Invited keynote speaker

 

He Sun

National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological University

 

will give a talk at 10:00 a.m. (CEST, UTC+2), corresponding to 4:00 p.m. Singapore time (SGT, UTC+8),

with a presentation entitled

 

 

"Harmonious Bilingual Experience: Why Reading in Both Languages Matters for Children's Social-Emotional Wellbeing"

 

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.

 

Bio

Dr. SUN He is an Associate Professor at National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. Her major interests are 1) child bilingualism and ICT (e.g., eBooks, AI), 2) individual differences in early bilingualism/second/foreign language acquisition, and 3) harmonious bilingual experience. Her work has appeared in journals such as Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, Child Development, and International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, Studies in Second Language Acquisition, and Educational Psychology Review, and has been featured by media, such as Straits Times and CNA. She is an Associate Editor of the Journal of Child Language, a Consulting Editor of Child Development, and an Executive Committee Member of the International Association for the Study of Child Language.

 

References

Cheng, M., Setoh, P., Bornstein, M. H., & Esposito, G. (2020). She thinks in English, but she wants in Mandarin: Differences in Singaporean bilingual English–Mandarin maternal mental-state-talk. Behavioral Sciences, 10(7), 106. https://doi.org/10.3390/bs10070106

Cheng, Q., & Sun, H. (forthcoming). Shared book reading and bilingual children's dual language learning and socio-emotional skills.

Doan, S. N., & Wang, Q. (2010). Maternal discussions of mental states and behaviors: Relations to emotion situation knowledge in European American and immigrant Chinese children. Child Development, 81(5), 1490–1503. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8624.2010.01487.x

Green, C., & Sun, H. (2025). Picturebooks increase the frequency and diversity of emotion vocabulary in children's language environments: Modelling potential benefits to emotional literacy, with pedagogical resources. Early Education and Development. https://doi.org/10.1080/10409289.2024.2423259

Han, W. J. (2010). Bilingualism and socio-emotional well-being. Children and Youth Services Review, 32(5), 720–731. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.childyouth.2010.01.009

Sun, H. (2019). Home environment, bilingual preschooler's receptive mother tongue language outcomes, and social-emotional and behavioral skills: One stone for two birds? Frontiers in Psychology, 10, 1640. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2019.01640

Sun, H. (2023). Harmonious bilingual experience and child wellbeing: A conceptual framework. Frontiers in Psychology, 14, 1282863. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1282863

Sun, H., Ng, S.C., & Hagen, A.v. (2026). Impact of Shared Book-Reading on Children’s Social–Emotional Competence: A Meta-Analysis of Intervention Studies. In: Schapira, R., Aram, D. (eds) Shared Book Reading and Children's Social-Emotional Competence (p. 231–251). Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-032-14688-5_14

Sun, H., Yussof, N. T. B., Mohamed, M. B. B. H., Rahim, A. B., Bull, R., Cheung, M. W. L., & Cheong, S. A. (2021). Bilingual language experience and children's social-emotional and behavioral skills: A cross-sectional study of Singapore preschoolers. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, 24(3), 324–340. https://doi.org/10.1080/13670050.2018.1461802

Wang, Q., Leichtman, M. D., & Davies, K. I. (2000). Sharing memories and telling stories: American and Chinese mothers and their 3-year-olds. Memory, 8(3), 159–177. https://doi.org/10.1080/096582100387588

Winsler, A., Kim, Y. K., & Richard, E. R. (2014). Socio-emotional skills, behavior problems, and Spanish competence predict the acquisition of English among English language learners in poverty. Developmental Psychology, 50(9), 2242–2254. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0037161