Order in the chaos. Nurses’ perceptions of multilingual families in a society marked by a monoglossic ideology

ABSTRACT

This paper explores the connection between nurses’ multilingual beliefs and their advice on multilingual parenting to families with young children. Data was gathered through video-stimulated reflection dialogues with 11 nurses employed at infant welfare clinics in Belgium. Our analysis disclosed two salient counter topics regarding participants’ multilingual beliefs: order versus chaos. The latter refers to nurses’ view of multilingualism as a linguistic imbroglio. By ‘order’, we understand the benefits of multilingualism for cognitive and emotional development, provided that the multilingual environment is strictly regulated, particularly through the rigorous adherence to a consistent multilingual parenting strategy. Nurses’ panacea for this linguistic farrago is manifested in their advice to multilingual parents. Their recommendations are consistent: multilingualism can only be advantageous for children through a functional language segregation within spaces (i.e. home versus school) and individuals (i.e. One-Parent-One-Language). Nurses’ positive perspective on multilingualism thus hinges on the condition that home languages are neatly transmitted in which the acquisition of the school language will not be impeded. Our findings illuminate how nurses’ ostensible multilingual orientations are in fact coloured by a monoglossic ideology in which multilingualism is acknowledged from a monolingual vantage point: as the simple sum of separate languages.

KEYWORDS:

• Multilingualism
• early childhood
• home languages
• monolingual ideology
• multilingual parenting
• OPOL

Acknowledgements

The authors are very grateful for the inspiration, support and feedback from the members of the PRO-M team. This study would not have been possible without them.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Research Foundation Flanders: [Grant Number S006518N].

Notes on contributors

Victoria Van Oss

Victoria Van Oss is doing a PhD in Linguistics at Ghent University, Belgium. Her research interests include multilingualism, language policy and Early Childhood Care and Education (ECCE). She investigates the multilingual policy dynamics of health care professionals in relation to multilingual families.

Wendelien Vantieghem

Wendelien Vantieghem is Professor in ‘Language, diversity & learning' at the Faculty of Arts & Philosophy of Ghent University and director of the Research Centre for Diversity & Learning (CDL). Wendelien’s work researches diversity and inclusion from different angles, with a focus on the inequalities in the educational system in terms of gender, sexual orientation, multilingualism, SES, ethnicity and disability, and studies the attitudes and competences of teachers with regard to diversity.

Piet Van Avermaet

Piet Van Avermaet is professor in ‘Language and Diversity' in the Linguistics Department of Ghent University, Belgium, where he teaches ‘multicultural studies', ‘multilingualism in education', ‘language, diversity and globalisation' and ‘language policy’. He has a long-standing expertise in the field of diversity, language and social inequality in education.

Esli Struys

Esli Struys is a professor of Applied Linguistics at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel. He teaches courses in the BA and MA programmes of (applied) linguistics on multilingualism (from cognitive and educational perspectives), psycho- and neurolinguistics, and interpreting studies. His research foci include the cognitive processes involved in second language acquisition, bilingualism, and interpreting; and multilingual education in family and school settings.