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Pride, prejudice and pragmatism: family language policies in the UK
In this study, we examine how mobility and on-going changes in sociocultural contexts impact family language policy (FLP) in the UK. Using a questionnaire and involving 470 transnational families across the UK, our study provides a descriptive analysis of different family language practices in England and establishes how attitudes influence the different types of FLP in these families. Complementing the descriptive analysis, we use interview data to understand the driving forces behind the different types of language practices and language management activities, and explore how ideological constructs of ‘pride’, ‘prejudice’ and ‘pragmatism’ are directly related to negative or positive attitudes towards the development of children’s heritage language. The findings indicate that migration trajectories, social values, raciolinguistic policing in schools, and linguistic loyalty have shaped family decisions about what languages to keep and what languages to let go. Our paper responds to the linguistic and demographic changes in British society, and makes an important contribution to our knowledge about multilingual development of children in transnational families. Critically, this study shows that FLPs alone cannot save the minority languages; institutionally sanctioned language practices and ideologies have to make a move from limiting the use of these languages in educational contexts to legitimising them as what they are: linguistic resources and languages of pride.
Journal Article
Mindsets Matter for Linguistic Minority Students: Growth Mindsets Foster Greater Perceived Proficiency, Especially for Newcomers
Growth language mindsets (i.e., beliefs that language ability can be improved) are found to sustain learners' motivation and resilience in challenging situations. Considering that migrants who are speakers of languages other than the dominant ones often face challenging daily communications, the authors examined important but understudied questions of 'how' and 'when' growth language mindsets predict migrants' language experiences, including language anxiety, language use, and perceived English proficiency. In 3 studies, the authors surveyed 2,163 foreign-born university students in Canada who indicated English as their second language. It was found that growth language mindsets positively predicted self-assessed English proficiency, even 4 months after the initial assessment of mindsets. Answering 'how,' the authors found that migrants with stronger growth mindsets were less anxious, were more likely to use English, and reported higher proficiency, even after accounting for baseline proficiency. Concerning 'when,' they found that mindsets have significant and moderate association with language use, anxiety, and perceived proficiency for only more recently arrived students (who lived in the receiving country for less than 7 years). Although newly arrived migrants are more anxious about using English and less likely to use English, they are resilient when they envision growth in their new language. Growth mindsets may help English as a second language (ESL) students thrive in intercultural communication and succeed in language development. (Verlag, adapt.).
Journal Article
Linguistic and Cultural Collaboration in Schools
This article extends the work of culturally sustaining pedagogy by moving towards the conceptualization of linguistic and cultural collaboration (LCC) in classrooms through reconciliation of majoritarian and minoritized language users. Whereas attention in mainstream educational research has been given to students’ cultures, this article underscores that explicit attention to diverse languages and language varieties is essential to reconfiguration of power relations in schools and reconciliation among culturally and linguistically minoritized and dominant groups. Drawing on scholarship regarding plurilingual and multilingual practice, the authors conceptualize LCC as both a process and a product that expands all students’ critical multilingual language awareness. They draw on an ongoing research-practice partnership (RPP) with a U.S. school district experiencing growing cultural and linguistic diversity. The article focuses on a single school to illustrate how LCC has been taken up as a whole-school approach to leveraging students’and families’cultural and linguistic resources as vital to learning and living together in a multicultural and multilingual world. After outlining development of the RPP following a social design–based methodology, the authors discuss how in practice reconciliation is forged as teachers, students, and their families engage in collaborative multilingual bookmaking. They focus on three aspects of reconciliation (collaboration, restoration, living together) that support students in becoming more language-aware and in moving towards multilingual activism.
Journal Article
Multilingualism, Translanguaging, and Minority Languages in SLA
The study of second language acquisition (SLA) has seen important developments in the last decades, including far‐reaching reflection processes that question its scope, method, and aims. One of the most influential articles was published by Firth and Wagner (1997) who highlighted the role of the social context. The Douglas Fir Group (DFG) article (2016) also highlights the role of the social context and proposes a new transdisciplinary framework for SLA in a multilingual world. In this commentary, we look at some of the ideas discussed in the DFG article as well as in the articles in this Special Issue regarding new perspectives and critical questions in SLA. Our ideas are obviously shaped by our own social context, which is European, and our type of multilingualism, which involves not only English but also minority languages.
Journal Article
Arabic and its alternatives : religious minorities and their languages in the emerging nation states of the Middle East (1920-1950)
\"Arabic and its Alternatives discusses the complicated relationships between language, religion and communal identities in the Middle East in the period following the First World War. This volume takes its starting point in the non-Arabic and non-Muslim communities, tracing their linguistic and literary practices as part of a number of interlinked processes, including that of religious modernization, of new types of communal identity politics and of socio-political engagement with the emerging nation states and their accompanying nationalisms. These twentieth-century developments are firmly rooted in literary and linguistic practices of the Ottoman period, but take new turns under influence of colonization and decolonization, showing the versatility and resilience as much as the vulnerability of these linguistic and religious minorities in the region. Contributors are Tijmen C. Baarda, Leyla Dakhli, Sasha R. Goldstein-Sabbah, Liora R. Halperin, Robert Isaf, Michiel Leezenberg, Merav Mack, Heleen Murre-van den Berg, Konstantinos Papastathis, Franck Salameh, Cyrus Schayegh, Emmanuel Szurek, Peter Wien\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
Educating Language Minority Students in South Korea: Multilingual Sustainability and Linguistic Human Rights
In the context of globalization, the landscape of language in Korea has changed dramatically in the last three decades because of the influx of marriage migrants and foreign workers. The growing number of immigrant and international marriages has led to the emergence of new linguistic minorities in Korea who have multicultural and multilingual backgrounds, and they challenge Korea’s long-lasting tradition of linguistic homogeneity and purity. Language related education for this newly emerging group of language minority students, whose number has increased dramatically since the late-1990s, has become a salient issue. This paper critically analyzes the current education policies and programs designed for the newly emerging group of language minority students, and examines the prospects for sustainable development of these students in Korea. In particular, it focuses on the underlying ideology of linguistic nationalism and assimilationist integration regime embedded in various education policy initiatives and reforms, which require language minority students to forgo their multilingual background and forcibly embrace linguistic homogeneity. The paper elaborates on alternative educational programs that could enable language minority students to achieve sustainable development and progress.
Journal Article