The Role of Education in Shaping Parental Language Choices in a Multilingual Society

Low Hui Min Low Hui Min

doi:10.37256/ser.122020270

Abstract

In a multilingual society, the parents are faced with the need to make language choices when they interactwith their young children. Even though language choices in bi-or multilingual families have been vastly reported in the literature on childhood multilingualism, most of these reports reflected the situations involving immigrant or mixedmarriage families who live in a largely monolingual society. In this paper, I argued that the factors that influenced the making the language choices in parents living in a multilingual society are slightly different to those reported in the general literature. From the qualitative investigation with three Malaysian-Chinese families, it was found that the parent language choices were influenced by multiple factors, including the parents’ own educational experiences and language repertoires, their language attitudes, the language repertoires of the other family members, the family tradition, and most prominently, the educational choices made by the parents for the child. The findings from this investigation added perspectives to understand the extent of complexity involved in the making of language choices by parents in a multilingual society.

Highlights

Unlike monolingual parents, bi-or multilingual parents need to make decision of which language or languages to use with their young child at home[1]
In contexts of childhood multilingualism, language planning at the familial level involves decisions about which language or languages each member in the family is going to speak with their child, and when and where the child will be exposed to these language[4,5]
The qualitative investigation with these three Malaysian-Chinese families provided the evidence that educational factor is a catalyst of language diversity in a multilingual society

Summary

Introduction

Bi-or multilingual parents need to make decision of which language or languages to use with their young child at home[1]. Even though language choices in bi-or multilingual families have been vastly reported in the literature on childhood multilingualism, most of these reports reflected the situations involving immigrant or mixed-marriage families who live in a largely monolingual society[7,8,9,10] Many of those reports attributed heritage values, social prestige and socioeconomic reasons as the elements that the bi-or multilingual parents would consider in the making of language choices. I adopted Romaine’s[11] proposed sociolinguistic perspective that the considerations vary according to the parents’ language repertoires, the language supports available in the community and the parents’ objectives of wanting their children to acquire more than one language in early childhood As asserted by those researchers who reported the scenarios in a largely monolingual society, the parents’ objective of promoting childhood bi-or multilingualism is primarily due to cultural and heritage reasons. Without denying the influences of these two factors in a multilingual society, I will argue in this paper that in a multilingual society, educational choice is another factor that would determine the ways the parents shape their children’s early multilingual experiences

Methods

Results

Conclusion