UMass-Amherst collaborative with Springfield Vietnamese Civic Association looks to help youth succeed overall.
Participants in Project CANVAS, a collaboration between the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and the Springfield Vietnamese American Civic Association, are, from left, Jeanne Chaclas and Amanda Dembowski, UMass graduate students; project director GiangThuy Pham, assistant professor in the department of communications disorders at UMass; Truong Thuy, SVACA case worker; Thu Pham, coordinator of the Vietnamese Health Project at Mercy Medical Center and a SVACA board member; and Maly Son, executive director of the SVACA.
There will be a health fair April 26 from 10 a.m. to noon outside the Springfield Vietnamese Civic Association, 433 Belmont Ave. Participants will include a new collaborative called Project CANVAS, which means "Community-based Needs Assessment for Vietnamese Americans in Springfield."
The project, which assesses language skills in young Vietnamese Americans, aims to help them strengthen their Vietnamese and preserve ties to their families and culture.
It is directed by Giang Thuy Pham, assistant professor in the department of communications disorders at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, who will be assisted by graduate students Jeanne Chaclas and Amanda Dembowski.
It is being done in partnership with SVACA, where Maly Son is executive director, and whose board members include Thu Pham, coordinator of the Vietnamese Health Project at Mercy Medical Center, and is backed by a community support group of health professionals and others that has begun to meet monthly.
Staff photo by
DON TREEGER
Giang Pham, an assistant professor in the department of communications disorders at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, heads a collaborative project with the Springfield Vietnamese Civic Association that will help Vietnamese American children retain their home language to help their development and to maintain their family and cultural ties. "We will have a table in front of SVACA to provide public health information related to communication development and disorders," said Giang Pham about introducing the project at the fair. "We will also be conducting our parent survey for Vietnamese American parents of children younger than 18 years of age."
At a later date, the project also will conduct Vietnamese and English language screenings for the children in the SVACA after-school program.
Giang Pham, who also speaks Spanish, would eventually like to "get more involved with Spanish-speaking children in Holyoke and Amherst." At UMass, she started a Spanish vocational group for graduate and undergraduate students in Communication Disorders that meets weekly to talk in Spanish about clinical issues, such as how to explain a language disability to parents in Spanish.
She was asked her to explain why the language assessment project is being undertaken and why she sees it as necessary.
How did UMass become involved in this project? How is it being funded, and how did it originate? What language issues are you seeing among Vietnamese children in terms of preserving their first language?
Project CANVAS - Community-based Needs Assessment for Vietnamese Americans in Springfield - is a collaboration between UMass Amherst and the Springfield Vietnamese American Civic Association.
CANVAS is funded by the Western Massachusetts Public Health Training Center, which promotes collaborations between the university and community organizations and address public health needs within Western Massachusetts.
I conduct research on child language development and disorders among bilingual children who speak either Vietnamese or Spanish as a home language. I have worked with Vietnamese American communities in Minnesota and Florida before moving to Massachusetts.
I joined the faculty at UMass Amherst this past fall, 2012, and wanted to begin establishing collaborations with the local Vietnamese American community.
CANVAS is the first collaboration between UMass and the Vietnamese American community in Springfield.
The project is an initial step toward developing innovative solutions to meet community needs. Our research team will be working alongside SVACA to identify gaps between the language needs of Vietnamese children living in Springfield and the school and community services available to meet to those needs.
CANVAS arose out of an increasing need at the national level to better serve children who speak a minority language at home.
Currently, more than 20 percent of school-age children in the U.S. speak a language other than English at home, with that proportion expected to double by 2030. These children need the first language to effectively communicate at home while developing English language skills for educational and vocational success.
Many positive developmental and behavioral outcomes have been associated with bilingualism. However, many children from immigrant families experience first language loss as they move toward adolescence.
Preservation of the first language is a key element of CANVAS. Asian and Latino adolescents who speak English well and continue to speak their home language have been shown to have higher self-esteem, closer family ties and greater academic success than their same-ethnic peers who spoke English only (Feliciano, 2001).
In contrast, risk factors are associated with loss of one's home or first language. Adolescents who report limited proficiency in their non-English home language were at risk for social isolation from their family and ethnic community and were more likely to engage in risky behaviors.
By conducting a needs-based assessment, we aim to determine the Vietnamese and English language needs of Vietnamese American children living in Springfield and identify ways needs can be better met.
Why is it being done in Springfield, and why is there a need for it to be done?
There are more than 1.6 million Vietnamese Americans nationwide, and an estimated 5,000 to 8,000 in Western Massachusetts. Although Springfield is home to one of the largest Vietnamese populations in Massachusetts, few programs are available that serve children in the community.
SVACA is the main community organization serving Vietnamese immigrants and refugees in Springfield and the surrounding areas. SVACA is located in Forest Park, the heart of the Vietnamese American community, and offers a variety of programs including health education and an after-school tutoring program.
Although SVACA has been operating since 1992, it continues to struggle with major challenges including limited funding, resources and personnel.
One of the main goals of CANVAS is to establish a long-term, mutually beneficial relationship between UMass Amherst and SVACA to expand on existing programs and better meet community needs.
What role does language play in the development of a child reared with one language at home and another language at school? What supports do children need to develop in their first language?
Children of immigrant families need two languages in order to successfully communicate at home, in school and within their community. For example, Vietnamese American children need Vietnamese to effectively communicate with family and other members of their community and need English for educational and vocational purposes.
While bilingual children are rapidly learning English in school and through interacting with the larger community, there are few opportunities outside of the home to support the first language. In order for children to continue developing their first language, they need educational and community support.
Children need to have a large amount of input in the first language to learn vocabulary and grammar as well as learn how to communicate in a culturally appropriate way.
Children need multiple opportunities to speak the first language with many different partners and for different purposes. The more rich and meaningful interactions children can have in the first language - both orally and written modes -- the better they are able to develop strong language proficiency.
How are you going about doing this assessment? Who will you work with and how will you select the children? Who will interview them and what type of questions will they be asked?
We will be working in collaboration with the SVACA to complete a needs-based assessment. The assessment consists of a parent survey and a child language screener. Parent surveys will be distributed at community events, including the SVACA Public Health Awareness Day on April 26, and following a Vietnamese Catholic Mass at St. Paul's Church in Springfield.
The surveys will ask about parental attitudes toward first and second language learning, services and programs that families are currently accessing within the community or schools, and the types of programs that families would like the community or schools to provide.
The child language screeners will be conducted in both Vietnamese and English at the SVACA after-school program and summer camp. All children enrolled in those programs will be invited to participate, with parental consent.
Participants will be given screening measures in each language to assess their vocabulary, grammar and storytelling skills. Individual child results will be shared with parents. A group summary will be shared with SVACA to inform its programming.
What are some of the results that you might anticipate? How will you address some of these issues?
Through our work with Project CANVAS, we aim to determine the language skills of Vietnamese American children living in Springfield and identify what types of school or community services can be developed or enhanced in order to better meet these needs.
While SVACA offers a number of services to the children in the community, funding constraints limit the scope of its programming.
Through our collaboration with SVACA, we hope to identify specific areas of need and suggest long-term solutions to support and preserve the Vietnamese language skills, promote overall well-being and academic success for children in the community.
What are some of the common issues that children of immigrants face who speak another language at home?
Many children of immigrant families experience a loss of their home language as their English language skills progress through school. This loss of language can have great impact on families and could result in a disconnect between parents and children.
How did you become interested in this field? What is your own heritage and academic background? Was Vietnamese your first language?
I was born in Vietnam and came to the United States when I was 3 years old. My family was part of the wave of "boat people" who escaped from Vietnam by boat after the war. I grew up mainly in Illinois in small rural towns where we were often the only Asian family.
My parents continued to speak to my sister and me in Vietnamese, and we responded in English. Growing up "receptively bilingual" is very common among immigrant and refugee families where children are still able to understand the home language but feel more comfortable speaking in English.
It was not until I returned to Vietnam at the age of 13 that I realized how difficult it must have been for my parents to come to the United States and not be able to communicate. In Vietnam, I could understand most of what others said, I just could not respond in Vietnamese. This experience made me aware of how people with speech and language disabilities must feel when they cannot communicate their thoughts or ideas.
In my senior year in high school, I knew I wanted to be a speech-language pathologist. I shadowed a speech therapist working in a local elementary school on a day when a child first learned how to say the "g" sound in "hamburger" (before therapy, he said "hambur-er"). I knew at that moment that's what I wanted to do for a living.
In college I double majored in speech and language sciences and Spanish. I knew I wanted to work with bilingual populations. At one point in my life, I was more fluent in Spanish than I was in Vietnamese. After graduating with a master's degree from San Diego State University, I worked for a few years in preschool and elementary schools in Illinois. I worked in Spanish with primarily a Mexican American population.
While working, I started returning to Vietnam in the summers to volunteer at schools and help children with disabilities. I have been back to Vietnam numerous times and now feel very comfortable speaking and reading in Vietnamese.
Throughout college and graduate school, I gained experience with research. I fell in love with research and recognized how research can be a powerful tool to make a long-term impact on people's lives. After working as a speech-language pathologist, I returned to school to complete a doctorate at the University of Minnesota and focused my research program on child language development with bilingual children.
Now I am here at UMass Amherst as faculty in the department of communication disorders. I am fortunate to continue research in child language development and disorders with bilingual children as well as teach coursework related to cultural and linguistic diversity.
How difficult a language is Vietnamese to learn?
For Vietnamese American youth, learning Vietnamese from a very young age in a natural environment is no more or less difficult than learning any other language.
The challenge for the youth is to maintain their Vietnamese skills as they become older and are more exposed to the larger English-speaking community. The contexts and opportunities to use Vietnamese become more limited with age.
For adult native speakers of English, Vietnamese can be challenging to learn because it is a tonal language. Each Vietnamese word has a tone, or a rising or falling intonation, and the meaning of the word can change if a different tone is used.
English speakers often have difficulty hearing tones and producing them consistently. However, Vietnamese reading is relatively easy. Similar to Spanish, it uses a Romanized alphabet and has nearly a one-to-one correspondence between letters and the sounds they make.