2026-10-12T12:41:36Z https://api.figshare.com/v2/oai

oai:figshare.com:article/33827800 2026-09-16T04:32:53Z category_129 portal_316 item_type_3 month_year_09_2026

Table 1_Measuring bilingual input and output in early childhood education: English and Vietnamese speech within a language exposure program.docx Paola Escudero (764283) Ha Chi Tran (24960544) Mai Linh Tran (24960547) Minh Anh Tran (24960550) Weicong Li (12615374) Education additional language automatic speech measurement heritage language preschool children Vietnamese and English speech Vietnamese exposure program <p>In Australia, languages other than English are not included in the educational curriculum of most preschools and primary schools, with exceptions for some high prestige languages, such as French, Italian, Mandarin or Spanish. Languages such as Vietnamese are rarely supported, accentuating the substantial challenge in transmitting the Vietnamese language to younger generations in Australia. In this study, we examined the quantity of Vietnamese language input and output in a program designed to provide Vietnamese language exposure in an Australian preschool. The Vietnamese language exposure program was delivered by an adult facilitator trained in the Little Multilingual Minds method, featuring 176 language sessions delivered across 29 weeks of the year. We measured the amount of speech in English and Vietnamese during the program sessions following the annotation method used in previous research, selecting 48 of the total 176 audio recordings. For each selected recording, the start and end of the facilitator (input) and preschoolers’ (output) speech in either English or Vietnamese was manually annotated, with an automatic script measuring the duration of each segment. Children’s output doubled the output reported by a similar previous study, indicating that structured sessions offered higher opportunities for children's speech. Crucially, children's speech increased as the Vietnamese language exposure program progressed, demonstrating greater engagement and interest from the preschool children. Although the facilitator was encouraged to use Vietnamese, her use of English increased from first to second term, remaining high thereafter due to the constraints in starting a Vietnamese exposure program in a preschool where only English was previously used. Nevertheless, Vietnamese played an important role in the facilitator's input, with children's Vietnamese output showing signs of increase. We conclude by highlighting that children's overall speech increase aligned with the engagement and interest reported in the language exposure program evaluation, laying a good foundation for program continuation the following year.</p> 2026-09-16T04:32:53Z Dataset Dataset 10.3389/feduc.2026.1858229.s001 https://figshare.com/articles/dataset/Table_1_Measuring_bilingual_input_and_output_in_early_childhood_education_English_and_Vietnamese_speech_within_a_language_exposure_program_docx/33827800 CC BY 4.0