{"title":"Monolingual disobedience, multilingual guilt?: an autoethnographic exploration of heritage language maintenance during COVID-19 lockdowns","authors":"Qianqian Zhang-Wu","doi":"10.1515/multi-2023-0020","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"Abstract In this study I indicate that lengthened family interaction time during pandemic lockdowns can afford children significantly more exposure and opportunities to enhance their heritage language, but that this does not diminish the constant dilemma between striving to balance English acquisition and heritage language maintenance. Using autoethnography, and as a first-generation immigrant mother of a preschool-age Chinese American child, I will demonstrate how our family language policy and languaging practices evolved during the COVID19 lockdowns, and indicate how, despite the growing development of my child’s heritage language skills, her multilingualism was achieved at the cost of my constant ideological struggles between disobeying rampant English-only ideologies in society and feeling guilty about decentering academic English in our family language policy. With this study, I call for future research to adopt a longitudinal lens to explore whether shifting family language policies and languaging practices during lockdowns may have long-term influences on children from multilingual households.","PeriodicalId":46413,"journal":{"name":"Multilingua-Journal of Cross-Cultural and Interlanguage Communication","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.4000,"publicationDate":"2023-10-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Multilingua-Journal of Cross-Cultural and Interlanguage Communication","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1515/multi-2023-0020","RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"0","JCRName":"LANGUAGE & LINGUISTICS","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
Abstract In this study I indicate that lengthened family interaction time during pandemic lockdowns can afford children significantly more exposure and opportunities to enhance their heritage language, but that this does not diminish the constant dilemma between striving to balance English acquisition and heritage language maintenance. Using autoethnography, and as a first-generation immigrant mother of a preschool-age Chinese American child, I will demonstrate how our family language policy and languaging practices evolved during the COVID19 lockdowns, and indicate how, despite the growing development of my child’s heritage language skills, her multilingualism was achieved at the cost of my constant ideological struggles between disobeying rampant English-only ideologies in society and feeling guilty about decentering academic English in our family language policy. With this study, I call for future research to adopt a longitudinal lens to explore whether shifting family language policies and languaging practices during lockdowns may have long-term influences on children from multilingual households.
期刊介绍:
Multilingua is a refereed academic journal publishing six issues per volume. It has established itself as an international forum for interdisciplinary research on linguistic diversity in social life. The journal is particularly interested in publishing high-quality empirical yet theoretically-grounded research from hitherto neglected sociolinguistic contexts worldwide. Topics: -Bi- and multilingualism -Language education, learning, and policy -Inter- and cross-cultural communication -Translation and interpreting in social contexts -Critical sociolinguistic studies of language and communication in globalization, transnationalism, migration, and mobility across time and space