 21st-century learning, children should be provided access to various resources to gain their own needs and challenges when dealing with the texts. We also use digital tools like YouTube Kids as alternatives to books. It enhances literacy among children [12]. It also has been regarded as a source that provides extensive accents and pronunciation [5]. Furthermore, role-play and interaction-accompanied drawing are stimulating activities to improve children’s linguistic, cognitive, and social skills [7] to develop children's communicative language and language development [1].

Parent-kid activities to support a child's language development are theoretically influenced by Bronfenbrenner’s ecological theory [2] and more on learning in a social context [14]. Bronfenbrenner stated that more distal encouragements in societal institutions impact children's learning, but the proximal factors are the immediate family. Vygotsky [14] argued that children gain something to learn from their observation and interaction with the help of adults. In particular, as parents can identify children's current level of understanding, they support children to move forward gradually becoming independent learners. In addition, social interaction plays a vital role in language acquisition and development. Learning is embedded in how social contexts are constructed through interaction [4]. It entails socialization through language and socialization to practice language [11]. Mutual engagement and shared repertoire are central to language socialization in community practice [16]. 

The present study deserves our personal experience to reflect on our practice to know how the family members play the role of a language catalyst in a bilingual setting English-Indonesian as an impact of social turn [4] (Ellis, 2015). We understand that parents handled children during the pandemic. We must guide and help children face the shifting educational practice from in-person to distant instruction [9]. We must familiarize technology such as smartphones and laptops to facilitate children’s educational needs. We also realized that a 4-year-old daughter could not stand alone. We must establish basic educational needs at home together. Besides, she also needs a social community to play and share.

Furthermore, we cannot deny that our daughter is still acquiring her first language. The language is imperative to facilitate her success in learning L2 [6]. We observed that her first language (L1) was at her age level. She had no difficulties interacting communicatively using simple L1 with parents, relatives, and friends. However, it is essential to emphasize that L2 is worth learning at her age since the pre-school’s literacy activities use both L1 and L2. Therefore, we also support her language development in English (L2). In this case, both L1 and L2 are substantially exposed to provide a bilingual environment. However, this research focuses on how L2 is developed, and the research questions were as follows:

1. What kind of parent-kid activities are selected to expose children's L2 development during COVID-19?
2. How are parent-kid activities implemented in parent-kid interaction?
3. What English linguistic features does the kid acquire during the interaction?  

Method

In order to probe how a kid attained the second language development from various activities in small community practice, an autoethnography was employed. We use our experience as a source of data [15] in building home literacy that impacts a child's language acquisition. The research investigated a 4-year-old non-English speaker in acquiring English as her L2. She interacted extensively with her parents and siblings, who speak Indonesian (L1) and English (L2). The sibling was also involved in an online school environment where L2 was partly used as a medium of instruction. Our daughter also attended toddler school, where L2 partially mediated learning instruction. The family members often used code switching and code mixing in our interaction. However, there was a tendency for kids to prefer English when they wanted to talk about school subjects. There were no rules on when we should use L1 or L2 in our interaction. It was entirely based on preferences. 

Data Collection

Data were collected through video recordings and observation. They were selected from personal documentation. They were transcribed and presented in Table 2 to Table 6 in the findings and discussion section. The duration of each recording varies, as shown in Table 1. The transcription process is done by converting the video into Mp3 files, which are then transcribed using Mac Application Transcribe. Stages of parent-kid interactions are displayed and described narratively in terms of vocabulary, clauses, and complex sentences.

Table 1

Data Recordings

Finding and Discussion

Home Literacy Setting

We focused on developing our daughter's English language acquisition through home literacy habits started from March 2020 to July 2021. First, we set our home as comfortable as possible to avoid boredom, especially for children. Setting home like a playground was the only option to make our daughter comfortable and motivated. Due to the limited room space, we reduced things in the living room, like the sofa set. After that, we could build a temporary tent in the living room to do reading and storytelling, watching while learning, and thinking aloud while drawing. Thus, the living room becomes a kid's playground and reading corner. 

Parent-Kid Activities

Many literacy activities occurred in the living room. Three months after the lockdown, my daughter's English proficiency improved. Initially, she could only mention common English vocabulary like fruits, colors, foods, and kitchen utensils. Then, she uttered the words individually. Complex sentences were not spoken fluently. We were further motivated to focus on enriching her English language acquisition by providing more context for language use. Some activities that were taken into account include:

1. Reading a book. We provided books in different genres such as storybooks, science for kids, and other relevant genres for preschoolers. Besides that, multisensory and big books were also available to stimulate. We read English books to our daughter every night before sleeping.
2. Watching. Besides YouTube kids, we also subscribed to a TV providing appropriate channels for kids. However, she liked YouTube kids since the program was more flexible than other programs. Therefore, she could watch the most favorable program at the moment she wanted. Peppa Pig, and Ben & Holly, in my daughter’s case, were the most effective for pronunciation.  
3. Storytelling. We asked her to retell the story from the book or TV series she had previously had. This activity was intended to practice her speaking skills.
4. Think aloud while drawing. The parents did not deliberately design this activity. She always verbalized her thinking while drawing. This activity was considered beneficial to improve her speaking skills.
5. Role-play. This activity was our daughter’s favorite. She could do mutual-role play with her brother to create the story. The characters of the story were usually copied from cartoon movies. In addition, she also could do an individual role-play. She sometimes talked to herself; she posted herself as one particular character, and at the same time, she played another character. For example, when she played Peppa Pig cartoon characters, she could be George and Peppa or become Daddy and Mommy Pig. In this case, she was swamped with playing characters. 

With those five significant activities, she became a chatterbox kid, and her fluency in speaking English was immediate. She needed little time to predict the vocabulary she should use when speaking. However, there was an issue in the initial stage of "learning." She could not distinguish which language should be used with her interlocutor. She easily mixed one language with another no matter what language the interlocutor used. At this moment, L1 and L2 were unidentified yet. She did not know a referent of the word "language." Regarding language control in bilingualism, she had not built a control mechanism required for bilinguals to use one language and not the other language [17]. However, in the other six months, she could monitor herself from her confusion and finally identify which language should be spoken with a particular interlocutor. 

Another issue was stuttering-like behaviors. Our daughter spoke a bit hesitated to pronounce words. Her thinking moved ahead before her speech production ended, but her vocabulary recall was hampered. To take, for example. 

“Daddy, I want you to help… p. I want you to help me lift this paper bag."

“Brother is taller than me, but daddy is tall...tall...ller taller than my brother."

However, stuttering seemed to be the normal condition in children's language acquisition. According to Mukalel [10], fragmenting and disjoint sentences form part of language disorder even in otherwise normal children. It is typical of children to produce sentences in broken, unrelated units of words that lock required fluency. Shenker [13] claims that stuttering is normal when children speak bilingually. 

Kid-parent Interaction

As previously explained, the daughter was introduced in English with a common vocabulary. The Show and Tell strategy was used a lot to introduce new words. Her mother usually took this part. She took toys or other learning aids and asked her daughter to name them. Sometimes, she did an air-drawing to make the activity more engaging. The recording was transcribed below, and the participants were coded as m (mother) and d (daughter).

Table 2

Building Vocabulary

Based on Table 2, most language productions were at the word level. Several names were not successfully mentioned. Nevertheless, the daughter preferred to answer directly in L1 rather than asking back to her mother. Uniquely, she remained to pronounce the word jagung (corn) and terong (eggplant) in the way L2 is pronounced. In this case, she had a positive attitude toward L2 by producing an L2 accent even though the word production was in L1. She kept trying to talk in L2 despite insufficient L2 vocabulary. Alternatively, her strategy to keep talking in L2 was answering the questions in another reference. Even though the question was distributed to denote things, she answered by denoting the color yellow rather than jagung. It indicated that she had high confidence in speaking L2. A positive attitude and confidence in learning L2 are vital to acquiring the language [3].

More engaging activities were applied to enrich her vocabulary mastery and to provide their contextual use, such as watching and reading a book, still accompanied by parent-kid interaction. Two months later, we recorded dinner activity. There was an improvement in her language production, as shown in Table 3.

Table 3

Building vocabulary

Table 3 informed that language production improved. There are some linguistic complexities prompted; this time, elicited questions were more complex than in the previous language production. The mother used the question word 'can,' and the daughter followed the instruction by naming all fruit correctly, some at sentence level. She did not answer shortly by saying yes or no but chose to elaborate on her answer. Another question was, what do you eat? Where she preferred to shorten the sentence pragmatically by saying salad. The complete answer could be, I eat salad. It indicated that she could monitor her speech production and utter appropriate answers to respond to the question.

Several other activities were further used in exposing L2. We did more reading and storytelling. The activity not only enlarged vocabulary mastery but also practiced all language intake interactively. Telling a story was a powerful strategy to activate word databases in the memory and recall them into speech production. The following was the transcription of the video recording. The activity was about Found and Tell. We were in a dark bedroom. Our daughter used a torch to find out things that we asked. 

Table 4

Find and Tell

Based on Table 4, some progress in producing sentences were made. The initiating interaction started to happen in this activity; our daughter started to restate the exchange as in the following sentence.

e.g., “oh. mommy …you said I can found anything with light.”

Even though she did not use the verb found appropriately, she tried to conduct turn-taking to engage in the activity. She further raised a question to challenge her interlocutor to do more activity through requests, e.g., “want you find it more?” Although the request expression was still disjoint and did not meet English grammar.  

Some further activities were conducted in our daily activity. Diverging exposures to language had also been carried out. As our daughter proceeded with more vocabulary and sentences, she became more confident in practicing her L2. At this stage, she did think aloud while drawing and sing along while doing something. However, she was still confused with cultural diversity across linguistics such as Halloween, Jolly time, and Thanksgiving that she found on YouTube. Parents took the role of explaining these different cultures.

Her language production grew longer. The following activity was transcribing her storytelling from her picture strips. She made a series of pictures and then retold the story.

Figure 1. Telling Series pictures

Table 5

Telling a story

Table 5 shows her improvement in L2 acquisition. Even though the construction of sentences did not meet L2 grammar, this activity informed several enhancements, such as fluency. When she told a story, she took about 55 seconds. The most eminent of this activity was her achievement of gaining confidence to speak English alone even though she still mixed up the tenses between past and present.  

Role-play was the most favorable for our daughter. She usually asked her brother to get involved in the play. She enjoyed playing role-play with their toys. For example, our daughter loved Peppa Pig cartoon characters. The following was a clip of the script from the role-play between son (s) and daughter (d).

Table 6

The Role-play

Based on Table 6, the speech productions were getting complex and immediate. Nevertheless, it showed admirable progress in our daughter's language acquisition. Besides being able to turn-taking, she used the language contextually and pragmatically. Several idiomatic words were also acquired, and she could use them correctly: chatterbox, starboard, opened minded, paddle to medal. I (coded as f) wrote the moment when she used those idioms as the following notes: 

In this context, parents need to notify which word can be appropriately addressed for older people in L1 culture. There was nothing wrong with the word choice in that excerpt, but we need to advise how to respond to such instructions. Finding also showed that our 4-year-old daughter achieved her communicative competence. It is portrayed from the capability to use grammatical constructions with target-like accuracy, the capability to use language in socially appropriate ways, the ability to take part in a coherent and cohesive conversation, and the ability to deal with communication breakdown.

Reading and watching were dominant activities to boost vocabulary intake. Kids acquire and imitate phonic and pronunciation from the authentic model. Kids also copied how to use vocabulary contextually from reading aloud and watching. However, language acquisition did not end at this point. We need to activate vocabulary stored in kids' memory. We need to drill our kids to recall the vocabulary through stimulation. Stimulation can be aided by providing community practice to a family member. As we were currently available at home because of COVID-19, a teacher's family like us can do the same thing to treat preschoolers' kids in developing their language competence.

This present study reflected on our family practice with child language development. However, limitations were being concerned include; first, we did not discuss language development concisely following the sequence of second language acquisition in detail. Another aspect, pronunciation transcriptions, can also be analyzed so that the conclusion over the pronunciation acquisition in this reflexive study would not be overestimated. Second, a transcript of a conversation recording can be further analyzed using conversational analysis. Therefore, how children build their conversations in a minimal community can be uncovered. Thirdly, the data analysis such as coding, transcribing, and categorizing in this research was not assisted by technological support for qualitative data analysis. 

Conclusion

Based on the finding and discussion, this article showed that diverging language activities at home could be helpful for our children's language development, especially when speaking in a bilingual setting. YouTube Kids and books could provide extensive vocabulary exposure for children. Activities such as reading aloud, reading a story, watching an appropriate TV program, and accessing resources through technology could also enrich Children's vocabulary. However, vocabulary exposure is not enough to boost children's language use. Parents must build community practice at home to form literacy habits and instill the literacy outcome. Interactive speaking activities like Role-play, thinking aloud while drawing, and find & tell can be options for children to conduct such vocabulary reinforcement and oral communication practice.

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