scholarly journals Language Maintenance in a Multilingual Family: Informal Heritage Language Lessons in Parent–Child Interactions

Multilingua ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 34 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Mina Kheirkhah ◽  
Asta Cekaite
Keyword(s):  
Heritage Language ◽  
Language Use ◽  
Social Dynamics ◽  
Language Maintenance ◽  
Language Instruction ◽  
Family Interactions ◽  
Parent Child Interactions ◽  
Interactional Analysis ◽  
Family Language ◽  
Parent Child

AbstractThe 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

Everyday updates: How parents ask about their young children’s lived experiences

2021 ◽  
pp. 026540752098236
Author(s):  
Darcey K. deSouza
Keyword(s):  
Young Children ◽  
Family Communication ◽  
Lived Experiences ◽  
Research Study ◽  
Family Interactions ◽  
Canadian English ◽  
Very Young Children ◽  
Parent Child Interactions ◽  
Parent Child

This research study explores how children respond to solicitations for updates about their (recent) experiences. Instances of parents soliciting updates from their children were collected from over 30 hours of video-recorded co-present family interactions from 20 different American and Canadian families with at least one child between the ages of 3 and 6. Previous research has documented that caregivers of very young children treat them as being able to disclose about events they have experienced (Kidwell, 2011). In building upon the literature on family communication and parent-child interactions as well as the literature on epistemics, this paper explores the concept of “talking about your day” in everyday co-present family interactions, showing three ways in which parents solicit updates from their children: through report solicitations, tracking inquiries, and asking the child to update someone else. Data are in American and Canadian English.

scholarly journals Factors Affecting Language Proficiency in Heritage Language: The Case of Young Russian Heritage Speakers in Spain

2021 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 303-329
Author(s):  
Tamara Vorobyeva ◽  
Aurora Bel
Keyword(s):  
Language Proficiency ◽  
Significant Relationship ◽  
Heritage Language ◽  
Language Use ◽  
Age Of Onset ◽  
The Other ◽  
Significant Variable ◽  
Heritage Speakers ◽  
Factors Affecting ◽  
Family Language

Abstract This study focuses on the issue of language proficiency attainment among young heritage speakers of Russian living in Spain and examines factors that have been claimed to promote heritage language proficiency, namely, age, gender, age of onset to L2, quantity of exposure and family language use. A group of 30 Russian-Spanish-Catalan trilingual children aged 7–11 participated in the study. In order to measure heritage language proficiency (L1 Russian), oral narratives were elicited. The results demonstrated a significant relationship between L1 proficiency and three sociolinguistic variables (age of onset to L2, quantity of exposure and family language use). Additionally, the multiply regression model demonstrated that the only significant variable affecting language proficiency was family language use and it accounted only for 33% of the variation of children’s language proficiency. The study raises the question about what are the other, yet unknown factors, which can affect heritage language proficiency.

scholarly journals Turkish Fathers' Language Use In The Context Of Toy Play

2016 ◽  
Vol 12 (8) ◽  
pp. 430 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ozge Cengiz ◽  
Hamide Cakir
Keyword(s):  
Socioeconomic Status ◽  
Language Use ◽  
Bloom's Taxonomy ◽  
Thinking Skills ◽  
Cognitive Domain ◽  
Low Ses ◽  
Parent Child Interactions ◽  
Bloom’S Taxonomy ◽  
Toy Play ◽  
Parent Child

Parent-child interactions and the characteristics of child-directed language have been related to children’s linguistic development. Studies on parent-child interactions have generally focused on mothers. There has been very little research on the language used by fathers in interactions with their children. This study addresses this gap by investigating the properties of Turkish paternal language use including their use of question types within the framework of Bloom’s Taxonomy of Cognitive Domain; that is, we try to explore to what extent fathers' language use differentiates depending on their socioeconomic status in terms of Bloom’s Taxonomy, thus which fathers help their children gain higher thinking skills before entering school. Bloom’s Taxonomy which is a model of classifying thinking according to six cognitive levels of complexity (remember, understand, apply, analyze, evaluate, create) is hierarchical; in that, each level is subsumed by the higher levels. In this cross-sectional study, high and low socioeconomic status (SES) fathers were taped in their homes with their preschoolers in the context of toy play. The results showed that both group of fathers produced the most utterances at the remember level. Both groups produced no utterance at the analyze level, and low SES fathers produced no utterance at the apply and create levels. High SES fathers asked open ended question at all levels except the analyze level, while low SES fathers asked open ended questions only at the remember and understand levels.

scholarly journals Pluricentrity, Multilingualism and Heterogeneity of the Learners’ Groups

2021 ◽  
Vol X (1) ◽  
pp. 25-46
Author(s):  
Ekaterina Protassova ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Special Needs ◽  
Language Learners ◽  
Heritage Language ◽  
Cultural Practices ◽  
Language Instruction ◽  
Language Teachers ◽  
Heritage Language Learners ◽  
Language Policies ◽  
Regular Classrooms ◽  
Family Language

Multilingualism, superdiversity, and the abundance of language contacts place new demands on language teachers, who must consider each student’s linguistic biography, family language policies, and cultural practices in order to keep up with their growth in a specific school vs. university subject. Many more languages are becoming pluricentric as they continue to be used in migrating populations. So, they decline or flourish in diaspora and introduce heritage language learners as people with special needs into regular classrooms. Using Russian as an example, the paper suggests methods for organizing language instruction of varied speakers and learners in a heterogeneous integrated university classroom.

scholarly journals Socialization of Language Through Family Language Policy: A Case Study

2014 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 53-66 ◽  
Author(s):  
Orly Kayam ◽  
Tijana Hirsch
Keyword(s):  
Language Policy ◽  
Heritage Language ◽  
Language Maintenance ◽  
Family Language Policy ◽  
Heritage Languages ◽  
Heritage Language Maintenance ◽  
Family Language ◽  
English Dominant

Abstract Challenges of heritage language maintenance and benefits of bilingualism have been widely acknowledged. Heritage language maintenance research most oft en focuses on heritage languages in English-dominant societies. This paper presents a case study on family language policy experiences, strategies, and outcomes led by an American-born mother in her effort to maintain and promote English, her heritage language, within the home in the Hebrew-dominant environment in Israel

scholarly journals The impact of religion on language maintenance and shift

2019 ◽  
Vol 49 (1) ◽  
pp. 31-59 ◽  
Author(s):  
Seong Lin Ding ◽  
Kim Leng Goh
Keyword(s):  
Heritage Language ◽  
Language Use ◽  
Language Maintenance ◽  
Language Shift ◽  
Religious Institutions ◽  
Religious Groups ◽  
Heritage Language Maintenance ◽  
Use Patterns ◽  
Language Maintenance And Shift ◽  
The Impact

ABSTRACTThis article explores religious impact on language maintenance and language shift in two Hakka communities in Malaysia. While research has shown a trend towards language shift in these communities, whether religious institutions can play a role in heritage language maintenance remained unclear. The key findings are as follows: (i) language use patterns differ among various religious groups; (ii) this difference is due mainly to religious practices, that is, whether a heritage language is used as the ‘language of religion’; and (iii) most religious institutions, except Taoist temples and Basel churches, seem to fuel shifting. However, the tendency to move towards the ‘bi-language of religion’ threatens even the efforts of Basel churches. The study indicates interesting possibilities regarding religious impact but also shows, paradoxically, that the priority of Hakka-based religious institutions is to promote their religions, not to sustain the threatened heritage language. (Language maintenance, language shift, religious impact, Hakka Chinese community)*

Influential factors in lexical richness of young heritage speakers’ family language: Iranians in New Zealand

2017 ◽  
Vol 23 (2) ◽  
pp. 381-399 ◽  
Author(s):  
Khadijeh Gharibi ◽  
Frank Boers
Keyword(s):  
New Zealand ◽  
Heritage Language ◽  
Language Use ◽  
Linguistic Variables ◽  
Parental Attitude ◽  
Heritage Speakers ◽  
Lexical Diversity ◽  
Heritage Language Acquisition ◽  
Lexical Richness ◽  
Family Language

Aims and objectives: This study investigates the extent to which young heritage speakers’ oral narratives in their first language (L1) differ from monolinguals’ narratives with regard to lexical richness (lexical diversity and lexical sophistication). It also explores which demographic factors (age, age at emigration and length of emigration) and/or socio-linguistic factors (frequency of heritage language use and parental attitudes toward heritage language maintenance) account for the differences. Data and analysis: The participants were a group of 25 young speakers of Persian as a heritage language, who were either born in or emigrated to New Zealand, and a group of 25 monolingual counterparts in Iran. Demographic information about the heritage speakers as well as information about parental attitude and practices regarding heritage language acquisition and maintenance were collected through semi-structured interviews with their parents. A film-retelling task was used to elicit the oral narratives, and these were analyzed for lexical diversity (by means of the Measure of Textual Lexical Diversity) and for lexical sophistication (by counting the incidence of low-frequency words). Findings and conclusion: As expected, the monolinguals’ narratives tended to manifest greater lexical richness than the heritage speakers’, especially according to the measure of lexical sophistication. Against expectation, frequency of heritage language use and parental attitude toward heritage language acquisition and maintenance were not found to be significant predictors of the young heritage speakers’ results. For the heritage speakers who were born in New Zealand, the results were predicted best by their age, while for those who arrived in New Zealand at a later age, the best predictors were both their age and how old they were at the time of emigration. This suggests that the demographic factors overrode the potential influence of the socio-linguistic variables examined. Originality: This study sheds light on (factors that contribute to) young heritage speakers’ L1 lexical competence, a topic that has hitherto been under-investigated. Significance and implications: A major implication of this study is showing the association of age and heritage speakers’ lexical richness. Although the statistical analyses did not show the effect of socio-linguistic variables, this finding indirectly supports the effect of parental input on heritage language proficiency in young bilinguals. Limitations: Limitations of the study include the relatively small number of participants, the use of only one task to elicit speech samples and the reliance on parents’ self-reported family language habits.

Speaking in (Whose) Tongue

2014 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 22-49 ◽  
Author(s):  
Wai Fong Chiang
Keyword(s):  
Heritage Language ◽  
Language Use ◽  
Language Maintenance ◽  
Meaning Making ◽  
Ethnographic Study ◽  
National Language ◽  
Religious Activities ◽  
Heritage Languages ◽  
Religious Conversions ◽  
Private And Public

This article discusses the intricate religio-linguistic links in multiethnic, multi-religion and multi-lingual Singapore, and looks at how language use in religious activities may affect language maintenance. As an ethnographic study, it examines heritage language use in both private and public domains of traditional religious events, in addition to discussing the implications that meaning-making processes involved in religious conversions in multi-faith families have for heritage language maintenance. The study also reveals the family institution as a stronghold where national language policy does not fully penetrate, and argues that the vitality of heritage language may depend on how successfully cultural and religious practices continue to be performed in the heritage languages.

scholarly journals The Second Generation: Heritage Language Maintenance – Native English Speakers Living in Israel – Case Study No. 3

2014 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 18
Author(s):  
Orly Kayam
Keyword(s):  
Heritage Language ◽  
Language Maintenance ◽  
Native English Speakers ◽  
English Speakers ◽  
Heritage Language Maintenance ◽  
The Family ◽  
Two Generations ◽  
Family Language ◽  
English Speaking

Heritage language maintenance faces additional challenges when native English speakers intermarry with partners from the host society. This paper, the third in a series, focuses on the family language policies, or lack thereof, of two generations of English speaking women married to Hebrew speaking Israeli men.

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