She reported on some of her work on our VietSpeech ARC Discovery grant: https://www.csu.edu.au/research/vietspeech/overview
Here is an excerpt from the Language on the Move article:
"Why do some parents succeed in their efforts to maintain the home language and to raise their children bilingually in English and a LOTE while others fail? Our guest speaker in this week’s Lecture in Linguistic Diversity, Dr Van Tran from Charles Sturt University, explored precisely this question with a focus on Vietnamese in Australia. As part of the “Vietspeech” research project, the researcher surveyed over 150 first generation Vietnamese parents living in Australia with children aged below 18 years. The questionnaire study asked parents to rate their children’s proficiency in Vietnamese and English, respond to questions about language use practices, and identify characteristics of the child, the parent, the family, and the community. She then went on to identify the factors that differed for children with above and below average Vietnamese language proficiency (as rated by their parents). With regard to spoken language proficiency, the best predictor was child language use. Maybe unsurprisingly, the more likely a child was to use Vietnamese, the higher their ability to speak the language. This finding points to the existence of vicious and virtuous cycles in language learning. A vicious language learning cycle is one where there are few opportunities to speak, resulting in fewer practice opportunities, resulting in deteriorating language proficiency, resulting in reduced likelihood to speak. By contrast, a virtuous language learning cycle works in the opposite direction: many and varied practice opportunities lead to proficiency gains which in turn further increase the likelihood of language use. This means that the ability to establish virtuous language learning cycles is one of the secrets of success in bilingual parenting."
There has been interest in the article across social media (some examples are below).
