Anticipating expectations. Family language policy and its orientation to the school system

ABSTRACT

Family Language Policy never takes place only in private but is embedded in larger discourses in society or rather in several societies to which the multilingual family is linked. One main point of contact of families and discourses on language is the education system. Previous research has shown that bilingual families orient towards teachers for advice on their language policies and tend to adopt the schools’ view on languages. This especially applies to families, in which three or more languages are spoken. In this article, I will present the results from a case study with two highly multilingual families in Germany and the parents’ orientation to the education system. Findings show that in the case of the two families, teachers do not have extensive direct influence. Instead, the main impact that the education system has on the families’ language policy is indirect by conveying and enforcing mainstream language ideologies and supporting high prestige languages such as English and French, while the parents constantly try to anticipate potential expectations by stakeholders in the education system.

KEYWORDS:

• family language policy
• education policy
• language ideologies
• social worlds theory
• multilingual families

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 I use the term ‘language’ here in the sense the families in this studies refer to certain varieties.

2 Following Hua and Wei (2016), I use the term transnational instead of migrant to indicate the families’ mobility and their cultural, affective and digital interconnectedness across borders.

3 The data I use here are part of my longitudinal study on family language policies in times of transition in linguistically diverse transnational families.

4 For the ideal of the native speaker in the context of migration see for example Khakpour (2016).

5 All names are pseudonyms. As the specific family and language constellations might give hints to the persons identities, I do not reveal further information such as exact places and times to protect their anonymity.

6 Due to privacy reasons, full transcripts can not be made available. Parts of the transcript are available on request from the corresponding author [S.B.]. Due to the nature of this research, participants of this study did not agree for their data to be shared publicly, so supporting data is not available.

7 Transcription of data is a first step into interpretation. To reduce unreflected interpretations, in the transcripts, all words are written in lower case letters, punctuation and apostrophes are not used.

8 For the use of the Douglas Fir model of second language acquisition with language ideologies on a meso level permeating FLP on all levels see Higgins (2018).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the research funding programme of the German Society for Foreign Language Research (DGFF) and the Bielefeld Young Researchers’ Fund.