I NTERVIEWEE  10

Shadi was 34 years old. She had a bachelor degree in Agriculture. She had moved to Norway six years ago with her husband and her daughter, who was ten years old. They were all originally from Iran. Their daughter was a student at an international school and was in the fourth grade.

She was working as a kindergarten assistant. Shadi and her husband spoke Persian at home together. They also spoke Persian with their daughter. Their daughter could speak Persian, English and Norwegian. She added that her daughter could easily speak Persian, however, when she could not find the right work, she would switch to another language to make her flow of

conversation easier. The language which Shadi’s daughter used changed in different contexts. For example, she spoke English with her parents when she was around her English friends.

When I asked her whether bilingualism was important to her and her husband, she said it was. In addition, she said that they preferred their daughter be a tri-lingual person. She also would put effort to keep the three languages simultaneously by encouraging her daughter to read books in the three languages. Shadi also was willing her daughter to be able to speak, understand, read and write the languages she knew perfectly because Shadi wanted her daughter to have the options to live in different countries when she grew up.

In addition, Shadi said that she would encourage her daughter to read by buying many books in Iran and Norway, in addition to the books that her daughter borrowed from her school library. However, her daughter mostly liked reading English story books and she liked reading alone. Two or three times a week she read Norwegian books and one day a week Persian books.

She mentioned that her daughter used dictionaries to other languages she knew, if she did not know the meaning of some words. Her daughter’s favorite place for reading was in her bed before sleeping or sitting in her sofa. Her daughter was very much interested in reading. Shadi made a meaning clear by explaining in her mother tongue, which was Persian, and her daughter did not understand, she would explain in English. Shadi would make a meaning clear by telling in simpler words and by giving examples and comparisons. Shadi’s daughter would ask most of the times for an English translation and her mother would mostly reply to her in Persian.

Moreover, Shadi’s daughter was allowed to watch TV twenty minutes in the morning during week days and as much as she wanted at weekends. She mostly watched English and Norwegian channels and sometimes Persian. Shadi’s daughter liked to watch cartoons and teenager programs and also had an IPad and an IPod which she could listen to music when she was eating lunch at weekends for ten or fifteen minutes. She liked to listen to pop music. She added that sometimes her daughter listened to Persian traditional music as well. In addition, she sometimes sang a song from Iran, which her daughter liked.

As for assisting her daughter in speaking, especially accent or pronunciation, Shadi said that her daughter did not need any help in English and asked about the words she did not know in Norwegian either from her parents or from her teacher at school. She thought that her help with pronunciation was mostly effective when her daughter could not pronounce some Persian words.

The family also had dinner time discussions in which they talked about every day events and the objects their daughter would want. At dinner time, the family would speak Persian. Shadi and her husband corrected errors the same way immediately after an error was made. They would mostly correct the Persian errors in the forms of words or sentences by explaining why it was wrong and saying it the correct way.

When I asked about the language or languages Shadi’s daughter wrote in, she replied that her daughter wrote mostly in English, then Norwegian and least of all Persian during the week.

Her daughter had a spelling examination once a week at her school, therefore, Shadi worked with English and Norwegian spelling during the week in order to prepare her daughter for the exam.

She added that her mother tongue had a totally different alphabet. However, she had set a day, which was on Sundays, to work on her daughter’s spelling in the Persian language. In order to do so, Shadi had bought Persian alphabet books from first to fourth grade in Iran. She said that her daughter was in the second grade, as for the Persian language. In addition, she said that she had bought many mini short story books in Iran too to encourage her to read. A writing activity that she would use in the Persian language was to ask her daughter to read a book carefully and then she would say many words that her daughter had to write down. She, then, corrected her daughter’s errors and would give her a mark and a present if her score was high. Another incentive was that Shadi had made a table which was hanged to the wall. For every positive thing that she would do with respect to the homework, assignments in the three languages, either at home or at school, she would get a star. Her daughter would get a present after getting ten stars.

4.12. Summary

In this chapter the parental backgrounds and attitudes to bilingualism was summarized. Parental strategies to supports the first and second language learning skills were also presented. All the summaries were based on the transcription of the individual interviews. It should be noted that efforts have been made to remain as objective as possible with respect to the presentation of the interviewees’ answers. In the next chapter the findings will be discussed in detail with a comparison to be made across the parents and with the previous research which was carries out relevant to findings.