Positive and negative identity practices in heritage language education

ABSTRACT

Previous research into heritage language education has often focused on the connection between frequency of language use and heritage language speakers’ maintenance of their heritage language. This article expands this research into language use to additionally examine the ways in which heritage language speaking children are discursively positioned and how this positioning in turn contributes to their own positive and negative sociolinguistic identities. By having children narrate their creation of linguistic identity portraits [Krumm, H. J. (2001). Kinder und ihre Sprachen – lebendige Mehrsprachigkeit. Vienna: Eviva; (2010). Mehrsprachigkeit in sprachenporträts und sprachenbiographien von migrantinnen und migranten. Der Arbeitskreis Deutsch als Fremdsprache/Zweitsprache Rundbrief, 61, 16–24], they are able to present a holistic view of how they internalise their languages, thus creating a visual artefact that reveals their embodied ideologies and multilingual identity construction and negotiation. The results of this research show that the ideologies that the students are exposed to and the ways that they are positioned at school and at home affect their ongoing positive and negative multilingual identity development and negotiation.

KEYWORDS:

• Identity
• heritage language
• positioning
• multilingualism
• agency
• embodiment

Acknowledgements

My greatest thanks to the editors and reviewers of this article, as well as to Dr Natalie Schilling, Professor Alison Mackey, Dr Robert Podesva, Dr Laada Bilaniuk, and all of the wonderful participants in both the immediate and extended studies.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Due to space constraints, a review is presented of only key points regarding Russian, Ukrainian, and Latvian languages and ethnicities as related to the present article (see Seals, 2013, for a more thorough review).

2 All names are pseudonyms.

3 It is not uncommon to hear children in the United States conflate ‘American’ with ‘English’, as the different labels for languages and nationalities are often confusing for them.