Parents’ Roles in Children’s Bilingual Development in Selesai Kabupaten Langkat

The objectives of this study were to elaborate the way parents play their role in children’s language development and to describe the factors cause parents do to support children’s language development. This study is limited to the study of the role of the parents in their children bilingual development, precisely, balanced bilingualism and unbalanced bilingualism. This study is followed the theory of Anderson (2010) about the roles’ parents play in children’s development comprises of (1) Role as facilitator, (2) Role as motivator, (3) Role as controller, (4) Role as threatener, and (5) Role as feedback provider. In accordance to the theory and research purposes, descriptive qualitative research design was appropriately implemented in the study. The data of this research were the transcriptions of in-depth interviews with the bilingual children’s parents, which were collected through semi-structured interviews and interpreted through the parents’ role theory. The results shows that all parents in bilingualism development of the three categories: (1) Unbalanced Karonese-Javanese, (2) Unbalanced Javanese-Karonese, and (3) Balanced Karonese-Javanese play the roles as facilitator and feedback provider. The difference among the parents lies in one type of role, they are: the unbalanced Karonese-Javanese bilingual’s parents play the role of threatener, the unbalanced bilingual Javanese-Karonese play the role of controller, and the balanced bilinguals Karonese-Javanese play the role of motivator. Further, actors underlying the playing of the five roles, namely (1) facilitator, (2) feedback provider, (3) controller, (4) threatener, and (4) motivator. This leads to conclusion that language attitude of parents toward a language tends to be transformed to their children’s bilingual development.