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“No, no Maama! Say “Shaatir ya Ouledee Shaatir”! Children’s agency in language use and socialisation
Abstract
Aims and objectives
This paper investigates how children in multilingual and transnational families mobilise their multiple and developing linguistic repertoires creatively to assert their agency in language use and socialisation, and why these acts of agency are conducive to successful maintenance of the so-called “home”, “community” or “minority” language.
Methodology
Close, qualitative analysis of mealtime multiparty conversations is carried out to examine children’s agency in language use and socialisation.
Data and analysis
Twelve hours of mealtime conversations within one Arabic and English-speaking multilingual family in the UK were recorded over a period of eight months. The excerpts selected for analysis in this paper illustrate how agency is enacted in interaction.
Findings
The data analyses of the family’s language practices reveal both their flexible language policy and the importance the family attaches to Arabic. The children in this family are fully aware of the language preferences of their parents and are capable of manipulating that knowledge and asserting their agency through their linguistic choices to achieve their interactional goals.
Originality
This paper explores how Arabic is maintained as a minority language by second and third generations of Arabic-speaking immigrants in the UK through close analysis of conversations.
Significance
The findings contribute to the current discussions of family language policy and maintenance by demonstrating children’s agentive and creative roles in language use and socialisation. Three factors are identified as the reason for the successful language learning, use and maintenance of Arabic: firstly, a family language policy that has a positive multilingual outlook; secondly, family relationship dynamics that connect and bond family members; and thirdly, the children’s highly developed ability to understand their parents’ language preferences.
... Alternatively, some scholars reverse the roles within the family by exploring children's agency. That is, these studies investigate if and how children's language use impacts their caregivers' practices and beliefs Gyogi, 2015;Revis, 2016;Said & Zhu, 2019). ...
... Lastly, similarly to practices and beliefs, the initial emphasis of FLP studies was on parental efforts to steer children's language use. However, several scholars demonstrate that children, fully aware of their family members' language preferences and skills, are capable of negotiating or manipulating the language use and attitudes of the people in their household by explicitly questioning or correcting the language choice of interlocutors or by (implicit or explicit) medium requests Gafaranga, 2010;Gyogi, 2015;Kheirkhah & Cekaite, 2018;Luykx, 2005;Palviainen & Boyd, 2013;Revis, 2016;Said & Zhu, 2019;Smith-Christmas, 2018;Tuominen, 1999). ...
... One of the strongest described influences, however, probably is the influence (school-age) children exert on their family's language policy. The observation that children are important agents in modifying the FLP, even though they lack their parents' authority (Gyogi, 2015;Kheirkhah & Cekaite, 2015Revis, 2016;Said & Zhu, 2019;Tuominen, 1999) was partially addressed by Spolsky's (2018) latest addition to the original model, introducing advocates to the management component (individuals without authority wishing to change language practices). The addition of selfmanagement or efforts speakers make to modify or increase their own linguistic repertoire and proficiency (Spolsky, 2019), has also been observed and described in several FLP studies (e.g., adoptive parents learning the birth-language of their adopted children Shin, 2013)). ...
In this thesis I have investigated the family language policy of multilingual families raising infants and toddlers in the Flemish Community (Belgium). The thesis includes longitudinal survey data of nearly 500 families and represents a (language-)diverse sample.
... The concept of agency refers to intentional, reflexive activities that are conducted with the intent of achieving certain goals within the constraints of the social context (Huang & Benson, 2013). In transnational and bi/multilingual families, children maintain an agency to influence their family's language policy through resistance and negotiation (Fogle & King, 2013) and assert their own linguistic preferences to achieve communicative goals (Said & Zhu, 2019). Children in those families can also develop an agency to learn their heritage language while maintaining transnational affiliations by utilizing online social media (Kędra, 2020;Palviainen & Kędra, 2020). ...
... As a result, the family achieved a consensus to allow Rizki's dominant use of English at home. The change in the family language policy as a result of negotiation was similar to that in studies conducted by Fogle and King (2013) and Said and Zhu (2019). ...
... Parents-child negotiation demonstrated in this study echoed that of earlier language socialization studies in transnational families (Fogle & King, 2013;Said & Zhu, 2019). However, the study looks closely into the conflict and negotiation with regards to parents' and a child's language investment. ...
Parents of transnational sojourner families, who stay temporarily in a country other than their own, navigate across online and offline spaces to mediate their children’s socialization into the linguistic competence they need for both contexts, namely the host country and the homeland. Simultaneously, their children establish agency in developing their own linguistic competence. However, language socialization studies have rarely examined the interconnection between parents’ mediation and children’s agency across both online and offline spaces of socialization. In this light, this study presents an ethnographic study that examined parents’ mediation and a child’s agency in the online and offline language socialization of an Indonesian-Muslim transnational sojourner family in the United States, which is underexplored in language research. Additionally, using Darvin and Norton’s (2015) investment model, it explored how the family’s identities, ideologies, and capital structured the child’s language socialization. Data were collected from observations, interviews, and artifacts that depict language practices within the family. In-depth thematic analysis through triangulation of the various forms of data was conducted to obtain trustworthiness. The findings demonstrated that parents’ mediation and their child’s agency across online and offline spaces contributed to the development of the child’s linguistic and multimodal repertoires while also strengthening the family’s local and cross-border connections. The findings also demonstrated competing priorities in identity as well as in social and cultural capital investment, which were eventually resolved. The study provides a deeper understanding of transnational sojourners’ language investment in their imagined communities, which span across the host and the home countries.
... The majority (19/24) of studies reviewed were quantitative in nature, except for a small group of studies that examined language with video-recording and/or ethnographic methods (Kim et al., 2015;Lomeu Gomes, 2020;Meyer Pitton, 2013;Peñalva, 2016;Said & Zhu, 2019). For quantitative studies, the participant sample sizes ranged considerably, from 40 to 5878. ...
... A minority of studies examined parent-child relationships using observational measures (7), viewing parent-child communication in situ as a way to understand their relationships. These studies coded for parent-child observation tasks (Schofield et al., 2017;Tao et al., 2012) or analyzed self-recordings of daily family activities such as mealtimes (Lomeu Gomes, 2020;Meyer Pitton, 2013;Peñalva, 2016;Said & Zhu, 2019). These more qualitative assessments of parentchild relationships examined parental power and/or authority, focusing on how language shifts in everyday interactions impact parental authority (Kim et al., 2015;Peñalva, 2016), and how language socialization as conceptualized via language choice and child behavior monitoring are inextricably linked (Meyer Pitton, 2013;Said & Zhu, 2019). ...
... These studies coded for parent-child observation tasks (Schofield et al., 2017;Tao et al., 2012) or analyzed self-recordings of daily family activities such as mealtimes (Lomeu Gomes, 2020;Meyer Pitton, 2013;Peñalva, 2016;Said & Zhu, 2019). These more qualitative assessments of parentchild relationships examined parental power and/or authority, focusing on how language shifts in everyday interactions impact parental authority (Kim et al., 2015;Peñalva, 2016), and how language socialization as conceptualized via language choice and child behavior monitoring are inextricably linked (Meyer Pitton, 2013;Said & Zhu, 2019). ...
Upon initiating school, immigrant children begin to lose much of their heritage language (HL) abilities, resulting in the erosion of a common shared language with their parents. Although communication is fundamental to positive parent–child relationships, research on the effects of navigating two languages is missing from most family theories regarding immigrant populations. This scoping review provides a comprehensive overview of the literatures from family science, child development, communication, and applied linguistics regarding how immigrant families navigate the adoption of a host country's language and the maintenance of their HL, and how this process impacts parent–child relationships. Results indicate that (a) the literature is relatively small and underdeveloped; (b) there is a limiting focus on individual language proficiency rather than a dyadic or familial communicative process; and (c) child HL proficiency is strongly correlated with healthier parent–child relationships and child outcomes. Limitations and future directions are discussed.
... Research in this phase is characterised by the experiences of family members when making sense of the languages in their life. Scholars are now beginning to highlight the different factors that influence family language practices and decisions (e.g., Curdt-Christiansen 2016; Curdt-Christiansen & Huang 2019; Curdt-Christiansen & Wang 2018;Zhu & Li 2016;Said & Zhu 2019). Because of the social nature of families, the study of FLP is expanding its domain from families to encompass other domains 'related to family decisions, such as education, religion, and public linguistic space as well as many different aspects in individual family members' everyday life, including emotions, identity, and cultural and political allegiances (Curdt-Christiansen 2018: 423). ...
... Thus, the development of informal language instruction was dependent on the child's willingness to collaborate and participate. Children's agentive power to appropriate or resist their parents' language beliefs and practices can also be a driving force for language shifts (Gafaranga 2010;Luykx 2005;Said & Zhu 2019). ...
... In a recent study, Said and Zhu (2019) evaluated how children in Arabicspeaking families in the UK creatively mobilised their developing linguistic repertoires to negotiate and take up their agency in language use and socialisation. Drawing on close qualitative analysis of mealtime conversations involving multiple family members over an 8-month period, Said and Zhu (2019) found evidence of a cultural attachment to Arabic by the parents. ...
As an increasingly established research field, family language policy (FLP) provides a very useful lens to view how bi/multilingual home language-use patterns are influenced by socio-political ideologies and economic factors at the macro level and by family members’ language ideology at the micro level. This chapter starts with an introduction to FLP and outlines the development phases of the field. It then provides a discussion of the major research contributions to the field. Following that, it provides a synthesis of the extant research on how FLP is established and maintained in a range of countries and contexts, particularly in multilingual families. The synthesis focuses on internal factors, such as emotion, identity and cultural practices, and child agency in the negotiation of a family language policy. Lastly, insights gleaned from the more diverse range of social contexts are taken into consideration when making implications for parents, educators, and policy makers and a call for future research.
... As children grow older, many studies demonstrate a change in the family practices. Research also witnessed a proliferation of educational activities and language teaching practices that become an important part of children's everyday life and a way to spend time with their parents (Döpke, 1992;Juan-Garau & Pérez-Vidal, 2001;Kheirkhah & Cekaite, 2015;Kopeliovich, 2013;Meyer Pitton, 2015b;Obied, 2010;Said & Zhu, 2019). ...
... As I explored previous research on family language socialization in monolingual and multilingual settings and engaged with the preliminary analysis, I chose to focus on a practice called home language lessons and to investigate its sequential development and the interplay of educational, relational, and pragmatic dimensions. An example of typical Western middleclass families' "education-relevant family routines" (Ochs & Kremer-Sadlik, 2013), is recurrent during mundane activities such as mealtime (e.g., Kheirkhah & Cekaite, 2015;Said & Zhu, 2019) or book reading (e.g., Meyer Pitton, 2013b). The analyzed episode comes from the Bergman family and is embedded in the mundane task where the mother and the three-year-old daughter are engaged in the collaborative multilayered activity of emptying the dishwasher and talking about what each item is called in Russian. ...
... In particular, it concerns child-centered and age-appropriate orientations that afford specific modes of engagement and playfulness (cf. Döpke, 1992;Juan-Garau & Pérez-Vidal, 2001;Kopeliovich, 2013;Said, 2021;Said & Zhu, 2019;Smith-Christmas, 2018). Therefore, nurturing heritage language environments also include pragmatic, relational, and childrearing dimensions. ...
Situated within research on language socialization and family language policy, this thesis explores how young children (2–4 years old) learn their heritage language in multilingual, transnational families, and how multilingualism becomes an integral part of family life. It draws on video-ethnographic fieldwork in three bi/multilingual families in Sweden with preschool-aged children where the mothers speak Russian and the parents aspire to raise children multilingually.
Using a multimodal interactional analysis, the three studies identify and examine recurrent language practices that promote the children’s use of the heritage language, Russian, in mother-child interactions. They approach heritage language maintenance as embedded in mundane activities such as home language lessons during collaboratively accomplished chores (Study I), conversational storytelling during mealtime (Study II), and co-narration during literacy events (Study III).
The analyses focus on the interactional organization of language learning agendas and heritage language socialization environments that are initiated by the mothers to scaffold their children’s learning and use of Russian. In particular, this study illuminates various ways to engage the children in collaborative Russian speech production, including mutually enjoyable embodied performances. Moreover, it is shown in detail how high expectations of children as heritage language speakers and learners and educational efforts are interactionally balanced through relational work.
The findings suggest that the realization of family language policy to support heritage language development relies not only on consistent language choice, frequency of language use, and parental strategies and ideologies, but also on how language choice and language use are embedded in the ongoing activity, how activity formats are organized and appropriated by the children, the position of the child as a speaker vis-à-vis the parent, and affective alignments. The study uncovers an interplay of educational, relational, ideological, and pragmatic dimensions of heritage language socialization in the home. In this way, the thesis contributes to a more nuanced understanding of family language policy and children’s emergent multilingualism as integrated in everyday family life.
... Available studies have rarely demonstrated how this interconnectedness impacts on heritage language socialisation within minoritised language families. research has tended to pay more attention to how children in transnational families are socialised into bi/multilingual language practices (e.g., Slavkov, 2017) while others have sought to understand issues of agency in language socialisation in immigration contexts (e.g., Luykx, 2005;Fogle & King, 2013;Said & Zhu, 2019). In such contexts, the language of immigrants is usually pitted against a more powerful global language such as English (Curdt-Christiansen, 2016;Yazan & Ali, 2018). ...
... However, few studies have attempted to show how the two notions are intertwined and interact with language practices in extra familial spaces. Some studies have focused on transnational families to understand how they negotiate between their children's bilingual development in the host country and intergenerational transmission of their heritage language (e.g., Fogle & King, 2013;Kayam & Hirsch, 2014;Hua & Wei, 2016;Said & Zhu, 2019). Much of language socialisation studies have tended to view children as passive 'novices' who are subject to 'expert' language socialisation practices by parents and other 'experts' such as older siblings, teachers and extended family members. ...
... Developing the same ideas in the UK, Said & Zhu (2019) studied mealtime interactions of a transnational family, bilingual in English and Arabic, in order to understand how children in multilingual and transnational families mobilise their multiple and developing linguistic repertoires creatively to assert their agency in language use and socialisation, and why these acts of agency are conducive to successful maintenance of the so-called 'home', 'community' or 'minority' language. (Said & Zhu, 2019: 771) Like Luykx (2005), their findings demonstrated the importance of child-agency in language socialisation and how children's awareness of their parents' language preferences resulted in children manipulating that knowledge to persuade parents into giving in to their own language socialisation preferences (Said & Zhu, 2019;Luykx, 2005). Parental tendencies to negotiate family language policies with their children have a far-reaching impact on language socialisation and this has in many ways resulted in the practice of harmonious bilingualism (De Houwer, 2015). ...
This study investigates the interface between school language practices and children’s language socialisation
among speakers of the Tonga language in Binga, Zimbabwe. It is couched in the view that extra-familial language
practices and experiences have a bearing on language socialisation patterns on the home domain. The study,
therefore, examines how language practices in the school are infused with language practices within the family
milieu, and is informed by the twin concepts of family language policy and language socialisation. To understand
the nature of the interaction, we elicited and analysed perspectives of selected first language (L1) Tonga parents
and their school-going children on how they thought school language practices are related with language choices
and language socialisation preferences within the family linguistic ecology. The major finding is that children’s
school language experiences and practices permeate the home in various ways. Their importance in family
language policies cast children as agents of their own language socialisation as opposed to being passive subjects
of ‘expert’ parental language socialisation. The school is therefore an important language socialisation sphere
which has a far-reaching influence on language use in the family. It should thus be considered as a domain relevant
to the articulation of family language policies by speakers of minoritised languages.
... The critical role of children in shaping and reshaping parents' FLPs has aroused scholarly interest (Fogle and Frontiers in Psychology 03 frontiersin.org King, 2013;Said and Zhu, 2019;Wilson, 2020;Smith-Christmas, 2022, etc.). The children could either negotiate, contest or resist the explicit policy decisions implemented by the parents, which in turn impacts their FLPs (Boyd et al., 2017;Revis, 2019). ...
... Many researchers regard language acquisition and language socialization as an integrated process (Fogle and King, 2013;Said and Zhu, 2019;Smith-Christmas, 2020). That means the acquisition of HL is not merely associated with formal language learning in classroom settings, focusing on various linguistic components and language skills, but more importantly, happens informally and unknowingly with different family members at home and various social partners in the communities (He, 2008). ...
This study delves into the heritage language experiences of Australian-born Chinese immigrant children under the framework of family language policy. Storytelling as a narrative inquiry method is used to reveal the lived experiences of the protagonists in relation to heritage language and culture. The three family stories involved for case studies reveal different levels of parent agency in Chinese immigrant families regarding their children’s home language use and heritage language education. It is noted that the level of child agency corresponds with the level of their parent agency. Where parents strongly advocate and practice heritage language maintenance, stronger agency is observed in their children to continue the use and learning of their heritage language. In addition, maintaining harmony while parents are implementing family language policies and providing children with formal instruction in heritage language are conducive to heritage language development, particularly in terms of its literacy.
... Following this concept, children play a crucial role as emergent speakers who actively contribute to the dynamic process of language transmission and transformation in the family. They are not passive recipients of language but are active agents in shaping their linguistic environment and practices (Said and Zhu 2019;Smith-Christmas 2018). For example, children often navigate and negotiate language use in multilingual families based on their social interactions, both within and Languages 2024, 9, 320 3 of 22 outside the family, thereby influencing language maintenance and shift in their immediate surroundings (Gafaranga 2010;Obojska 2017Obojska , 2018. ...
This study investigates the influence of selected aspects of family language policies (FLPs) on language proficiency across three generations of Russian-speaking families in Germany using data from a sample of 18 families. The data were collected via questionnaires and a cloze test was used to measure proficiency in Russian. Multiple regression analysis and Dunn’s test were employed to analyze the influence of the selected components of FLP and assess differences in language proficiency between family members. The findings highlight a significant generational shift in language proficiency: parents exhibited the highest proficiency in Russian, followed by grandparents, with children showing the least proficiency and greater variation in their language skills. This pattern reflects the dynamics of language practices in families where older generations predominantly use Russian, whereas children display a greater inclination towards German or enhanced bilingualism. Additionally, this study underscores the positive influence of literacy skills in both Russian and German, reading in Russian, and a positive attitude towards maintaining cultural ties through reading on Russian language proficiency. Although attendance of Russian language lessons was positively correlated with the proficiency scores of children, the statistical models were only partially successful in accounting for their overall impact on proficiency, indicating that other unexplored factors may also play a significant role.
... Individuals' agency has been studied in conversation. The active role of parents (Deprez 1996;De Houwer 1999;Spolsky 2012;Curdt-Christiansen and Wang 2018) and grandparents (Zhan 2021) has been observed, as well as the active role of children (Fogle and King 2013;Said and Zhu 2019). Fogle and King (2013) observed the agentive role of children in shaping FLP through interactions, though in a national rather than transnational context. ...
In this paper I analyse agency through conversational alignment within trilingual transnational families living between the Antioch region in southern Turkey, where the eldest members were born, and France or Germany, where they migrated and where the members of the youngest generation were born. Focusing on language practices across three generations, based on conversational analysis of multilingual corpora recorded during ethnographic fieldwork, I explore agency within family language policy. The language repertoires of the members of these families include resources in Arabic, Turkish and the national languages of the country where they live (mostly French or German). In this transnational context, participants present varied profiles and asymmetrical language resources in their different languages. The analyses of their intergenerational conversations show the use of all languages, even the heritage language Arabic, by the youngest participants, encouraged by mutual alignments of language and of choice of varieties between grandparents and grandchildren.
... Schwartz and Verschik 2013;Smith-Christmas 2017), which has led to greater attention being paid to children as agents in family language policy research (e.g. Kheirkhah 2016; Revis 2019; Said and Zhu 2019;Smith-Christmas 2014, 2020, 2022. This notwithstanding, the focus on children remains an important topic that deserves further exploration to uncover how children contribute to family language policy through their practices (Moustaoui Srhir & Poveda, 2022;Smith-Christmas 2020). ...
... These findings align with previous research about the significance of family ties in family language policy, and the connection between a nurturing environment and positive language use in the home as discussed by Curdt-Christiansen (2020) and as shown in empirical studies based on the analyses of the interactions between family members (e.g. Filipi, 2015;Said & Zhu, 2019;Wright, 2020) as well as positivist approaches (e.g. Tannenbaum & Howie, 2002). ...
... The importance of child agency (Said and Zhu, 2019;Smith-Christmas, 2021) in the choice of technology and Internet resources, and the fact that parents do not always approve of them, is a similar trend in all countries. In Germany and Sweden, children discover new Russian-speaking role models, and parents note that they can watch 'real heroes', such as YouTubers or TikTokers, in real time for hours -many more than they spend watching movies or cartoons -since they can interact with them (at least in theory) and leave comments. ...
Forty-five Russophone families in Estonia, Germany and Sweden answered semi-structured questionnaires about their sociolinguistic characteristics and participated in in-depth interviews regarding language use, language transmission and maintenance, and attitudes to all these processes. This comparative analysis of the family context helps to explain the variation in the development of linguistic identities and language-use strategies. We identified clear similarities and differences between these families, especially regarding reported digital language practices among immigrant families. The data analysis showed that the use of digital technologies has an impact on the reported language practices among the families but not necessarily on the use of Russian as a heritage language. Most families highlighted the intensification of internet-based communication with extended family members and the supportive effect of digital technologies on intergenerational heritage language transmission, since younger family members gained more access to Russian via the internet. But the role of digital technologies alone is limited when it comes to intergenerational heritage language transmission and other factors, such as the efforts of parents and the agency of children, seem to be more important. Still, the joint use of digital technologies has a positive effect, especially in those families where the children are actively involved in digital communication.
... The family and the home have always been considered as learning spaces and recognized as such in, for instance, anthropology, language socialization studies and most prominently in family language policy (FLP) studies (Curdt-Christiansen and Lanza 2018; Fogle 2013; King and Fogle 2017;Lanza and Lexander 2019;Lomeu Gomes 2022;Okita 2002;Piller and Gerber 2018;Said and Zhu 2019;Schalley and Eisenchlas 2020). FLP is the study of how languages are used, learned and managed within the home context and beyond (King et al. 2008). ...
... However, most studies usually focus on translanguaging practices in the context of two or more languages. Since research has indicated that translanguaging practices help HLLs to advance in their learning by relying on their entire linguistic repertoire to achieve their desired communication goals (e.g., Said & Zhu, 2017;Albirini & Chakrani, 2017;Al Masaeed, 2020), this study examines those practices by Arabic HLLs in the classroom and extends the examination to how translanguaging can help those learners bring their social identity to the classroom. ...
The field of Heritage Language (HL) education has recently gained more ground in applied linguistics and teaching (Dávila, 2017). A considerable amount of research focusing on Arabic Heritage Learners (HLLs) has raised conversations around translanguaging practices and their effects on language learning progress for heritage language learners (e.g., Abourehab & Azaz, 2020; Al Masaeed, 2020; Albirini & Chakrani, 2017). Other studies found value in HLLs' sense of belonging to their heritage communities and how this may positively affect their learning process (e.g., Sehlaoui, 2008). This study investigates the effects of both translanguaging practices and social identity theory on the experience of Arabic HLLs in the classroom. Following a mixed-method design, ten participants were recruited for the study where two questionnaires on translanguaging and social identity were conducted followed by interviews. Contrary to previous research findings, results of this study indicate that Arabic HLLs hold mixed perceptions of translanguaging practices, while they categorize themselves as members of their heritage communities.
... Lo anterior, demuestra que el estudio específico de la agencia infantil debe considerar el hecho que dentro de la familia también se presentan relaciones asimétricas de poder entre padres e hijos (Armstrong 2014;Lokot et al. 2022;Said y Zhu 2019), las cuales se pueden desplegar de manera diferenciada en diferentes comunidades y en diferentes familias dentro de una misma comunidad. Duff (2020), de hecho, sostiene que, aunque la investigación en PLF reconozca la agencia de los niños, sus interlocutores pueden a menudo tener un nivel mayor de agencia. ...
Theoretically and methodologically framed within family language policy studies, this article contrasts the idea of Mapuche-Pewenche child autonomy and agency, as the result of the early socialization of Mapuche-Pewenche children, with our sociolinguistic ethnographic data from two Pewenche families. We do this in order to determine the extent to which, from a parental perspective, the agency ascribed to Mapuche-Pewenche children impacts the language policies in each family and the transmission of their indigenous language, Chedungun. We conclude by suggesting that, even though agency and autonomy are present in the way the children in these families are socialized, when it comes to determining the sociolinguistic future of these children, parents appear to assume the main role as agents of language policy.
... Lo anterior, demuestra que el estudio específico de la agencia infantil debe considerar el hecho que dentro de la familia también se presentan relaciones asimétricas de poder entre padres e hijos (Armstrong 2014;Lokot et al. 2022;Said y Zhu 2019), las cuales se pueden desplegar de manera diferenciada en diferentes comunidades y en diferentes familias dentro de una misma comunidad. Duff (2020), de hecho, sostiene que, aunque la investigación en PLF reconozca la agencia de los niños, sus interlocutores pueden a menudo tener un nivel mayor de agencia. ...
Este artículo pretende contrastar la idea de la ‘agencia infantil mapuche-pewenche’, que proviene de estudios que destacan la importancia de la autonomía en la sociedad mapuche, con evidencia sociolingüística-etnográfica recogida en dos familias pewenche en una comunidad ubicada en el Alto Biobío. El estudio se enmarca en el ámbito de las políticas lingüísticas familiares e intenta dilucidar en qué medida la autonomía y la agencia infantil determinan el futuro lingüístico de los niños en un primer acercamiento desde las perspectivas parentales. Entre los resultados destacan la decisión de los padres por sobre la agencia y la autonomía infantil, a pesar de observarse elementos de autonomía en los niños en otros aspectos de la crianza.// Theoretically and methodologically framed within family language policy studies, this article contrasts the idea of Mapuche-Pewenche child autonomy and agency, as the result of the early socialization of Mapuche-Pewenche children, with our sociolinguistic ethnographic data from two Pewenche families. We do this in order to determine the extent to which, from a parental perspective, the agency ascribed to Mapuche-Pewenche children impacts the language policies in each family and the transmission of their indigenous language, Chedungun. We conclude by suggesting that, even though agency and autonomy are present in the way the children in these families are socialized, when it comes to determining the sociolinguistic future of these children, parents appear to assume the main role as agents of language policy.
... This finding is consistent with Said and Zhu (2019) who show through their study of an Arabic and English-speaking family in the United Kingdom that children have an important role to play in the use of their minority and the implementation of FLP in the family. A flexible FLP that considers children's preferences would create positive experiences of bilingualism (Said and Zhu, 2019), which are known to contribute more broadly to family well-being (De Houwer, 2020). However, neither children's language attitudes nor parents' language practices alone can explain the maintenance of minority languages. ...
Objectives: This study examines the mediating role of children’s language attitudes in the relationship between parental language practices and children’s use of the minority language. Methodology: This cross-sectional study uses questionnaires filled out by children individually, focusing on their and their parents’ language attitudes and practices.
Data and analysis: The study was conducted with 135 children (Mage=10.76years) living in a bilingual family in France. We tested our hypotheses using regression analyses (logistic and linear) and a mediation analysis.
Findings: Our findings indicate that (1) parents’ use of the minority language significantly predicts children’s; (2) children’s attitudes towards their minority language significantly predict its use; and (3) children’s language attitudes mediate a more important part of the relationship between their own and their parents’ use of the minority language when both parents use the majority language and only one uses the minority language.
Implications: Reinforcing children’s positive attitudes towards their minority language can foster its use. Children have a role in the development of their bilingualism. When the child’s bilingual development is not supported by active language use by both parents at home, the children’s attitudes are crucial and decisive.
Originality: This study focuses on the role of 10-year-old children’s perceptions of their bilingual development. This study provides interesting new insights into children’s agency in minority languages maintenance.
... The role of children as actors who can initiate changes has been emphasized in the literature previously (Said and Zhu 2019;Smith-Christmas 2021). Yet, there is still a need for more research to understand the role of the child's agency in shaping FLP, which is related to language exposure that the child gets and in turn is associated with the child's linguistic outcomes in both languages. ...
This study explored the language and literacy practices of multilingual families in Cyprus, Estonia, Germany, Israel, and Sweden during the COVID-19 pandemic. The study focuses on the different roles of family members in language transmission in order to understand whether these practices might have been influenced by the COVID-19 pandemic. We aimed to answer two key research questions: RQ1, whether and how the pandemic conditions affected the heritage language, societal language acquisition, and heritage language literacy learning environments in the five countries examined (Cyprus, Estonia, Germany, Israel, and Sweden); and RQ2, what is the nature of child and parental agency in facilitation of the possible changes in the corresponding five countries? Fifty semi-structured interviews (ten in each country) were conducted. The data highlighted the factors that triggered changes in family language policy during the pandemic and the role of the child's agency, parents, extended family, and social network during this period. Based on our findings, we argue that the pandemic conditions gave the children new opportunities for agency when it comes to language and literacy choice and communication with extended family members. This even facilitated new sources of input and suggested the active role of a child as an agent in shaping family language policy in the family.
... In the family domain, even though children are often analyzed as subjects for whom the FLP is designed, if dissatisfied with parental language governance, they may develop alternative discourses of power and resist caregivers' decisions (Tsushima & Guardado, 2019). FLP case studies around the world underline that there are a wide range of issues influencing children's resistance to the FLP including clash over cultural beliefs and norms with caregivers (Bezcioglu-Goktolga & Yagmur, 2022), higher social status of a school language (Wilson, 2020), and peer influence in early adolescence (Said & Zhu, 2019). Therefore, parental assumptions about creating home as a secure place for bilingualism and minority language maintenance may be disturbed as children develop and exercise their own agency. ...
Current research on language policy underscores how top-down policymakers tend to endorse the interests of dominant social groups, marginalize minority languages, and attempt to perpetuate systems of socio-lingual inequity. In the Castilian-Spanish-dominated sociolinguistic terrains of Galicia and Navarre, this article examines the rise of grassroots-level actors or agents in the form of parents who have decided to contest the government's low-intensity language policy models through various bottom-up efforts. The principal focus of this article is to examine how ideologies, language planning strategies , and practices of pro-Galician or Basque parents act as instruments of language 'governmentality' leading to grassroots discourses of resistance. Through their individual as well as collective linguistic practices, as this article underscores, these parents have the potential to generate visible and invisible language policies on the ground, influencing their children's language ecology. Drawing from ethnographic research tools, including observations from field sites, individual interviews, and focus groups with parents from both geopolitical domains, we investigate how these parents exercise their agency and become policymakers in their homes and the community. The endeavor is also to reveal the key challenges they come across while implementing these policies.
... Several studies have also underscored how children are not simply passive recipients of FLP but agents who play an active role in their language development (see Fogle and King 2013;Said and Zhu 2019;Tuominen 1999). The attitudes that children have towards their minority language and their responses towards their parents' language management efforts have been shown to encourage or discourage the parents' efforts (Nakamura 2019;Park 2019;Takeuchi 2006). ...
The few studies on Family Language Policy in Singapore (FLP) have generally focused on FLP in local and immigrant Chinese families. This article explores language policies that seem to undergird Singaporean-Japanese families’ language practices. In-depth interviews and observations with five such families showed that Japanese only functions as the language of communication between the Japanese parents and their children if parents have invoked particular language policies to support its transmission and use at home. For most families, English was the main medium of communication among family members. Language policies and practices in these families were heavily influenced by the value emplaced on each language within the parents’ linguistic repertoire and their beliefs regarding language learning.
... Agency, often defined in family bilingualism research as a person's "socioculturally mediated capacity to act" (Ahearn, 2001, p. 11), has been the topic of many scholarly works (see e.g., Bergroth & Palviainen, 2017;Gyogi, 2015;Said & Zhu, 2019, who all adopt this exact definition). However, if language practices in bilingual families are inherently influenced by contextual factors, as indicated by the previous section, then, the question is to what extent family members actually have a capacity to act in relation to their language practices at all. ...
This doctoral dissertation examines the family language practices of Swedish-English families using an interdisciplinary and mixed-method approach. The principal aim is to empirically document what these practices are, as well as how practices interact with various ideological, conceptual, and contextual factors.
The dissertation is composed of four empirical studies and a comprehensive summary with seven chapters. In order to engage with the complex, multidimensional nature of bilingual family language practices, the empirical studies adopt four different theoretical and methodological frameworks. Study I uses a large-scale quantitative approach to investigate the connection between declared family language practices and macro societal factors. Study II adopts a conversation analytic approach to examine the local sequential context of family language practices. Study III uses a rhizomatic discourse analytic approach, which considers how family language practices can be conceptualised as an assemblage of semiotic resources, objects, space, and time. Finally, Study IV focuses on the affective and psychological dimensions of language practices by adopting an interpretative phenomenological approach that explores participants’ thoughts, feelings, and their lived experiences with language.
The chapters of the comprehensive summary discuss the four empirical studies in relation to an expanded theoretical framework and in relation to each other. Although the epistemological and theoretical perspectives adopted in the four studies are different, they all consider how language practices are fundamentally situated in the local context of occurrence. Each study illuminates a portion of this local context, which, when triangulated, leads to a richer understanding of language practices than would be obtained with a single approach alone. In addition, the findings emphasise and exemplify how the context-sensitive dimensions of agency, identity, and emotion are inherently connected to language practices in bilingual families.
... In multilingual families, language scaffolding strategies have also been found crucial for creating heritage language and literacy socialization environments ( Lanza, 1997 ;Meyer Pitton, 2013a b;Said & Zhu, 2019 ). In particular, in a handful of studies of naturally occurring literacy events, parental responses to children's code-switching have received most attention, as code/language alternation is a central feature of bilingual talk ( Filipi, 2015 ;Musk & Cromdal, 2018 ). ...
This video-ethnographic study investigates how designedly incomplete utterances (DIUs) are used during home literacy events in three multilingual families with young children in Sweden to prompt collaborative storybook reading in the children's heritage language, Russian. The multimodal interaction analyses uncover how DIUs, in concert with other semiotic resources, create a sequential environment to prompt children's speech production in relation to the text at hand, negotiate language choice and alignment with an ongoing literacy project, and to creatively exploit the DIU structure to initiate storytelling. The findings moreover show that recurrent use of DIUs during the reading of well-known to the child texts with rhythm and rhyme allows for ritualized engagement in co-narration, in all contributing to children's socialization to oral performance in the heritage language.
Background
Earlier studies have shown that parents may adopt various discourse strategies in response to children’s language mixing, which vary in the extent to which they encourage their child to speak a certain language. Specifically, when the child switches to another language during a conversation, parents may pretend not to understand the child, encourage the child to speak the original language of the conversation, or codeswitch to the other language. Existing work has typically studied the use of such discourse strategies through observations in case studies and focused mostly on child language outcomes.
Aims
The aims of the current study are to examine (1) what discourse strategies parents use, (2) why they use them, and (3) how their use of these strategies relates to beliefs about child-rearing and attitudes towards multilingualism.
Method and results
Qualitative data were collected through interviews with eight parents of multilingual children in the Netherlands. The results show that parents largely used strategies that encourage children to maintain the language of conversation, without putting too much pressure on the child. Parents’ reasons for using each of the strategies were diverse and related to, among others, parents’ ideologies about multilingual parenting and impact belief, children’s age, and the circumstances of the situation, such as the presence of other people and the child’s physical or emotional state.
Conclusion
Taken together, these findings indicate that parents’ choice of strategies depends on a variety of psychological and contextual factors. As such, the findings provide a starting point for future more in-depth studies on how parents socialize their children to become multilingual language users.
This chapter examines the concept of ‘practiced language policy’ in the context of the sociolinguistic subfield of ‘Family Language Policy’ (FLP). This chapter centres on four main aspects of practiced language policy vis-à-vis FLP: first, how caregivers construct FLPs through language practices; how children re-negotiate FLPs through their own language practices; how language practices between siblings specifically contribute to re-shaping FLPs; and finally, the creative and affective re-negotiations of certain linguistic norms through language practices over time. This chapter illustrates how ‘practiced language policy’ is a valuable way to conceptualise the co-agentive and dynamic nature of FLP, namely, how caregivers and children take turns in filling the opposing roles of what (Spolsky, Language Policy 18:323–338, 2019), p. 335) terms ‘advocates without power and managers with authority.’
Since the arrival of indentured immigrants to Mauritius in the 19th century, the teaching of the Telugu language has been present across various levels. Over time, it gained official recognition when it was formally incorporated into the curriculum as an ancestral language during the 1960s. The inclusion of ancestral languages as optional core subjects fulfils linguistic roles such as revitalisation, identity preservation, and cultural maintenance. This stands in contrast to compulsory subjects like English and French, which primarily serve as languages for epistemological development. Teachers teaching Telugu, like other ancestral languages, experience their role as teachers differently. This study delved into the nuances of these experiences. A case study design was employed to investigate and gain a deeper understanding of the experiences of teachers instructing Telugu in state secondary schools. Initial data sources, directed at the entire population, allowed me to obtain a comprehensive overview of the phenomenon and subsequently select participants for the subsequent phases. Adopting an interpretive phenomenological approach, I conducted semi-structured interviews with six participants in three distinct settings. The collected data were analysed through the application of a socio-cultural perspective and Bronfenbrenner's ecological systems theory. This approach and theory provided a framework to comprehend the experiences of a culturally and linguistically minority group of teachers within a multilingual environment. Various constructs and concepts such as ‘language power’, ‘’minority languages, ‘linguistic identity’, ‘language preservation’, and ‘revitalisation’ were unpacked and a thematic approach was employed to interpret and analyse the data. The study reveals that Telugu teachers exhibit a strong sense of attachment and belonging to the language of their immigrant forefathers, even though it is largely no longer spoken. Ascribing a distinct role and significance to their profession, these teachers exhibit language loyalty and actively contribute to the preservation of language. Telugu teachers are actively involved in the revitalisation process, and the existing language policies lead to transformations in identities and experiences of Telugu teachers over time. Telugu teachers mediate the use and study of the language by maintaining a home environment where Teluguness is omnipresent. Socio-cultural factors influence the experiences of teachers. Similarly, the participating Telugu teachers were socially involved and influenced by their engagement in socio-cultural activities in socio-cultural spaces.
Using semi-structured interviews, the current study investigates how twelve Vietnamese sojourner parents perceived and performed family language policy and practices with their primary school children during their temporary residence in Australia. Results reveal that translanguaging was commonplace in family settings. It was a challenge for parents to systematically practise any particular language use rules to assist their children’s maintenance of their mother tongue. Anxiety about future reintegration into formal schooling back in Vietnam and reluctance to send the children to Vietnamese community language classes were also major themes. This reflects how family language policy and practices were shaped by parents’ language and cultural ideology and imagined communities. The chapter raises issues and provides several suggestions that stakeholders may need to consider about community language education to accommodate sojourners’ language needs, too.
The phenomenon of three-generation households is typical in many homes across the world, though perhaps less so in North America and Western Europe. When multigeneration families share the same physical space and take part in the same activities, the dynamics of parenting, eating, how time is spent and allocated, and relationships differ from families in which only parents and their children live together. One of the main (relevant) differences is that in these multilingual families there is easy access to the learning of heritage languages and socialisation into and through them. As the article will demonstrate shortly, such ease is also accompanied by relational and relationship challenges which bear on the heritage language learning process. The article describes the language transmission efforts of three Arabic-speaking families in the United Kingdom to teach and use Arabic with their children at home. Data was collected in the form of audio-recorded interactions, family background forms and parental interviews. Interview data was analysed thematically, and interactional data was analysed from the perspective of interactional sociolinguistics. The data reveals that, in addition to parents, grandparents uniquely enhance not only the learning of Arabic but also the experience of learning it. Children have a direct opportunity to learn Arabic and its various, often rare, dialects with help from their monolingual grandparents. Relationship dynamics between parents, their own parents, their parents-in-law, and their own children appear to shape and be shaped by the explicit and implicit language beliefs and practices of family members. Grandparents seem to also contribute to children’s emotional socialisation and their future beliefs of Arabic as an authentic means by which to express emotion. This is the first study to highlight the role grandparents play in the FLP of Arabic as a heritage language.
Desde una perspectiva crítica, este artículo arroja luz sobre los tipos de agencia individual que despliegan adolescentes bi/multilingües con español como lengua de herencia en una escuela complementaria fundada por padres de familia con raíces latinoamericanas en el cantón de Berna (Suiza). Partiendo del presupuesto de que las identidades son contextuales, relacionales y parciales (Bucholz y Hall 2005), en este estudio exploratorio se analiza cómo las alumnas y los alumnos, haciendo uso de sus agencias, se posicionan frente al español como lengua de herencia en clase. El estudio muestra la importancia de tomar en cuenta los factores contextuales en el análisis de las formas de agencia que pueden darse en el marco del aprendizaje institucionalizado de la lengua de herencia. Se suma además a los estudios de las políticas lingüísticas que incluyen las actitudes y las agencias de los adolescentes para comprender las complejidades de los procesos de mantenimiento y cambio lingüísticos en épocas de transnacionalismo y globalización.
This article sheds light on the types of individual agency displayed by bi/multilingual adolescents with Spanish as their heritage language in a complementary school founded by parents with Latin American roots in the canton of Bern (Switzerland). Based on the assumption that identities are contextual, relational and partial (Bucholz and Hall 2005), this exploratory study analyzes how pupils, using their agency, position themselves in relation to Spanish as a heritage language in class. The study shows the importance of taking contextual factors into account in the analysis of the forms of agency that can occur in the context of institutionalized heritage language learning. It also contributes to studies of language policies that include the attitudes and agencies of adolescents in order to understand the complexities of language maintenance and change processes in times of transnationalism and globalization.
This paper reports on a study of Chinese parents’ involvement in their children’s heritage language (HL) development during the COVID-19 lockdowns in the UK. Involving seven transnational families, we examined the roles parents played during the online learning sessions and the factors shaping their involvement. Employing a netnographic approach, this study incorporates online classroom observations, semi-structured and focus group interviews with parents, and analysis of their Instagram posts. The study underscores the critical role of parental involvement (PI) in enhancing children’s HL education, offering insights into distinct parental roles, including as emotional supporters, co-educators, teaching assistants, and technical supporters. The study introduces a three-dimensional PI model within the framework of family language policy (FLP), enhancing our understanding of FLP by concretely manifesting what, how and why parents get involved in their children’s HL development. This study contributes to the discourse on PI and FLP, shedding light on the evolving roles of parents and the complexity of their involvement during the unique circumstances of the pandemic.
This paper examines language use and policies in Arabic supplementary schools in the UK to explore how language teachers and learners negotiate and renegotiate sociolinguistic hierarchies and boundaries between language varieties. It draws on long-term ethnographic research in three Arabic supplementary schools in Manchester, with a particular focus on one case study school. Classroom participation and observation, informal interviews, and linguistic landscapes (offline and online) offer insights into language practices and reported practices, revealing discrepancies between language policy and actual language use. The article demonstrates how language beliefs and ideologies held at wider global scales play out locally, shaping imagined hierarchies of language resources in the diverse urban diaspora setting. It shows how in the supplementary school, staff and pupils redefine the status and relevance of “Arabic” versus English. Furthermore, the paper discusses the tensions between fuṣḥā and non-standardized varieties that are at the center of decision-making processes relating to target language and language of instruction in the classroom. This article argues that language policies are to be understood as emerging and operating within wider “interactional regimes,” encompassing declared and practiced policies, actors’ dynamic understandings of their language resources, and local and translocal language ideologies.
The linguistic and cultural values of migrants, as well as their attitudes and behaviour, differ from those of the host society. All resources and values can be characterised as linguistic and cultural capital, which can provide migrants with certain advantages in their new country of settlement. A heritage language (HL) and knowledge about another culture are important components of this linguistic cultural capital. It is crucial for multi-generational families to maintain their HL and transmit the culture of their heritage to help individuals gain a better understanding of their own identity. This study aims to investigate the views, attitudes, and beliefs of second-generation migrants in Cyprus and Sweden in relation to their HL, linguistic and cultural capital, factors affecting HL use, maintenance, and development, as well as their future plans and aspirations regarding HL transmission. Narrative analysis of the semi-structured interviews revealed certain differences and similarities between the countries under investigation regarding the personal reflections of the participants and their perceptions regarding the role of family language policies, home literacy environments, child and parental agency, socio-emotional well-being, local context, and other internal and external factors influencing HL use, maintenance, and transmission. Storytelling proved to be an effective method of narrative inquiry, providing a deeper insight into the complex process of HL development and support. In addition, it offered participants an opportunity to reflect on their personality, language, and culture.
In this study, we analyze interview data from 17 mothers of Arabic-English multilingual families to examine their experiences of maintaining their children’s Arabic language development during the COVID-19 pandemic. We were interested in exploring the challenges they faced during the pandemic and their responses to those challenges with the resources available. Following a constant comparative method, our data analysis demonstrated that four main factors have impacted Arabic-English multilingual Muslim families’ language policies during the pandemic, i.e. (1) inner-family dynamics, (2) school closures, (3) children’s agency, and (4) family safety and wellbeing. Responding to those factors, participants’ family language policies were guided by their commitment to Arabic as the language of Islam (i.e. performing religious practices and maintaining connection with the written Islamic heritage) and as an indispensable component of their children’s ethno-religious identities. During the lockdown, when their children could not attend Arabic tutoring, mothers developed new strategies to support their children’s language socialization (e.g., Halaka, more frequent family visit, online tutoring). When schools switched to online learning, their children had more time to spend at home, which most mothers used as an opportunity to have their children practice Arabic more and, in some cases, conduct daily Arabic literacy tutoring at home. All those mothers’ creative responses to COVID-19 challenges were complexified by children’s agency and concerns about family safety and wellbeing.
The articles in this thematic special issue of Sociolinguistic Studies, 'Family as a language policy regime: Agency, negotiation and local practices', are concerned with the impact of family (language policy) among the minority population, whether indigenous or otherwise, on the sociolinguistic makeup of the contemporary policy regimes worldwide. Although family language policy is already a well-established domain of inquiry, this issue points to the wide range of cases from around the world including Cyprus, Germany, Estonia, Iran, Spain, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and Zimbabwe to understand how (individual) pathways are formed and choices made in favour of language and cultural maintenance. While covering a wide range of factors and perspectives that contribute to our understanding of family's linguistic behaviour and the broader social implications of the discipline, these papers emphasise on the complex relationships between language, culture, politics and socioeconomic factors in today's global multilingual and multicultural mosaic. This edition further underlines a number of present-day requirements in the field, such as being able to examine children's or extended family members' agency, use of digital technologies for language maintenance, different forms of parental language planning and activism to mention a few. The collection has emerged in the wake of a symposium 'Family as a language policy regime: Agency, practices and negotiation' at the 20th AILA World Congress (July 19-20, 2023, Lyon, France) and a closed call for papers.
This book attempts to fill a gap in the Greek literature
concerning the needs of courses related to Multilingualism/
Plurilingualism, Educational Linguistics, Applied Linguistics,
Language Education as well as Sociolinguistic Dimensions in
Language Education. The book covers the following fields:
Multilingualism, second language acquisition, multilingual
assessment, linguistic diversity and superdiversity,
intercultural communication, translanguaging, sociolinguistic
approaches to multilingual education, Lingua Franca,
language education for refugees and migrants, bilingual
education and heritage languages and language policies in
education and in the family. The book also discusses issues of
language education in Greece and approaches to Greek as a
second language in formal education.
The
Aims
This study explores how home language(s) are used in bilingual family members’ daily digital or non-digital interactions to demonstrate their emotions and affections for each other. The study investigates linguistic features and situated-language use of home language(s) in emotional negotiations between family members. In addition, it explores how multimodalities and languages are mixed to contribute to the interactional dynamics underlying ‘family talk’ and how children and adults position themselves emotionally in moment-to-moment interaction of family life.
Methodology
This study involves six families from two transnational communities (Chinese and Polish) and it employs an ethnographic research design for data collection.
Data and analysis
Data sources include recordings of mealtime conversations, daily WhatsApp/WeChat texts, and digital-mediated family talk recorded by the families themselves. Affective repertoire is used as an analytical framework.
Findings and conclusions
The following five key features are identified in online or offline family talks regarding expression of emotionality: emojis, terms of endearment, diminutives, declaration of love and situated emotive language use.
Originality
Unlike recent studies of emotions in bi-multilingual families, this study does not rely on surveys, memoirs, or interviews. Few studies have investigated how family members present their emotional expression in their daily communications, what role home/heritage language(s) actually play in communicating their emotional needs, and how these emotional expressions are manifested in their lived experiences and socialisation practices.
Significance and implications
The findings contribute to FLP literature by looking into how emotions are involved in the practices of family life and the construction of familyness. Emotions, as a key factor in FLP, are directly related to parents’ perceptions of and investment in their heritage language. Although these perceptions are linked to the powerful societal languages that often represent educational possibilities, when it comes to emotional expressions, the primacy is given to the first language/heritage language.
The article explores the mutual relationship—or reflexivity— between language socialisation and child agency. It discusses two respective models developed to: (a) better theorise successful language acquisition in a ‘Family Language Policy’ context (b) conceptualise how children construct their agency through language. These models are implemented in analysing interactions in a family in which the mother is making concerted efforts to transmit the autochthonous minority language Scottish Gaelic to her children. It shows how although initially her attempts in fostering her son Billy's Gaelic linguistic development appear to be ‘unsuccessful,’ later in the interaction, Billy actively uses Gaelic in playing a card game, evidencing his linguistic competency and his embedded knowledge of the power of language in achieving certain interactional functions.
Childhood multilingualism has become a norm rather than an exception. This is the first handbook to survey state-of-the-art research on the uniqueness of early multilingual development in children growing up with more than two languages in contact. It provides in-depth accounts of the complexity and dynamics of early multilingualism by internationally renowned scholars who have researched typologically different languages in different continents. Chapters are divided into six thematic areas, following the trajectory, environment and conditions underlying the incipient and early stages of multilingual children's language development. The many facets of childhood multilingualism are approached from a range of perspectives, showcasing not only the challenges of multilingual education and child-rearing but also the richness in linguistic and cognitive development of these children from infancy to early schooling. It is essential reading for anyone interested in deepening their understanding of the multiple aspects of multilingualism, seen through the unique prism of children.
The present chapter discusses children’s multilingual landscapes and language practices in social interaction and in their play. It presents studies on children of various ages, specifically focusing on how children with multilingual linguistic potentials and various kinds of language proficiency encounter a variety of social settings where multilingual or monolingual discursive practices are used. It discusses main theoretical perspectives on multilingualism, children’s learning and play, and introduces a bottom-up conceptualization of children’s multilingual landscapes. Research highlights how children, in their peer interactions, can use various language ideologies and resources. Children exploit the multilingual character and varieties of languages available in the social context and engage in translanguaging. The chapter reviews research on children’s multilingual peer play, language creativity and metalinguistic awareness. Further, it discusses how children co-create language norms and social order in multilingual peer groups, and how linguistic assets within multilingual families and in multilingual educational environments are invoked and exploited.
Childhood multilingualism has become a norm rather than an exception. This is the first handbook to survey state-of-the-art research on the uniqueness of early multilingual development in children growing up with more than two languages in contact. It provides in-depth accounts of the complexity and dynamics of early multilingualism by internationally renowned scholars who have researched typologically different languages in different continents. Chapters are divided into six thematic areas, following the trajectory, environment and conditions underlying the incipient and early stages of multilingual children's language development. The many facets of childhood multilingualism are approached from a range of perspectives, showcasing not only the challenges of multilingual education and child-rearing but also the richness in linguistic and cognitive development of these children from infancy to early schooling. It is essential reading for anyone interested in deepening their understanding of the multiple aspects of multilingualism, seen through the unique prism of children.
This article examines the communication patterns among multicultural African families in Japan. Using ethnographic vignettes, this article uses family language planning (FLP) theories to understand how African parents communicate with their children, how parents aim to shape their children’s language use, how parents conceptualize their family communication, and how Japanese institutions affect the trajectories of parental FLP efforts. This article demonstrates how five intersecting factors influence the outcomes of FLPs in idiosyncratic ways. These five factors include Japanese education and socialization practices, parents’ economic resources, parents’ language skills, identity ambitions, and parents’ willingness to use economic and cultural resources. It also highlights the utility and limitations of applying FLP theories of child agency to the Japanese context. These findings suggest scholars reconsider the interplay of macro- and micro-factors in shaping FLP outcomes, the role of child agency in actualizing FLPs, and the affective elements that shape parents’ understandings of language use.
This article investigates Chinese-Australian parents’ ideologies and visions about the maintenance of Chinese as a heritage language (CHL) as well as their struggles in using family language policy (FLP) as defence and coping mechanisms to address tensions associated with the transgenerational transmission of CHL. Language policy defined as an assemblage of ideologies, practices and management and parental agency understood as parents’ capacity to pursue their visions are deployed within Curdt-Christiansen’s dynamic model of FLP that accommodates a complex interplay of internal and external factors. The study focuses on 15 parents who were committed to and made agentive efforts to maintain CHL and transmit it to their next generations. Using interviews, parents’ visions based on their children’s future CHL proficiency and their agentive efforts around CHL transmission were examined. The findings revealed sharp contrasts between parents’ future visions and their lived experiences of struggles at present. Anticipating the eventual loss of CHL among their future generations in the Australian context, the parents struggled to negotiate FLP to combat the foreseeable language shift and defend their visions. The findings have implications for individuals, families, communities, institutions, and policies concerning the maintenance of heritage languages in Australia and globally.
This article examines the affective dimension of the linguistic repertoire of multilingual families. Specifically, resulting from a three-year ethnographic project in Norway, this study sets out to better understand the role of affect in parent–child interactions as members of two Brazilian-Norwegian families draw on their multilingual linguistic repertoires in the ongoing construction of their familial ties. A discursive analytical approach was employed to examine audio-recordings made by one of the parents of each family (i.e. around 15 h of recordings in total). The analysis demonstrates how certain linguistic features (i.e. terms of endearment and the ‘you are ... ’-format), combined with the use of the participants’ multilingual repertoire, accomplish three interrelated social actions; they: (i) convey parental value-laden aspirations of child-rearing, (ii) position children according to expected social roles, and (iii) forge parent–child ties. These findings are supplemented with interview data, which serve to illustrate the role of home-external contexts in encouraging the parents to use Portuguese with their children in the home. Focusing on the affective dimension of parent–child interactions as they draw on their multilingual repertoires to construct familial bonds contributes to an underexplored area in family multilingualism studies.
Documenting how in the course of acquiring language children become speakers and members of communities, The Handbook of Language Socialization is a unique reference work for an emerging and fast-moving field. Spans the fields of anthropology, education, applied linguistics, and human development. Includes the latest developments in second and heritage language socialization, and literary and media socialization. Discusses socialization across the entire life span and across institutional settings, including families, schools, work places, and churches. Explores data from a multitude of cultures from around the world.
The present study explores language socialization patterns in a Persian-Kurdish family in Sweden and examines how “one-parent, one-language” family language policies are instantiated and negotiated in parent–child interactions. The data consist of video-recordings and ethnographic observations of family interactions, as well as interviews. Detailed interactional analysis is employed to investigate parental language maintenance efforts and the child’s agentive orientation in relation to the recurrent interactional practices through which parents attempt to enforce a monolingual, heritage language “context” for parent–child interaction. We examine the interactional trajectories that develop in parents’ requests for translation that target the focus child’s (a7-year-old girl’s) lexical mixings. These practices resembled formal language instruction: The parents suspended the ongoing conversational activity, requested that the child translate the problematic item, modeled and assessed her language use. The instructional exchanges were asymmetrically organized: the parents positioned themselves as “experts”, insisting on the child’s active participation, whereas the child’s (affectively aggravated) resistance was frequent, and the parents recurrently accommodated the child by terminating the language instruction. The study argues that an examination of children’s agency, and the social dynamics characterizing parental attempts to shape children’s heritage language use, can provide significant insights into the conditions for language maintenance
This study approaches switching in bilingual infants from a developmental perspective , using a micro-focus of conversation-a nalysis. Early switching data of two bilingual children (age 1;6 to 2;11) is analyzed in terms of pragmatic choices and constraints, and it is argued that, whilst some adult-like socially-determined switching could be observed at a very early age, the most frequently observed early switches were explained in terms of the child's psycho-social and linguistic development, in particular switching for emphasis and appeal and switching due to vocabulary gaps. The results are interpreted within a developmental perspective on codeswitching, and as such bridge an identified gap in the field of infant bilingualism between structural analyses of language alternations in bilingual infants on the one hand, and switching in older bilinguals on the other.
This paper examines the phenomenon of ergativity and its relation to patterns of surface grammar and information flow in discourse. Corresponding to the grammatical pattern of ergativity (exemplified in the A vs. S/O distribution of verbal cross-referencing morphology in Sacapultec Maya) there is an isomorphic pattern of information flow: information distribution among argument positions in clauses of spoken discourse is not random, but grammatically skewed toward an ergative pattern. Arguments comprising new information appear preferentially in the S or O roles, but not in the A role-which leads to formulation of a Given A Constraint. Evidence from other languages suggests that the ergative patterning of discourse extends beyond the ergative type to encompass accusative languages as well. Given the linguistic consequences of a type-independent Preferred Argument Structure, it is argued that language-internal phenomena as fundamental as the structuring of grammatical relations can be shaped by forces arising out of discourse, viewed as the aggregate of instances of language use.
Challenges of heritage language maintenance and benefi ts of bilingualism have been widely acknowledged. Heritage language maintenance research most oft en focuses on heritage languages in English-dominant societies. Th is paper presents a case study on family language policy experiences, strategies, and outcomes led by an American-born mother in her eff ort to maintain and promote English, her heritage language, within the home in the Hebrew-dominant environment in Israel.
This sociolinguistic micro-level study examines experiences of five Egyptian families, living in Durham, UK, who are trying to transmit Egyptian Arabic to their children. It provides a qualitative description on the process of Egyptian Arabic maintenance and transmission at the family level. Based on in-depth semi-structured interviews and participant observation, the study explores: how these language-minority families describe barriers to and supports for passing on Egyptian Arabic to their children; the language decisions they make to fulfill their roles; how such decisions are linked to their identity as Egyptians living in an English-dominant country; and the factors that helps their children to preserve Egyptian Arabic. The findings show that the participants regard Egyptian Arabic as a cultural core value that is linked with other core values as religion and identity. Consequently, a number of language-related decisions have been made and implemented to improve their children's Egyptian Arabic spoken proficiency level.
Harmonious bilingual development is the experience of well-being in a language contact situation involving young children and their families. While so far no systematic ethnographic studies of harmonious bilingual development exist, the following constituting elements are proposed: the use of parent–child conversations employing basically a single language, children’s active use of two languages rather than just one, and children’s more or less equal proficiency in each language. The factors contributing to these elements most likely are positive attitudes to early bilingualism, discourse socialization patterns and the frequency with which children hear each language.
While some research investigating these factors has been initiated, a new theory- and practice-oriented research focus on harmonious bilingual development framed within the larger context of well-being research is needed for a deeper understanding of young children and their families’ positive experience with bilingual development and the factors that may foster it.
Bidirectional models of interpersonal influence in parent—child relationships underscore the influence of children on their parents. Following a social constructionist perspective, the present study uses Q methodology to explore meanings and beliefs concerning children's influence among members of the Belgian-Flemish culture. Children and adults each performed the Q-sorting tasks that were analysed separately. Q-factor analysis of the children-sorts produced five factors and six factors for the adults. These analyses revealed that a central understanding of children's influence for children and adults is the recognition of the full person and partnership of the child in the relationship. Children's responses focus on the responsiveness of the parents and stress that parents learn from them. Adults' responses emphasize the massiveness of children's influence on the parents' personal development.
This study suggests that political order within families is manifested in and constructed through family narrative activity. The study is based on a corpus of 100 family dinner narratives of two-parent American families. Our findings show that narrative roles (introducer, protagonist, primary recipient, problematizer of protagonists or other co-narrators, problematizee) differ in the control they exert and in their distribution across family members. Parents, especially mothers, tended to introduce narratives, thereby controlling narrative topic and timing. Children were the most frequent protagonists yet they rarely introduced narratives about themselves and were rarely ratified as preferred recipients of others' narratives. Fathers tended to be primary recipients, often orchestrated through mothers' introductions. Not coincidentally, fathers were also the dominant problematizers of family-member protagonists/co-narrators, assuming a panopticon-like role. Children sometimes resisted family narrative activity, suggesting a certain awareness of the politics of narrative and its potential to expose them as objects of scrutiny.
While continuing to uphold the major aims set out in the first generation of language socialization studies, recent research examines the particularities of language socialization processes as they unfold in institutional contexts and in a wide variety of linguistically and culturally heterogeneous settings characterized by bilingualism, multilingualism, code-switching, language shift, syncretism, and other phenomena associated with contact between languages and cultures. Meanwhile new areas of analytic focus such as morality, narrative, and ideologies of language have proven highly productive. In the two decades since its earliest formulation, the language socialization paradigm has proven coherent and flexible enough not merely to endure, but to adapt, to rise to these new theoretical and methodological challenges, and to grow. The sources and directions of that growth are the focus of this review.
Using a Peircean theory of meaning, agency may be theorized in terms of flexibility and accountability, on the one hand, and knowledge and power, on the other. In this theory, residential agency, which is closest to notions such as "power" and "choice," is the degree to which one can control the expression of a sign, compose a sign-object relation, and commit to an interpretant of this sign- object relation. Representational agency, which is closest to notions such as "knowledge" and "con- sciousness," is the degree to which one can thematize a process, characterize a feature of this theme, and reason with this theme-character relation. Agency, as a kind of social and semiotic facility, is thereby theorized as multidimensional, graduated, and distributed. This theory allows one to analyze, as concomitant phenomena, the longue duree processes that underlie relatively perduring institutions and the real-time practices that support relatively fleeting interactions. Finally, it highlights the theoretical and empirical terrain shared by linguistic anthropology, science and technology studies, political economy, and critical theory.
Starting from a view of socialization as a bidirectional process, the paper contributes to the field of language socialization in detailing how conversational interaction provides tools for parents and children to collaboratively construe a sense of moral meaning and social order. The paper illustrates both the agentive participation of Italian children in dialogue on normative behavior and ways that their discursive contributions shape the structure and thematic content of parental talk that ensues. Parental responses to children’s normative transgressions socialize them also into the language of transgression. The children we studied supply and elicit accounts from others that attempt to justify or explain transgression.
The family unit and home domain have been and remain important in heritage language maintenance efforts. There are complex relationships between parental language attitudes, their application in everyday language management activities and the children's knowledge of home language vocabulary. The present large-scale study examined the family policy factors affecting first language (L1) maintenance among second generation Russian Á Jewish immigrants in Israel in light of Spolsky's (2004) model of language policy. Participants in the study were 70 Russian Á Hebrew-speaking children with a mean age of 7,2 (years, months). After investigating the factors that influence Russian vocabulary knowledge, I constructed a composite measure of Russian lexical knowledge. In addition, structured questionnaires for parents and children were developed to collect data on language policy at home. The results attest to the crucial role of teaching literate L1 in both family and non-formal educational settings and to the children's positive approach toward home language acquisition. A range of non-linguistic factors (demographic, social and cultural) creates a favourable background for the survival of the heritage language among emigrants. At the same time, the data reveal inconsistencies in language policy at home and a tendency toward the co-existence of the first and second languages.
IntroductionToward a Definition of AgencyTwo Dimensions of AgencyEncoding of AgencyMitigation of AgencyConclusions
This paper reports a study examining the relationship between family relations and language maintenance, and the implications
of this association for language educational policy. We explored patterns of language maintenance and perceptions of family
relations among 180 adolescents from families that immigrated to Israel from the former USSR. Findings indicate that language
maintenance in the second generation is associated with harmonious family relations and so with the immigrants’ well-being.
There was no impact of family type on linguistic patterns or on family relations. The findings are discussed in light of their
implications for language policy, suggesting an additional and significant reason for promoting language maintenance among
second-generation immigrants.
To understand the role of language in public life and the social process in general, we need first a closer understanding of how linguistic knowledge and social factors interact in discourse interpretation. This volume is a major advance towards that understanding. Professor Gumperz here synthesizes fundamental research on communication from a wide variety of disciplines - linguistics, sociolinguistics, anthropology and non-verbal communication - and develops an original and broadly based theory of conversational inference which shows how verbal communication can serve either between individuals of different social and ethnic backgrounds. The urgent need to overcome such barriers to effective communication is also a central concern of the book. Examples of conversational exchanges as well as of longer encounters, recorded in the urban United States, village Austria, South Asia and Britain, and analyzed to illustrate all aspects of the analytical approach, and to show how subconscious cultural presuppositions can damagingly affect interpretation of intent and judgement of interspeaker attitude. The volume will be of central interest to anyone concerned with communication, whether from a more academic viewpoint or as a professional working, for example, in the fields of interethnic or industrial relations.
How do bilingual brothers and sisters talk to each other? Sibling language use is an uncharted area in studies of bilingualism. From a perspective of independent researcher and parent of three bilingual children Suzanne Barron-Hauwaert discusses the issues of a growing bilingual or multilingual family. What happens when there are two or more children at different stages of language development? Do all the siblings speak the same languages? Which language(s) do the siblings prefer to speak together? Could one child refuse to speak one language while another child is fluently bilingual? How do the factors of birth order, personality or family size interact in language production? With data from over 100 international families this book investigates the reality of family life with two or more children and languages.
Cambridge Core - Semantics and Pragmatics - Pragmatics - by Stephen C. Levinson
This book explores the linguistic and cultural identities of Sicilians in Australia, through conversations gathered within the family, survey data and interviews. The study is placed in the context of the family migrant experience and the shifting attitudes towards immigrant languages in Australia.
Book synopsis: Sociocultural linguistics has long conceived of languages as well-bounded, separate codes. But the increasing diversity of languages encountered by most people in their daily lives challenges this conception. Because globalization has accelerated population flows, cities are now sites of encounter for groups that are highly diverse in terms of origins, cultural practices, and languages. Further, new media technologies invent communicative genres, foster hybrid semiotic practices, and spread diversity as they intensify contact and exchange between peoples who often are spatially removed and culturally different from each other. Diversity—even super-diversity—is now the norm. In response, recent scholarship complicates traditional associations between languages and social identities, emphasizing the connectedness of communicative events and practices at different scales and the embedding of languages within new physical landscapes and mediated practices. This volume takes stock of the increasing diversity of linguistic phenomena and faces the theoretical-methodological challenges that accounting for such phenomena pose to socio-cultural linguistics. This book stages the debate on super-diversity that will be sure to interest societal linguists and serves as an invaluable reference for academic libraries specializing in the linguistics field.
IntroductionRepetition versus VariationImprovisation as Flexibility in Execution of TasksPlay and Other Creative BehaviorsThe Ubiquity of ImprovisationImprovisation as Patterned BehaviorThe Evaluation and Sanctioning of ImprovisationConclusions
References
Purpose – The overall aim of the chapter is to explore how disputes between family members are accomplished and how the actions of copresent members (the mother and elder brother) contribute to the unfolding dispute.
Methodology – Selected from video recordings of the family breakfast, three extended sequences of mealtime talk were transcribed using the Jeffersonian system and analyzed using the analytic resources of conversation analysis and ethnomethodology.
Findings – This analysis establishes how both the mother and elder sibling intervene in matters to do with who has access to some bookclub brochures. Appeals to rules such as “you’ve got to share” are used by the mother to manage the local issue of the dispute. In intervening to resolve and settle disputes, the mother makes visible particular moral orders, such as sharing. Intervention is accomplished through directions, increasing physical proximity to the dispute, topic shift, and physical intervention in the dispute, such as gently removing a child's hand from the brochures. Justifications for sharing proffered by the mother that work to establish an alignment with one child are challenged by the other sibling, thus contributing to an escalation of the dispute. Also explicated is how an older sibling buys into the dispute, making visible his view about how sharing is accomplished; that is, you “just cope with it.”
Practical implications – This chapter has some practical implications for adults who interact with children (teachers, parents) highlighting that in some way, adults, through their actions may contribute to the continuation of a dispute and second, how adult attempts to settle or end a dispute may result only in a temporary settlement rather than a cessation of the dispute.
Value of chapter – The chapter contributes understandings about how family members manage disputes interactionally and how social and moral orders are accomplished during family mealtime. Additionally, it shows how some disputes are temporarily settled and connected across a section of action rather than ended.
The theoretical framework of transnationalism has become more prominent within migration studies, examining how (im)migrants maintain connections with communities in their homeland (Sánchez, P. 2007a. “Cultural Authenticity and Transnational Latina Youth: Constructing a Meta-narrative Across Borders.” Linguistics and Education 18: 258–282). Children's identities are also affected by maintaining ties to their parents’ homeland through language. In California, a group of (im)migrants from Mexico, of Zapotec-speaking backgrounds, were among the families who wanted their children to maintain their Spanish language by enrolling in a dual immersion school. Although California has exhibited anti-immigrant rhetoric and legislated against bilingual education, some programs supporting heritage language maintenance continue to exist. This article presents interview data from 10 students who attended this school and their parents. Students maintained transnational and intergenerational ties to their families and communities in both Mexico and southern California through the maintenance of Spanish, but a subset of students who spoke Zapoteco as a heritage language also valued this language and used it as social capital.
List of photographs Foreword by Shirley Brice Heath Acknowledgements 1. To know a language 2. Methodology 3. Introduction to Samoan language usage: grammar and register 4. The social contexts of childhood: village and household organisation 5. Ergative case marking: variation and acquisition 6. Word-order strategies: the two-constituent bias 7. Clarification 8. Affect, social control and the Samoan child 9. The linguistic expression of affect 10. Literacy instruction in a Samoan village 11. Language as a symbol and tool Appendix I. Transcription conventions Appendix II. Canonical transitive verb types in children's speech References Index.
At the family dinner table, the working lives of employed adults often enter the home through conversational narratives about work experiences. Rather than offering only finished, coherent accounts, however, many adults speculate about upcoming work activities and potential outcomes, decisions to be made, and possible repercussions of resolutions to past or ongoing problems. Drawing on a corpus of videotaped dinnertime interaction, this essay investigates such future-oriented work narratives among 16 middle-class dual-earner families in Los Angeles, California. The essay first reviews recent studies of narrative as social practice in everyday interaction that have problematized a focus on completed past-tense stories in canonical approaches to narrative. It then develops a language socialization perspective, which asserts that children and other novices acquire linguistic practices and cultural ideologies (like those about work) through observation of and participation in social interactions with others around them. The frequency and temporality of spontaneous talk about paid work among the observed families is analyzed with attention to children's participation in work discourse. A distinction is developed between past-tense narratives that recount completed or resolved experiences and those that remain unresolved and oriented toward the future. The essay concludes with a discussion of the relevance of such future projection for narrative study.
This review describes and critiques some of the many ways agency has been conceptualized in the academy over the past few decades, focusing in particular on practice theorists such as Giddens, Bourdieu, de Certeau, Sahlins, and Ortner. For scholars interested in agency, it demonstrates the importance of looking closely at language and argues that the issues surrounding linguistic form and agency are relevant to anthropologists with widely divergent research agendas. Linguistic anthropologists have made significant contributions to the understanding of agency as it emerges in discourse, and the final sections of this essay describe some of the most promising research in the study of language and gender, literacy practices, and the dialogic construction of meaning and agency.
This qualitative study investigates attitudes toward heritage language (HL) maintenance among Chinese immigrant parents and their second-generation children. Specific attention is given to exploring (1) what attitudes are held by the Chinese parents and children toward Chinese language maintenance in the USA, (2) what efforts are engaged in by the Chinese parents in promoting children's HL maintenance, and how do the second-generation children respond to these efforts? Data for this paper are drawn from participant observations in two Chinese local communities in Philadelphia and ethnographic interviews with 18 Chinese immigrant families in the communities. Analysis of the data indicates that while the Chinese parents value their HL as a resource and take positive actions to maintain the HL in the next generation, the children fail to see the relevance of HL learning in their life and often resist parents' efforts in HL maintenance. The results of the study suggest that American mainstream schools should work together with immigrant parents and HL schools to incorporate children's HL in the official school curriculum and create a supportive environment for HL learning.
This collection of papers explores language socialization from very early childhood through adulthood. After "Introduction: Toward a Dynamic Model of Language Socialization" (Robert Bayley and Sandra R. Schecter), there are 16 papers in 4 parts. Part 1, "Language Socialization at Home," includes: (1) "Transforming Perspectives on Bilingual Language Socialization" (Lucinda Pease-Alvarez); (2) "Weaving Languages Together: Family Language Policy and Gender Socialization in Bilingual Aymara Households" (Aurolyn Luykx); (3) "Collaborative Literacy in a Mexican Immigrant Household: The Role of Sibling Mediators in the Socialization of Pre-School Learners" (Maria de la Piedra and Harriett D. Romo); and (4) "Growing Up Trilingual in Montreal: Perceptions of College Students" (Patricia Lamarre and Josefina Rossell Paredes). Part 2, "Language Socialization at School," includes: (5) "Representational Practices and Multi-Modal Communication in U.S. High Schools: Implications for Adolescent Immigrants" (Linda Harklau); (6) "Engaging in an Authentic Science Project: Appropriating, Resisting, and Denying 'Scientific' Identities" (KimMarie Cole and Jane Zuengler); (7) "Interrupted by Silences: The Contemporary Education of Hong Kong-Born Chinese Canadians" (Gordon Pon, Tara Goldstein, and Sandra R. Schecter); (8) "Novices and Their Speech Roles in Chinese Heritage Language Classes" (Agnes Weiyun He); and (9) "Language Socialization and Dys-Socialization in a South Indian College" (Dwight Atkinson). Part 3, "Language Socialization in Bilingual and Multilingual Societies," includes: (10) "Language Socialization and Second Language Acquisition in a Multilingual Arctic Quebec Community" (Donna Patrick); (11) "Growing a 'Banyavirag' (Rock Crystal) on Barren Soil: Forming a Hungarian Identity in Eastern Slovakia through Joint (Inter)action" (Juliet Langman); (12) "Multiliteracies in Springvale: Negotiating Language, Culture and Identity in Suburban Melbourne" (Heather Lotherington); and (13) "Terms of Desire: Are There Lesbians in Egypt?" (Didi Khayatt). Part 4, "Language Socialization in the Workplace," includes: (14) "Language Dynamics in the Bi- and Multilingual Workplace" (Christopher McAll); (15) "Back to School: Learning Practices in a Job Retraining Community" (Jill Sinclair Bell); and (16) "Bilingualism and Standardization in a Canadian Call Center: Challenges for a Linguistic Minority Community" (Sylvie Roy). (Contains approximately 475 references.) (SM)
The theory and practice of assistance to speech communities whose native languages are threatened are examined. The discussion focuses on why most efforts to reverse language shift are unsuccessful or even harmful, diagnosing difficulties and prescribing alternatives based on a combination of ethnolinguistic, sociocultural, and econotechnical considerations. The first section looks at reasons for trying to reverse language shift, whether it is possible, where and why shift occurs, and how it can be reversed. A typology of disadvantaged languages and ameliorative priorities is presented. The second section contains a number of case studies from different continents, including those of: Irish; Basque; Frisian; Navajo, Spanish, and Yiddish (secular and ultra-orthodox) in America; Maori in New Zealand; Australian aboriginal and immigrant languages, Modern Hebrew and French in Quebec; Catalan in Spain; and the unique situation of non-transmission of "additional" (parents' second) languages. The third section addresses the related issues of language planning for reversal of language shift, dialect standards and corpus planning, intergenerational transmission of "additional" languages, and limitations on school effectiveness in connection with native language transmission. Chapters include bibliographies. (MSE)
IntroductionPractices of RepetitionRepetition in ContextConclusions
References
This paper aims to investigate the complex relationship between social interaction and socio-cultural values. Samples of conflict talk between parents and children in the Chinese diasporic families in the UK are examined. Through a detailed analysis of the sequential organization of codeswitching as well as what is termed as “talk about social and cultural practice”, we aim to demonstrate how conflicts in values and identities are negotiated, mediated and managed in bilingual interaction and the emergent nature of new family dynamics and values. The study provides new insights into the (changes of) socio-cultural values in diaspora and migrant communities and contributes to the development of a general theory of the pragmatics of bilingual codeswitching.