‘I don’t want to see the foreign languages connected with our family disappear’: building and maintaining a multilingual family in the monolingual context of Vietnam

ABSTRACT

At a meso level, families have shown an imperative role in language policy in general and language education in particular. Predicated on the theories of family language policy and a transdisciplinary framework for L2 development, this study was undertaken to explore what three generations of a family did with the foreign languages they had learned in order to build and maintain their multilingual family. Data was gathered through informal interviews with the family members as well as field notes taken by the principal researcher during each visit to the family. The findings indicate that the members conformed to the prevalent discourses of L2 learning in mainstream education. They had specific strategies to sustain ‘old-fashioned’ L2s while simultaneously demonstrating their complete openness to emergent L2s. Of acute significance in research results is their interaction with L2s in multiple ways of learning and the system of values and ideologies they associated with the L2s in the monolingual context of Vietnam. The study offers implications for family stakeholders’ engagement in the policy, research, and practice of language education.

KEYWORDS:

• Family language policy
• meso level
• monolingual
• multilingual
• transdisciplinary framework

Disclosure statement

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

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Đại học Đà Nẵng [grant number B2020-DN05-31, B2020-DN05-31”].