The intricate links between heritage/home language (HL) use and heritage identity of heritage-bilinguals are well established. Less is known about the degree to which their language proficiency and use or acculturation contributes to heritage and host identities and psychological health. The present study investigated this with a diverse sample of heritage-bilingual students (N = 220; M age = 25.43 years) across first, ‘1.5’ (resettled as minors) and second generations in the United Kingdom. Participants completed self-report measures on their English and HL proficiency and that of family members, family language use, linguistic acculturation, biculturalism, cultural involvement and preference, host and heritage group identification, self-esteem and wellbeing. Data showed that different generations and language groups differed on HL proficiency and use, and that those with European HLs reported more bicultural orientations. Regression models showed that HL proficiency uniquely contributed to all acculturation outcomes and that family members’ language proficiency and use uniquely contributed to cultural involvement. Cultural involvement and preference, but not language use or proficiency, contributed to host and heritage group identification, while more HL-oriented family language use and cultural preference contributed to self-esteem. Findings are discussed in relation to the literature on generation differences, linguistic distance, and adaptive acculturation and identity patterns.
Bilingual children schooled in the dominant societal language can acquire home language literacy with home and community support. This paper reports on the development of English writing in 17 Japanese-English bilingual children (ages 9 to 13) who attended English weekend school in Japan during the COVID-19 pandemic. We assessed their English writing using a US standardized test before and during the pandemic for two years when their weekend school switched to an online format. Many children’s age-adjusted writing scores were within the Average range or above before the start of the pandemic, and these scores were largely maintained during the pandemic. Online lessons did not negatively impact children’s English writing as technological tools facilitated learning. However, the lack of social interaction diminished the children’s enthusiasm for weekend school. The pandemic freed more time for home literacy practices such as reading in English for pleasure and preparing for English examinations, which likely improved the children’s English literacy. These findings suggest that bilingual children’s home language writing can develop even in challenging learning conditions.
This study draws on a rare media incident in which an individual family language policy (FLP) became the subject of public discussion and debate. In an interview on Swedish national television (SVT2), Nadim Ghazale, a high-profile police officer of Lebanese background, was asked why he had decided not to speak in his "mother tongue", Arabic, with his children. His answer sparked considerable media reaction. The aim of this article is to take the public debate sparked by Ghazale's FLP decision as an empirical entry point into understanding how debates about multilingualism are the discursive battleground on which other identity issues are negotiated and contested. To this end, the study draws on critical discourse analysis and the notion of raciolinguistic ideology to demonstrate how the arguments advanced by Ghazale and those who reacted against his decision are informed by a raciolinguistic logic that mutually constitutes language, race and social class. A detailed analysis of relevant media data illustrates that language, appearance and naming serve as signs of differentiation contributing to the social positioning of Otherness. The analysis also offers an interesting counterpoint to discourses that view bilingualism as intrinsically advantageous to speakers. This is not to say that bi/multingualism necessarily has drawbacks; rather, we should be careful about issuing too-quick verdicts of guilt to parents like Ghazale without fully appreciating the raciolinguistic ideologies at play in relation to a language like Arabic in Sweden.
Multilingual families in immigrant/minority language contact settings face various challenges that are related to their affective and emotional domains, as well as to their well-being. This study investigated the interrelationship of the family language policies (FLPs), emotions, socialisation practices and language management strategies of immigrant Russian and mixed-marriage families in Cyprus. The participants were eighty multilingual families from low-middle-high socio-economic backgrounds, including two- and one-parent families who resided in rural or in urban areas. Forty were mixed-marriage (Russian wife and Greek Cypriot husband) families and 40 were Russian-speaking (both spouses Russian) immigrant families who resided in Cyprus. Data sources included a questionnaire about the families' general backgrounds, the parents' socio-economic status, their linguistic behaviour and their children's language proficiency, and semi-structured interviews with the mothers focused on their FLP, home language development and socio-emotional well-being. An analysis of the diverse family types revealed both differences and similarities amongst Russian speakers in Cyprus and their FLPs. Russian speakers incorporated a wide range of language repertoires in their everyday lives. Multilingualism and the maintenance of the Russian language and culture were usually encouraged, as was the development of the children's Russian-language literacy, and the parents often used the one-parent-one-language (OPOL) approach at home. In many cases, FLPs were characterised by translanguaging to enhance dynamic multilingualism and emotional well-being at home. However, not all of the efforts resulted in successful language transmission, which may have been due to individual and/or societal differences and family configurations.
Informed by Spolsky's language policy theory, this study explores Vietnamese-Australian families' experience of successful home language maintenance in three aspects: language practices, language ideologies, and language management. Seven parents from five families whose children achieved high bilingual proficiency scores in the speech and language assessment of the VietSpeech research program were invited to participate in a focus group to discuss successful strategies for home language maintenance. The discussion was undertaken in Vietnamese. Thematic analysis of the bilingual transcription revealed four themes: motivations, challenges, practices, and recommendations for home language maintenance support. The parents' motivations for home language maintenance included communication with grandparents and relatives, maintenance of cultural identity, parents' need to speak their home language, and cognitive and emotional benefits. Challenges faced by the families were related to children starting school and growing older, parents' lack of time and persistence, and insufficient support in terms of formal Vietnamese education, resources, and teacher quality. The families' strategies for successful language maintenance included speaking Vietnamese all the time as well as teaching Vietnamese directly using textbooks and indirectly through regular activities including book reading, daily interactions, and watching Vietnamese TV. The parents' recommendations focused on changes in language education policy and advocacy, better resources, and raising awareness of the benefits of home language maintenance. This study provides insights into the successful experience of home language maintenance of Vietnamese-Australian families and can be used by multilingual families, educators, policy makers, speech-language pathologists, and other professionals to support home language maintenance.
Children’s view of family language practices and their agency therein is regarded as important in the study of family language policy (FLP). This work extends the notion of the linguistic landscape to the private family domain and uses the innovative methodological approach of “homescape walking tour” to engage young children (6 to 7-years-old) in the data generation process. During the walking tours, children in Chinese-German families guided the researcher through their homes, taking pictures of objects containing “languages” and sharing their lived experiences with these resources. In a further step, parents were invited to share their opinions about their FLP and the objects photographed by their children. More than 120 pictures gathered from the walking tours and transcribed interviews were analyzed in order to comprehend the multimodal linguistic practices of the families and the individual experiences family members create with such practices and resources. The results show that the application of the concept of homescape with its discursive constructions from both “user” (the children) and “designer” (the parents) perspectives can powerfully open up spaces for the co-construction of the family spaces. The homescapes are represented both as opportunities for language learning and as identity presentation. While parents tend to emphasize the intention behind the design of the homescapes and their wishes for their children to learn languages, children concentrate on their way of using different linguistic resources and playful activities.
Bilingual development is characterized by systematic variability, so called profile effects. This paper investigates dominance in exposure and linguistic distance as potential sources of bilingual profile effects by comparing the lexical and narrative profiles of Greek-German bilinguals to those of Dutch-German bilinguals. Both bilingual groups, aged 10–11 years, were recruited from bilingual school-contexts in Germany. The Greek-German bilinguals (N=15) constitute a classic heritage language population with a fairly distantly related language combination, the Dutch-German bilinguals (N=15) constitute an under-researched group of bilingual speakers with a very closely related language combination. Participants were asked about their language exposure and underwent a productive vocabulary task and a narrative production task in both languages. Findings indicate that dominance in exposure did not directly translate into dominance in lexical proficiency, which might be related to a cognate facilitation effect in the lexical tasks for the Dutch-German bilinguals. The narrative analysis indicates that, on group-level, dominance in exposure translated into dominance in narrative performance. A correlational analysis showed that dominance affected narrative measures differently and correlated differently with narrative measures depending on the group and, thus, language combination. However, it could not be affirmed that the linguistic proximity of Dutch and German balanced out dominance effects in general, since dominance in that group of bilinguals was too stark. It is concluded from this that dominance in exposure and linguistic distance interact in bilingual development, but that this relationship is also dependent on the magnitude of dominance and the type of task and linguistic domain under investigation.
The present eye-tracking study examines silent and oral text reading by Russian-German bilinguals of two age groups (9-10 and 15-16 years) and compares it with their monolingual peers. The bilingual sample represents so-called heritage speakers of Russian who know both the Latin and the Cyrillic script. The paper relies on two global eye movement measures – the averaged total fixation count and the averaged total fixation duration per token – and analyses the effects of three factors: language profile, age, and reading mode. In both age groups, bilinguals made a higher number of fixations per token and fixated the token longer than their peers. This observation holds for both languages and reading modes. However, the gap between bilinguals and their peers was much larger in Russian, and interindividual variation was greater in Russian than in German. The better results in German can be explained by its status as the primary medium of instruction and its dominance in everyday literacy, but the prolonged information processing in both languages suggests the activation of both linguistic systems and their mental lexicon, even if only one language has been triggered by the task. Notably, general language command, more specifically, lexical knowledge and reading experience play a decisive role in reading acquisition and behaviour. These insights should be considered by the educational practice at school as well as by scientific research in multilingualism.
In Norway, 92% of all children between 1 and 5 attend early childhood education and care (ECEC), and 18% of these children are minority language speakers. The Framework Plan for Content and Tasks of Kindergartens (Ministry of Education, 2017, p. 24) states that ECEC staff shall ‘help ensure that linguistic diversity becomes an enrichment for the entire group of children and encourage multilingual children to use their mother tongue while also actively promoting and developing the children’s Norwegian/Sami language skills’. In this paper, we present a study of how home language (HL) support takes place within the context of Norwegian ECEC, focusing on the strategies used by the staff to promote HL use. After analysing 26 narratives from practice, we found that the most common strategies employed were initiating activities that encourage HL use, facilitating metalinguistic conversations and consulting/involving language experts. The strategies available depend on contextual factors, such as the number of children present and the languages spoken by both children and staff. The HL support strategies are discussed in light of the interplay between teachers’ language ideologies, planned actions and spontaneous responses in situations where children’s HLs are involved inspired by the theories in García, Johnson and Seltzer’s study (2017).
This paper investigates the receptive and expressive vocabulary skills of 100 Arabic-Swedish-speaking children ages 4;0–7;11 growing up in Sweden. We explore how vocabulary in this under-researched population is affected by age, socio-economic status (SES), age of onset, daily exposure and home language use in the family (parents, siblings, extended family and friends) and via mother tongue instruction. Comprehension and production of nouns and verbs were assessed with the Arabic and Swedish versions of the Cross-linguistic Lexical Tasks (CLTs; Haman et al., 2015). Background information was collected via a parental questionnaire. In our cross-sectional study, comprehension was better in the minority home language (Arabic) than in the majority language (Swedish) for the youngest (4-year-old children), but this difference levelled out at ages 5, 6 and 7. There was a clear and positive effect of age on receptive and expressive vocabulary scores in both languages. For neither language was there any effect of SES (parental education). Age of onset and daily exposure had a measurable effect on Swedish vocabulary scores, whilst for Arabic, daily exposure and input in the home played an important role: Children whose parents mostly spoke Arabic to them had significantly higher Arabic vocabulary scores than other children. The complex interplay of environmental and individual-level factors on vocabulary skills is also illustrated by four case studies. These results from a Swedish context complement vocabulary studies of other language combinations and reveal the importance of input for the development of vocabulary in bilingual children.
Across and even within European states, heritage language education (HLE) for pupils with a migration background varies considerably, as do the political and academic discourses surrounding HLE. Due to the intensified public discourse around migration, educational opportunity and multilingualism, research on heritage languages (HL) and HLE has increased in recent years (Mehlhorn, 2020). However, there is still little agreement among scholars concerning the role of HLE for children's linguistic, educational or personal development. Although studies suggest that support for heritage languages does not bear negative consequences, empirical findings on the optimal design and delivery of heritage language lessons (HLLs) are still lacking. How, then, should research be prioritised in different contexts? We consulted a large cross-national survey on research priorities for multilingualism and language education (Duarte et al., 2020) in order to uncover findings relating specifically to HLE. The findings derive from the rankings of research priorities by panels of expert participants (n = 300) in five European countries: Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal and Spain. The rankings indicate that research on HLE is considered important in all countries, albeit to a lesser degree in Spain. Research on the effects of HLE on the majority language and subject comprehension was deemed most important by the expert participants, or at least as urgent as effects on the heritage language itself. Experts also attributed importance to topics concerning HLE quality. Other findings point to country-specific priorities. We present the overall results from two sets of questions concerning research on HLE and attempt to offer qualitative interpretations of these findings.
Due to the specific context of language acquisition and language learning within a migration situation, students may have only restricted opportunities to acquire literacy (reading and writing) in their heritage language in institutional settings. Therefore, in migration contexts, students’ literacy skills in different languages may follow different developmental paths resulting in various levels of reading and writing skills. While previous research has shown that the exposure to different scripts in biscriptual bilinguals may contribute to the heterogeneity of writing skills in a heritage language, the role of scriptual skills in constituting complex literacy profiles of both reading and writing remains to be clarified. Utilising Latent Transition Analysis, the present study investigates students’ profiles of scriptual skills in reading and writing and the patterns of change within the profiles occurring over time. This study draws on the data of the German panel study “Multilingual Development: A Longitudinal Perspective” (MEZ). Overall, it analyzes the development of scriptual skills in Russian as a heritage language of 131 German-Russian bilinguals from the two cohorts (grade 7 and grade 9) over three waves. The results reveal different developmental patterns for scriptual skills in reading and writing of biscriptual bilinguals and suggest that the use of the Latin script may serve as the bridge to biscriptuality. Furthermore, the findings highlight the role of heritage language classes in the development of scriptual skills.
This article reports parents’ experiences of the Tús Maith (Good Start) Home Visiting Scheme in South-West Ireland. The goal of Tús Maith is to support parents who wish to speak Irish to their children at home in the Kerry Gaeltacht an Irish-speaking heartland area. Home visitors spend an hour a week, over a period of six weeks, interacting with children and parents with varying levels of competency in Irish. Home visitors who are native speakers of Irish offer individualised guidance on how to promote the use of Irish as a home language, while encouraging families to engage in activities and events organised through Irish in the local community. This paper reports findings from four focus groups with parents (n = 22). A thematic analysis of qualitative findings reveal that home visits supported parents by: offering targeted linguistic support focused on language enrichment/learning; providing access to social networks through Irish; creating a designated time to focus on Irish in the home; and promoting the local dialect of Irish. It emerged that the home visiting scheme reaffirmed parents’ decision to speak Irish in cases where Irish was the home language, while motivating and encouraging parents with varying levels of proficiency in Irish to incorporate Irish into their daily language use. Challenges emerge in terms of assessing outcomes over a limited period of time, along with encouraging more proficient speakers of Irish to engage with the scheme. Home visits emerge as a potentially effective intervention to support the use of minoritized languages at home.
Despite a general expectation for immigrants to Australia to shift quickly to the use of English, many new-Australian families maintain strong attachments to their heritage languages. Little research has explored how recently arrived families of Arabic-speaking background in Australia preserve their heritage language while acquiring proficiency in English. In this paper, we report on part of a study that explored the family language policies of four Arab-Australian mothers as they negotiated their new language reality. Focus groups and semi-structured interviews revealed that the participating mothers considered it vitally important for their children to be proficient in both English and Arabic and they employed a range of strategies for developing their children’s bilingualism. However, they also acknowledged that maintaining their children’s heritage language could be difficult and stressful. Our paper offers insights into family language policy and the challenges of heritage language maintenance for bilingual immigrant mothers in assimilationist contexts.
The critical factor determining whether children of immigrants become bilingual is strong family and community support for, and use of, the home language(s) alongside English (Pauwels, 2005). It is well accepted that children of immigrant parents often undergo language shift to English (Clyne & Kipp, 1996), that bilingualism is a cognitive and social asset to children (Wong Fillmore, 2000) and that maintaining “potential for belonging” (Bilbatua & Ellis, 2011) is a powerful motivator for families to maintain the home language. As yet, however, we know little about how bilingual families in isolated circumstances in regional Australia manage the task of passing on their home language in the absence of a co-located speech community. This paper focuses on the challenges and impacts associated with isolation for plurilingual families in small towns in regional Australia. In this paper, selected findings are presented from a larger research project (the base study, titled ‘Bilingualism in the Bush) tracking the experiences of plurilingual families with pre-school-aged children in three regional towns over a three-year period. This paper explores each family’s language goals, aspirations, beliefs and practices. Findings reported here are that families struggle, facing extra pressures brought on by isolation from other speakers of the home language, that extended family relationships, often crucial to bilingual acquisition, can be problematic and not necessarily available for language support, and that the demands of work and study exacerbate the problems of isolation.
This study examines the mother-reported language practice in bilingual English/German-Norwegian, two-parent families in Norway, and explores the effects of (1) parental input patterns, (2) parental gender, and (3) status of the heritage languages (HL), on success of HL transmission and on children’s language use with siblings when the children were age five. Using mother-reported questionnaire data from the Norwegian Mother and Child Cohort Study (MoBa; a national birth cohort in Norway), we collected information about the languages spoken by the children and the home language use of 204 English-Norwegian and 99 German-Norwegian families. The success rate of HL transmission was reported to be 79.9% in English-Norwegian families, and 72.2% in German-Norwegian families. However, less than half of the bilingual children interacted in HL with their siblings. Different parental input patterns were found to have different effects on HL transmission and on children’s HL use with siblings. Additional HL input from the Norwegian parent seemed not only to promote HL transmission, but also increase the probability of children’s HL use with siblings. Mothers being the HL user was associated with higher rates of HL transmission and higher rates of children’s HL use with siblings.
As interest in the field of family language policy is burgeoning, an invitation has been issued to include more diverse families and language constellations. This article responds by presenting family language management data from Ethiopian and Colombian refugee families living in New Zealand. As part of the researcher’s ethnographic involvement in both communities, data was obtained through participant observations, interviews with parents and children, and recordings of naturally-occurring interactions between family members. Findings from both communities differ greatly: While many Ethiopian families used explicit management for their children to speak Amharic in the home, Colombian families tended to prefer laissez-faire policies as they did not direct their children’s language choice. Nevertheless, their children typically spoke Spanish, their heritage language. As a theoretical contribution, a model is developed to coherently present the caregivers' choice of language management and their children’s typical language practices. This model helps to uncover similarities and dissimilarities across families and communities. Since families typically moved through different management and practice constellations over time, the model also assists in identifying recurrent family language policy trajectories. The article concludes by drawing practical attention to the need and best timing for informing recent refugees about options and resources concerning intergenerational language transmission.
This paper investigates adoptive parents’ representations of their children’s birth-language and language negotiation which takes place during early stages of transnational adoption. By drawing on the interview discourse of 20 Italian transnational adoptive parents, in the first part we will focus on the reasons that led parents to use the child’s language with him/her and with orphanage staff during the first contacts in the country of origin. In the second part, the parents reported that they relied both on productive and receptive acquired linguistic knowledge to negotiate linguistic contexts with the child. Language negotiation has been described by the parents as involving the practice of intercomprehension, a plurilingual communicative strategy, which allows participants to speak their first language, while exhibiting receptive competences in the language of the other. Eventually, in the third part, we will describe how the mothers and the fathers rationalized the children’s linguistic transition from their first language to the parents’ language and, finally, we will explore the parents’ discourse around language shift. Examining parents’ perceptions of the role that language plays in the experience of adopting contributes to understanding the negotiation which takes place over the topic of language maintenance in specific contexts where parents and children have divergent linguistic repertoires.
The research described in this paper investigates issues related to language socialization of four adolescent Polish immigrant children attending different post-primary schools in Ireland. The focus is on how heritage (Polish) language socialisation goals affect these children’s identity negation as they grow up in a multilingual environment, and as they try to find their place in a new country and society. In particular, this paper examines the ways in which the children construct themselves as authoritative or unauthoritative heritage language speakers The theoretical background, methodology, and final results are set from the longitudinal study (5 years) involving such students and their families, two of whom also attend weekend Polish schools in addition to mainstream secondary schools. The theoretical and analytical approach combines an Ethnography of Communication approach to data collection and field work, such as participant home and school observations, audio-recordings of children’s interactions with their peers, their teachers and parents, open-ended interviews, children’s samples of school work with Discourse Analysis approaches (Duff, 1995; Davis & Harre 1990, Harre & Langenhove, 1999, Ochs & Capps, 2001). A particular focus is placed on epistemic, moral and affective stances taken by the children in question. Certain aspects of agency, such as variable participation, allegiances with heritage language peer groups, affective and epistemic stances taken with respect to sociohistorical norms and values of the Polish language and culture are illustrated. The results of the analysis are interpreted in terms of heritage language socialisation (Ochs, Schieffelin, & Duranti, 2011), describing how different educational contexts may influence children’s identity negotiation. This micro-analysis of heritage children language socialisation is contextualized within a more holistic account of the Polish community in Ireland (Singleton, 2007) – a community culturally shaped by, and in turn shaping, wider societal and educational ideologies, values and power relations.
