Centering English in Bilingual Preschool Education: Parents’ Beliefs and Agency
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This study examines how English is positioned and perceived within English-Spanish bilingual preschool education in Paraguay, a country traditionally characterised by institutional bilingualism in Spanish and Guaraní. While not an official language, English is increasingly viewed by parents as a tool for global access, academic achievement, and future professions. Using qualitative data from a questionnaire administered to 28 parents (from 31 to 40 years of age) in two bilingual preschools in Asunción, the study explores parental beliefs about English and the forms of agency they enact to support their children's English exposure. Findings reveal that parents associate English with cognitive development, intercultural competence, and social mobility. Many parents actively foster English exposure through home practices and participation in school activities, despite acknowledging limitations such as their own low proficiency in English or the absence of English use in extended family settings. English is often framed not only as a desirable language but as a form of symbolic capital that complements the official national languages. The study underscores how English is increasingly central to parental language ideologies and early bilingual educational choices, raising important questions about linguistic hierarchies and additive trilingualism.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".