The summery of Communication Between Early Educators and Parents who speak English as a

Second Language A Semantic and Pragmatic Perspective.

The articles title is Communication Between Early Educators and Parents who speak
English as a Second Language A Semantic and Pragmatic Perspective written by Gregory A.
Cheatham department of special education who published on 20 May 2011 in University of
Kansas. He interested on the topic since his research discuss about communication between early
educators speaking their native language and parents who speak English as a second language.
Parents who may have limited proficiency in the second language face challenges to
understanding semantic and pragmatic aspects of English. He hunch that children in early
childhood programs and their families come from diverse linguistic backgrounds in which
parents were speaking English as a second language will illustrate potential difficulties to
listening comprehension and communication.Additionally, semantics and pragmatics will be
used as a framework for recommending strategies to facilitate these parents' ability to
comprehend and communicate during discussions with early educators.
He exposed listening processes of parents who speak a second language can be difficult
and tiring for parents as they listen and respond to early educators during meeting. He thought
the meaning of language could be constructed from linguistic input, from a process involving
long and short term memory, language decoding skills and previous experiences. He express that
the best practices in early childhood education and early childhood special education include
positive education-family partnerships and communication to ensure meaningful family
participation in childrens education. Native language/Home languages are also vital for
maintaining positive family connections. It is therefore very important to maintain the language
of the home, particularly where older family members who care for children do not speak
English. Otherwise this may mean that eventually they are no longer able to have proper
meaningful conversations with each other.Parents who cannot share thoughts and ideas with their
children will inevitably lose the ability to shape, guide and influence their lives. Situations where
this has happened have been documented, and shown to have negative social outcomes for
communities because children have lacked the guiding hand of their elders. So, based on
Cheatham article that Practitioners have a key role in reassuring parents that maintaining and
developing their native language will benefit their children and support their developing skills in
English and also A linguistic perspective can lead to more complete understandings of challenges

parents who speak a second language face and ways to improve communication. Among studies
investigating discourse and sentence-level parent-educator communication (Baker and Keogh
1995).
Additionaly, Ostrosky and Cheatham (2011) studied communication between early
childhood educators and parents. One result was that while the native English speaking parents
in this study provided 28,2% of utterances during parent teacher converences, non-native English
speaking parents in this study provided 28.2% of utterances during parents-teacher coverences,
meanwhile non-native English speaking parents provided only 10.8% of utterances with the
same early head start and head start teachers. importantly, participant utterances counts included
partial words and listener feedback ( uh-huh and "mmm" ) thus these percentages may have
overstimated parents substative coverence contributions. Chetham and Ostrosky sugested that
language different between parents and early educators played a role in lack of some parents
participation in conferences. Chetham and Ostrosky's study warrants more discussion about
reasons that some parents speak so little during meetings with early educators as well as the
challenges for and needs of parents who speak a secound language during interactionswith early
educators. In additionally, Chetham discussed the important of teachers uses of English
phonology, morphology, and syntax to parent-early educator communication and partnerships.
In this paper, we discuss complicated second language linguistic processed assosiated with
understanding early educators talk for parents who speak and second language. In particular, we
provide (a) a discussion of the complexity of second language listening, an illustrative analysis
of pontential difficulties for parents who speak English as a second language when
communicating with early educators, and than (c) recommendations for early educators to
facilitated communication with parents who may have limited proficiency in english.
Importantly, this discussion will illustratethe need for early educators to better understand the
second language proficiency of parents, second language listening processes, and accomodations
as a step toward ensuring that all parents can fully participate in their children's education.
Listening processes of parents who speak a second language
Speaking a second language can be difficult and tiring for parents as they listen and
respond to early educators during meetings. The meaning of language is constructed from

linguistic input, a process involving long and short term memory, language decoding skills, and
previous experiences.
Language processing
according to Field (2008); Vandergrift (2007) though interactive processing from topdown processing and the bottom-up processing (Rechards 2008). First, second language listeners
bottom-up processing occurs as they make meaning through the joining of increasingly large
language units, from sounds to words to sentences to conversations calling upon their
grammatical knowledge to determine relationships among them (Richards 2008) to create ideas
and concepts (Flowerdew and Miller 2005). importantly, unlike native speakers of a language,
parents who speak English as a second language may need to intentionally focus on details of
talk, and because of speech speed and limitations of memory, comprehension can be difficult
( Vandergrift 2004).
Second, using top-down processing to improve their comprehension in English as a
second language. Top-Down Processing Strategy is one of direct techniques of teaching listening
which is classified as memory strategies. It has important impact not only on first language but
also on second language listening studies and also involved in second language listening as the
listener calls upon relevant prior knowledge ( knowledge of the current discussion topic, culture),
expectations and the context of talk leading to comprehension (Richards 2005; Vandergrift
2004). According to Richards (2008) said, second language listeners tap their prior knowledge to
fill in details of talk especially from sounds, and words as well as macro-level discourse to
understand early educator talk. He argues this strategy emphasizes the reconstruction of meaning
rather than the decoding of form. The interaction of the listener and the text is central to the
process, as part of top-down approach, second language listeners must developed formal
schemata appropriate content and formal schemata-background information and cultural
experience-to carry out those interpretations effectively.
But, the phenomenon occurred to parents who speak a second language may need to
attend to both micro-level details of talk by focused of sounds, and words, as well as macro-level
discourse to understand early educator talk. Unlike native speakers of a language, in part due to
teachers challenges in facilitating listening, parents who speak English as a second language take
difficult and often unrecognized tasks as they speak with early educators. As such, early

educators may have difficulty engaging these parents in meaningful conversations and
partnership.
Top-Down Processing

Purpose for listening

Prior knowledge, reading
Experience
(Content schemata)

Discourse knowledge
Of listening
Conventions, genres,
Registers (formal schemata)

Pragmatics
Pragmatics

Meta cognition

Interpretation/understanding
Of listening comprehension
(discourse Level)
Listening strategies
Language knowledge:
(sounds, words, grammar,
punctuation, cohesion
Orthography)

This episode of the podcast is about using Mass listening as a shortcut to developing fluency
in a foreign language. Vladimir Skultety is an experienced language learning who speaks more
than 10 languages. Hes used this approach to develop advance fluency in many of his language,
including Mandarin. In this episode we discuss specifically:

What mass listening actually is and why you should use it in your approach to learning
languages.

How to start learning a language with mass listening.

How to overcome the challenge of listening to difficult speech, especially with languages
similar to your native tongue.

The intensity of the process and how youll feel as you go through it.

The speed of progress when using this method.

Why transcripts are not necessary for the method.

What you can do to make it easier in the beginning.

What the best types of audio are for this method.

How long you need to listen to a piece of audio for the method to be effective and how to
stay focused.

The benefits of passive and active listening

Where mass listening fits in the process of acquiring a new language

How vocabulary goes from passive to active through listening

Whether using different forms of media to learn a language is a good idea

How to address different registers of language, from colloquial to formal

How mass listening helps you in other areas of language learning like speaking, reading
and writing