Abstract:The critical role that family plays in Chinese Heritage Language learning (CHLL) has gained increasing attention from psychological, political and sociological scholarships. Guided by Bourdieu's notion of 'habitus', our mixed methods sociological study firstly addresses the need for quantitative evidence on the relationship between family support and Chinese Heritage Language (CHL) proficiency through a survey of 230 young Chinese Australians; and then explores the dynamics of family support of CHLL through mu… Show more
“…However, a wealth of qualitative studies shows that, if asked many years later, many adult HL speakers can still talk about their experiences with language in the family. Mu and Dooley () give an example by En‐ning, an Australian‐born 23‐year‐old woman, who as an adult was committed to the maintenance of her Mandarin HL but recounted: Basically until I was in Year Nine, I hated learning Chinese with a passion. I think it's probably the thing I hated the most in my life.…”
Section: Measuring Input and Exposure During Childhood: Possible In Hmentioning
Using the lenses of bilingualism and social justice, I reflect on relevant conceptual and methodological issues encountered in the study of the linguistic development of heritage language speakers. Themes examined include the early but varying timing of heritage language learning; the surrounding linguistic environment, including the link between parental input and linguistic outcomes and heritage language speakers’ bilingualism, multilingualism, and multilectalism; the framing of literacy in the minority language; and the unique and language‐shaping experience of minoritization, often an outcome of immigration. I argue that bilingualism is gradient and that better measurement of relevant variables—particularly those related to timing, input/exposure, and literacy—can invigorate the study of heritage language development and make new and more robust insights possible. I propose that heritage speakers and their languages must be understood as connected to minoritized communities and to the experience of inequitable multilingualism.
“…However, a wealth of qualitative studies shows that, if asked many years later, many adult HL speakers can still talk about their experiences with language in the family. Mu and Dooley () give an example by En‐ning, an Australian‐born 23‐year‐old woman, who as an adult was committed to the maintenance of her Mandarin HL but recounted: Basically until I was in Year Nine, I hated learning Chinese with a passion. I think it's probably the thing I hated the most in my life.…”
Section: Measuring Input and Exposure During Childhood: Possible In Hmentioning
Using the lenses of bilingualism and social justice, I reflect on relevant conceptual and methodological issues encountered in the study of the linguistic development of heritage language speakers. Themes examined include the early but varying timing of heritage language learning; the surrounding linguistic environment, including the link between parental input and linguistic outcomes and heritage language speakers’ bilingualism, multilingualism, and multilectalism; the framing of literacy in the minority language; and the unique and language‐shaping experience of minoritization, often an outcome of immigration. I argue that bilingualism is gradient and that better measurement of relevant variables—particularly those related to timing, input/exposure, and literacy—can invigorate the study of heritage language development and make new and more robust insights possible. I propose that heritage speakers and their languages must be understood as connected to minoritized communities and to the experience of inequitable multilingualism.
“…Their effortsor their parents' efforts, are less about 'becoming', and more about 'remaining' or 'returning'holding on to language, culture and customs. However, not all young heritage language learners appreciate the heritage language while they are learning it, and only consider it part of their identity retrospectively (Mu and Dooley 2015). Similarly, not all parents attach the same value to their own language, as evidenced by Gogonas and Kirsch (2016), whose participants had varying views regarding the maintenance of Greek within a trilingual (German, French, English) community context in Luxembourg.…”
Section: Heritage Language and Identitymentioning
confidence: 99%
“…Families utilise multiple resources to support heritage language development, including books (Cho and Krashen 2000), technology, such as television, DVDs, social networking (Szecsi and Szilagyi 2012), and community schools (Mu and Dooley 2015). The use of such resources both facilitates heritage language and literacy development, and, depending on the resources, helps to maintain links with family abroad, or assists in exploring cultural roots.…”
Section: Supporting Heritage Languages At Homementioning
Migration, global mobility and language learning are well established as independent and interrelated fields of study. With nearly one fifth of children in British primary schools classed as speakers of English as an Additional Language (EAL), there remains much to explore in the field of heritage language research. This paper reports on a survey of 212 heritage language families and ten family interviews with families who, though not living in isolation, are not part of large, well-established, local communities. The study reported here explores the families' attitudes towards heritage language development, and their efforts to maintain, support or develop the heritage language in their families. The paper puts forward an original framework which can be used to conceptualise how different uses and perceptions of the heritage language use may be linked to identity, and concludes with recommendations on how relatively isolated heritage language families and their small community networks may be better supported to enable children more fully to benefit from the advantages of their multilingual, multicultural capital.
“…Through negotiating emergent power relations within fields of domination and subordination, participants in the Forum bring " the undiscussed into discussion, the unformulated into formulation" (Bourdieu, 1977, p. 168). This is a sociological process of giving meaning to the previously unconscious dispositions -a phenomenon of 'habitus realisation' termed elsewhere (see Mu & Dooley, 2015;Mu & Strong, 2014).…”
Workshops and seminars are widely-used forms of doctoral training. However, research with a particular focus on these forms of doctoral training is sporadic in the literature. There is little, if any, such research concerning the international context and participants’ own voices. Mindful of these lacunae in the literature, we write the current paper as a group of participants in one of a series of doctoral forums co-organised annually by Beijing Normal University, China and Queensland University of Technology, Australia. The paper voices our own experiences of participation in the doctoral forum. Data were drawn from reflections, journals, and group discussions of all 12 student and academic participants. These qualitative data were organised and analysed through Bourdieu’s notions of capital and field. Findings indicate that the doctoral forum created enabling and challenging social fields where participants accrued and exchanged various forms of capital and negotiated transient and complex power relations. In this respect, the sociological framework used provides a distinctive theoretical tool to conceptualise and analyse the benefits and tensions of participation in the doctoral forum. Knowledge built and lessons learned through our paper will provide implications and recommendations for future planning of, and participation in, the doctoral forum series and similar activities elsewhere.
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