This ethnographic study examines the family language policies that inform the daily language practices of five Chinese middle class focal families in Beijing, China. By exploring ethnographically their language ideologies,... [ view full abstract ]
This ethnographic study examines the family language policies that inform the daily language practices of five Chinese middle class focal families in Beijing, China. By exploring ethnographically their language ideologies, practices, and management strategies within the home, this study advances knowledge of the "informal," family-based ways in which parents’ beliefs about their own mother tongue influence children’s language acquisition and their social, cognitive, and emotional development. The goal is to understand the relationship of the Chinese parents’ language ideologies with their home language practices within the highly globalizing environment of an international city, Beijing. Particularly, this study seeks to find out what the daily language practices are within these home environments? How do the parents manage communicative interactions with each other and their child on a daily basis? What ideologies about their home language and English do the parents hold?
Given the rare access to the families' intimate domain of everyday language practices at home, this study shows that in these families, the parents use Mandarin Chinese as the home language because it is the mother tongue/official language of the country. English learning activities are predictable and observable. The parents make explicit rules and use clear instructions to facilitate their children’s English learning at home.
Building on a growing body of research on family language policy, the study promises to further our understanding of the ways in which parents’ beliefs about their mother language affect which language their children use in daily interactions, and whether they embrace or resist the influence of the global language – English – in the family domain. This study therefore fills a void in the educational linguistics scholarship on bridging the most intimate familial domain of language policy and the larger impact of informal and formal language policies that privilege English. This language choice within the home among family members will influence the children, who were born and raised in an international city and a highly globalizing environment, in their social, cognitive, and emotional development, as well as the cultural heritage maintenance within the home milieu in the post-industrial era.
