Strategies for bilingual maintenance: Case studies of Mexican-origin families in Texas

Abstract

This article examines strategies Mexican-American parents, grandparents, and other family members employ in their efforts to assist children to maintain and develop Spanish while developing their linguistic and academic abilities in English. We focus on three south Texas families, selected from a sample of forty families, who represent a range of possible home language maintenance strategies as well as different socioeconomic levels and modes of life. The three families include a rural family living on a south Texas ranch, a working class family living in an urban barrio, and an upper middle class professional family living in an ethnically mixed suburban neighborhood. Analysis of audiotapes of extensive home observations and a variety of proficiency measures indicated that children in all three families had achieved proficiency in English. However, only the children in the rural family had maintained native proficiency in Spanish. The maintenance of Spanish by the children in the rural family is attributable to several factors, among them the parents' insistence that the children use Spanish among themselves, the relative isolation of the ranch on which the family lived, and frequent visits to Mexico and contact with monolingual Spanish-speaking relatives.