Factors influencing family language policy – Xiao Lan Curdt-Christiansen

Date 14 October 2020
Time 4 - 6pm
Cost Free

Part of the English Language and Linguistics Research Seminar Series

The Westminster Forum for Language and Linguistics poster

About this talk

Xiao Lan Curdt-Christiansen, University of Bath will be presenting a paper 'Factors influencing family language policy'.

Family Language Policy (FLP) has received increasing attention in recent years. Of central interest is why some children, growing up in a bilingual environment, become monolinguals while other children, growing up in a monolingual society, become bilinguals.

Over the past decades, researchers in this field have tried to understand the role FLP plays in bi/multilingual development by examining parental language ideologies, investigating interactions between family members, as well as studying parents’ conscious choices in their discourse strategies. As families are important social units in a given society, and caregivers’ and children’s beliefs, practices and interventions are consistently shaped by linguistic and non-linguistic factors associated with family resources, and broader socioeconomic, sociopolitical and sociocultural forces, resulting in either valuations or de-valuations of bi/multilingualism and multiculturalism.

In this talk, I focus on factors influence the processes of family decisions on what languages to maintain and develop, and what languages to let go. Using empirical studies from recent research across different geopolitical contexts, I will demonstrate how internal and external factors are instantiated through parental beliefs and translated into language practices in children’s bi/multilingual development.

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Please find details of all events in this series of the English Language and Linguistics Research Seminars here.