We prepared an interview form that was translated into many languages I
among them, Spanish, Korean, Japanese, Chinese, Khmer, and Vietnamese--
and we held two workshops at the conference in which we trained people to
conduct the family interviews. The selection criteria for the families to be
interviewed were that they be language minorities and have children who
have attended preschool programs in the U.S. We wanted to know what
languages were spoken by the adults in the family, especially those who
were primary and secondary caretakers of the children. We asked about the
programs the children had been in: What kind were they? Which languages
were used in class by teachers and students? What did the parents like or not
like about the programs? We asked about language usage patterns in the
home: What language did the adults use to the children? What did the children
use to the adults in the home and to siblings? We asked whether or not
there had been changes in the use of language at home as a result of the children's
being in school, and what those changes were. We asked the parents
to judge their children's proficiency in the language of the home: Were they
as proficient as children their age and experience usually are in that language?
Finally, we asked the parents about their concerns: Were they worried about
their children losing the language of the home? Whose responsibility did
they think it was to help them retain it? What did they want us to tell policymakers
and educators about their concerns as parents? The interview consisted
of 45 questions; all but two were framed as forced-choice response
questions.