l assistance in understanding homework requirements or the meaning of a particular word, she goes to her teacher in school, consults English-Chinese dictionaries, or asks me for help at home. Through the conference with her teacher, I found the teacher had a very heavy schedule. Its unreasonable to demand anything more from him for a few LM students in his class. Besides, the teacher couldnt know all the primary languages of these students. So a more practical way to help the LM students become bilingual is the parents involvement.Amy has an American-born Chinese classmate whose parents came to Hawaii from China in the mid-eighties. This girl is biliterate and has helped Amy a lot. At the Back to School Night I had a chance to talk with her mother. When asked why she was taking so much trouble to bring up her child bilingually, the mother said her purpose for a bilingual upbringing was two-fold: to pass down the heritage and to empower the child with what parents can offer so that the child could have more chances of success in her career. When recalling the long and hard process, she said that without steadfast commitment and consistency from her husband and her, the bilingual upbringing plan could have easily flown out of the window. What de Jong (1986) concluded from her study fits very well here: It always needs a certain commitment on behalf of the parents to see to it that their own language and culture are passed on to their children and it always needs an effort on the part of parents to see to it that their children become or remain bilingual (p. 23)Almost every weekday after school on our way home, Amy would tell me in our L1 what happened in her school. I would elicit her views and opinions and she would ask for my advice. Of course, she didnt always follow it. I would give her a chance to try and fail or to prove that I was wrong. Sometimes when I was too occupied with my own thoughts to listen to her attentively, Amy would...
