Family language policy in mixed-language families: an exploratory study of online parental discourses

Kostoulas, Achilleas; Motsiou, Eleni

doi:10.1080/13670050.2020.1715915

Cited by 11 publications

(7 citation statements)

References 44 publications

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“…This can be attributed to the fact that Albanian language maintenance was not of interest for many of the families of those children, due to the low prestige status the Albanian language has in Greek communities, as well as due to the lower motivation to keep ties with their country of origin for those Albanian immigrant families. Therefore, not engaging in ethnic language learning practices or even embracing the idea of bilingualism for their children was a choice for these families, that derives from the often misguided impression that the acquisition of two languages burdens the development of the dominant language of the country they live in ( Chatzidaki and Maligkoudi, 2013 ; Kostoulas and Motsiou, 2020 ). Andreou (2015) examined a subgroup of the total bilingual cohort of the BALED project, i.e., 257 Greek– German, Greek– English and Greek– Albanian bilingual children.…”

Section: The Present Studymentioning

confidence: 99%

Cognitive Mechanisms of Monolingual and Bilingual Children in Monoliterate Educational Settings: Evidence From Sentence Repetition

et al. 2021

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Sentence repetition (SR) tasks have been extensively employed to assess bilingual children’s linguistic and cognitive resources. The present study examined whether monoliterate bilingual children differ from their monolingual (and monoliterate) peers in SR accuracy and cognitive tasks, and investigated links between vocabulary, updating, verbal and visuospatial working memory and SR performance in the same children. Participants were two groups of 35 children, 8–12 years of age: one group consisted of Albanian-Greek monoliterate bilingual children and the other of Greek monolingual children attending a monolingual-Greek educational setting. The findings demonstrate that the two groups performed similarly in the grammaticality scores of the SR. However, monolinguals outperformed the monoliterate bilinguals in SR accuracy, as well as in the visuospatial working memory and updating tasks. The findings did not indicate any bilingual advantage in cognitive performance. The results also demonstrate that updating and visuospatial working memory significantly predicted monolingual children’s SR accuracy scores, whereas Greek vocabulary predicted the performance of our monoliterate bilingual children in the same task. We attribute this outcome to the fact that monoliterate bilingual children do not rely on their fluid cognitive resources to perform the task, but instead rely on language proficiency (indicated by expressive vocabulary) while performing the SR.

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Section: The Present Studymentioning

confidence: 99%

Cognitive Mechanisms of Monolingual and Bilingual Children in Monoliterate Educational Settings: Evidence From Sentence Repetition

et al. 2021

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“…In terms of the specific research conducted about parental attitudes and ideologies on social media, Kostoulas and Motsiou (2022) used a data corpus containing a large quantity of words generated by drawing data from two online parental communities that focus on families where Modern Greek was one of the family languages. Their study used thematic analysis of the online parental discourses to examine the parents' stated attitudes, beliefs, and practices about language, family, and education as they correlated with plurilingualism and linguistic development.…”

Section: Language Attitudes and Ideologies Among Parents On Social Mediamentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Their work found strong positive views about fostering plurilingualism and some concerns about balancing different aspects of children's developing linguistic repertoire. They also reported that established language development and management practices (e.g., OPOL, minority language at home) were supplemented with more flexible ones, which indicates adjustment to emerging multilingual norms (Kostoulas and Motsiou 2022).…”

Section: Language Attitudes and Ideologies Among Parents On Social Mediamentioning

confidence: 99%

Critical Discourse Analysis on Parental Language Ideologies of Bilingual and Multilingual Child-Rearing and Language Education Using Facebook and Internet Forums

Qian

2024

Journalism and Media

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This study examines the computer-mediated discussion topics of parents who raise bilingual and multilingual children in four active Facebook and Internet forums, and investigates how the language ideologies embedded in the multiple languages being used in these forums are expressed. In this study, 179 data points, including users’ posts and thread comments, were collected to identify the most frequently discussed topics as part of my description of the database, in order to identify parental ideologies by using values analysis. The five most-discussed topics were selected to make a critical discourse analysis on the narratives to understand the language ideologies regarding the use of multiple languages, and regarding what users of the groups are saying specifically about the languages when analyzing metalinguistic discourses. This study found the most recurrent language ideologies that parents expressed on these online forums were supporting bilingualism/multilingualism, and claim that bilingualism/multilingualism is advantageous. Parents also demonstrate language ideologies supporting keeping languages separate, such as following the one parent one language (OPOL) method, using the minority language at home, and so on. A detailed values analysis with illustrative sample messages from the online posts and comments also more specifically shows the recurrent language ideologies identified, and parents’ views underlying their narratives on their posts and thread comments.

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“…Hence, the fact that they decide against participating in any heritage language learning opportunity or even accommodating bilingual practices for their children within and outside of the household, appears to be a conscious choice (Tsokalidou, 2005). Denying bilingual upbringing for the Albanian-Greek children also results from the mentality that bilingual language acquisition is detrimental to the proper development of the majority language of their country of residence (Kostoulas & Motsiou, 2020). Sociolinguistic evidence shows that Greek is the preferred medium of second-generation children of Albanian origin when communicating among peers, while the use of Albanian is mostly restricted to the family context, especially through informal communication with the mother and relatives in the homeland (Chatzidaki & Maligkoudi, 2013).…”

Section: Reference Patterns In Children With Asdmentioning

confidence: 99%

Bilingualism effects in pronoun comprehension: Evidence from children with autism

et al. 2021

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The prevalence of autism worldwide has risen steadily in the last two decades, while bilingualism is also becoming increasingly prevalent in today's rapidly globalizing world. The current study aimed to investigate bilingualism effects in the pronoun resolution skills of children with autism in comparison to age‐matched monolingual children with autism, as well as monolingual and bilingual children of typical development (Ν = 20 participants per group). Results showed that autistic children had general difficulty anchoring ambiguous pronouns to entities that were linguistically expressed in discourse, yet, the bilingual children with autism were more sensitive to the topicality of the entities in syntactic subject position and more prone to identify them as suitable referents of ambiguous null pronouns as compared to their monolingual peers. The findings suggest that bilingualism is not detrimental to autistic children's pronoun resolution skills. The current study aimed at determining how bilingualism influences ambiguous pronoun comprehension in children with autism as compared to bilingual and monolingual children of typical development. The findings show that bilingualism was not detrimental to the autistic children's pronoun resolution skills, further suggesting that having acquired more than one language does not exacerbate autistic children's deficits in the comprehension of pronouns.

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Family language policy in mixed-language families: an exploratory study of online parental discourses

Cited by 11 publications

References 44 publications

Cognitive Mechanisms of Monolingual and Bilingual Children in Monoliterate Educational Settings: Evidence From Sentence Repetition

Cognitive Mechanisms of Monolingual and Bilingual Children in Monoliterate Educational Settings: Evidence From Sentence Repetition

Critical Discourse Analysis on Parental Language Ideologies of Bilingual and Multilingual Child-Rearing and Language Education Using Facebook and Internet Forums

Bilingualism effects in pronoun comprehension: Evidence from children with autism

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