Conference Agenda

Family Language Policy (FLP) focuses on explicit language planning within households, providing an integrated perspective on managing linguistic diversities, facilitating learning, and enabling negotiation within family contexts. One of the objectives of my doctoral research is to study FLP in Asian-Polish families residing in Poland with special focus on ideology and factors influencing parents' language choices at home and their preferred strategies to maintain bi/multilingualism. Mixed Asian-Polish families were specifically chosen since Asian (Chinese, Indian, Indonesian) and Polish linguistic practices, as well as attitudes towards multilingualism differ considerably. Furthermore, this specific combination of families in Poland remains largely unexplored. From this standpoint, the study aims to explore the cultural diversities regarding language use, attitudes towards multilingualism and heritage management within the household. To investigate this, 10 semi-structured interviews were conducted with 10 couples belonging to the target group. These families include 3 Chinese-Polish, 4 Indian-Polish and 3 Indonesian-Polish couples. The preliminary findings suggest that preferred language strategy of most families is one person one language (OPOL). However, some families enforce strict rules with one parent consistently using only one language, while others adopt a more flexible approach, allowing a parent to switch between two or more languages. Most family’s strategies evolved over time. Regarding language choice, Chinese & Indonesian parents prioritize the national language over regional languages or dialects, whereas Indian parents tend to transmit the language they grew up speaking at home. Parents tend to choose bigger languages hoping that the children will be able to communicate effectively with people around the country and with family ‘back home’.

References:

King, K., L. Fogle, & A. Logan-Terry. (2008) Family language policy. Language and Linguistics Compass. 2 (5), 907-922

Servaes, J. (2000) Reflections on the differences in Asian and European values and communication modes, Asian Journal of Communication, 10 (2), 53-70

For families who have moved internationally, questions persist about how parents can support their children’s L2 development. Past research has demonstrated the importance of quality, more than quantity, of the L2 input that children hear at home (Sorenson Duncan & Paradis, 2020). Quality of input has primarily been measured via parental L2 fluency, focusing on lexical and grammatical properties of the input (Chondrogianni & Marinis, 2011; Unsorth, 2019). There has been little consideration of other ways L2-speaking parents might provide rich L2 input to their children. Accordingly, this exploratory study examines the narrative elaboration styles of English-L2 speaking parents from immigrant backgrounds during a book-sharing interaction with their school-aged children.

Method: Parents and their children worked together to narrate, in English, the wordless picture book, Frog Where Are You? (Mercer, 1968). Joint storytelling interactions of the parent-child dyads were analyzed (Age [Mean] = 6;10 [years;months]). There were three groups: L1-Tamil speaking (n=4), L1-Arabic speaking (n=4) and L1-English-speaking (n=4). Interactions were coded for the narrative elaboration styles in terms of the social roles (audience or narrator) that parents and children adopted during the book-sharing interactions and the degree of detail that parents encouraged within the activity.

Results: The Arabic-L1 parents primarily acted as an audience for their children’s storytelling, whereas Tamil-L1 and English-L1 parents mostly co-narrated stories with their children. Arabic- and Tamil-speaking parents provided and requested more details to enhance their children’s stories than English-L1 parents.

Conclusion: These findings suggest that L2-speaking parents provide their children with rich L2 input that focuses on building higher level, narrative macrostructure skills. The book-sharing elaboration styles of these English-L2 parents illustrates possible areas of strength, not deficits, in supporting their children’s narrative development. Implications for home literacy and educational practices will be discussed.

Parents played a fundamental role in the development of bilingualism (e.g., French immersion programs in Canada) and became “agents of change” in the Canadian educational system in late 1960s. Since then, scholars in the field of language education and applied linguistics have been debating over the role and aims of language education advocating for more critical versions of bilingualism (Nieto, 2017; Cummins, 2000), multilingualism (Blackledge & Creese, 2010; Conteh & Meier, 2014; May, 2014; Meier, 2017), plurilingualism (Corcoran, 2019) and translanguaging (Garcia & Leiva, 2014; Li, 2023) to achieve socially just (language) education in the fight against systemic social inequality (Phillipson, 1992; Piller, 2016). In this paper, we employ Fraser’s (2005) social justice theory to analyse data from two independent studies, which include a meta-synthesis of empirical research on plurilingualism, expert interviews with four researchers studying plurilingual families, as well as interviews with 19 plurilingual immigrant parents. Findings show that language education research focuses mainly on school/ higher education domain rather than families raising plurilingual children. There is a lack of literature that examines language needs and social justice issues in relation to plurilingual families, who rely on community resources and their own means in their children’s language development. Not only parents need consistent support with their young children’s language development, but they also require abundant resources. Implications include: 1) on a policy level, there is a need for parent engagement policy with the focus on language and issues of social justice in the family (minority language rights); 2) in research, a multidisciplinary approach to addressing parents’ needs – a nexus of research on plurilingualism, parent involvement/engagement and family language policy (FLP) is required; 3) in practice, parents need educational and community resources for raising plurilingual toddlers and young children and it should be addressed as a systemic issue.

This study investigates the language policies Syrian refugee families follow to ensure heritage language maintenance (HLM). It also examines the multilingualism of the children and their parents’ attitudes towards HLM, focusing on the efforts paid to help children maintain Arabic as their heritage language (HL). The study aims to understand how Syrian families in Turkey construct, negotiate and implement their family language policies. Applying a qualitative approach, the study employed recorded semi-structured interviews with ten families and language portraits coloured by seven children. Language portraits are used as a tool to make children’s multilingualism visible by using colours to present their linguistic repertoire. Thematic analysis using a coding scheme was used to analyse the data from the semi-structured interviews. The findings reveal that the participants were very positive toward the HL and its maintenance. This paper argues that an essential step to maintaining HL should be establishing a safe environment, particularly in schools where HL speakers are protected from negative stereotypes.