https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9065-3539
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ABSTRACT
Whereas early childhood professionals can play a pivotal role in fostering young children’s home language development, little is known about what determines the kind of multilingual parenting advice they offer families. The objective of this study was to deconstruct the processes culminating in two types of such recommendations: advice highlighting the usage of the home language in the family domain versus advice to include the dominant language. Different theories, including Spolsky’s insights on language policy and Ricento and Hornberger’s Onion model, were used to investigate several aspects influencing professionals’ interpersonal language policy. Logistic regression analyses were performed on a sample of 305 professionals employed at Flemish infant welfare clinics in Belgium. Our findings indicate that advice highlighting the home language is connected to manifold variables on the national, institutional, and interpersonal language policy levels. However, only few variables at the interpersonal and institutional level were associated with advice to include the dominant language. Hence, future research could further investigate the hitherto unidentified mechanisms underlying this type of advice. Overall, our results show the complex and nuanced ways in which the national, institutional, and interpersonal levels intersect in shaping different types of multilingual advice.
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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.
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.
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.