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Harmonious Bilingual Experience: Why Reading in Both Languages Matters for Children's Social-Emotional Wellbeing| title | Harmonious Bilingual Experience: Why Reading in Both Languages Matters for Children's Social-Emotional Wellbeing |
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| start_date | 2026/06/09 |
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| schedule | 10h |
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| online | no |
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| location_info | salle E411 & En ligne |
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| summary | Early childhood is a critical period for language and social-emotional development, and for bilingual children, the quality of their dual-language experience shapes this journey substantially (Han, 2010; Winsler et al., 2014). Grounded in the Harmonious Bilingual Experience (HBE) framework (Sun, 2023), this talk proposes that children's wellbeing is supported by active engagement of early reading in both languages. Content-wise, picture books provide richer and more diverse emotion vocabulary than typical child-directed speech, offering conceptual building blocks of emotional literacy that everyday conversation cannot supply (Green & Sun, 2025). Interaction-wise, a meta-analysis of 17 shared book reading intervention studies confirms that dialogic reading significantly improves children's social-emotional competence — including prosocial skills, emotional understanding, and conduct — with frequency and parent-child interaction quality as key moderators (Sun et al., 2026).
Yet the language of reading matters beyond quantity of input. Cross-cultural research shows Asian and Western parents read fundamentally differently: Western parents tend toward a cognitive orientation, discussing characters' feelings and encouraging perspective-taking, while Chinese parents more typically adopt a behavioral orientation, emphasizing moral lessons and consequences (Doan & Wang, 2010; Wang et al., 2000). Critically, bilingual parents' mental-state talk has been shown to shift with the language they speak, suggesting that reading in different languages may activate qualitatively different modes of social-emotional meaning-making (Cheng et al., 2020). Cheng and Sun (forthcoming) found that reading orientation predicted prosocial skills specifically through children's Chinese ability, not English — positioning the heritage language as the channel through which cultural values and moral socialization are transmitted. Evidence from 805 Singaporean preschoolers (Sun et al., 2021) and 202 English-Mandarin bilingual children (Sun, 2019) further confirms that heritage language reading uniquely predicts prosocial skills and fewer behavioral difficulties. The findings imply that each language reading may open a distinct social-emotional window to promote bilingual children’s harmonious development. |
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| responsibles | Köpke, Tiulkova, Marijanovic |
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Workflow history| from state (1) | to state | comment | date |
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| submitted | published | | 2026/06/04 09:29 UTC |
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