Chinese Communities: Family Ethnography Data, 2017-2020

10 families of different types (SES) and structures (e.g. nuclear, extended, single-parent) were observed. The data provide insight into family members’ ideological positions that can be congruent or conflictual and which may cause conflicting views about how to raise bilingual children. Interactional data capture the actual language practices in families across the communities. The data also allow us to observe the silent cultural conversations among family members, and to identify the critical moments of policy enactment.

The project locates Family Language Policy (FLP) as a field of inquiry to generate new knowledge on one of the fundamental dimensions of society: the family. FLP addresses three interrelated aspects of children’s multilingual development: language ideology (what family members believe about language), language practices (what they do with language), and language management (what efforts they make to maintain language). 1. Research questions: Employing a multi-level, multi-community and multi-type of family design, the project looks into: 1) How do mobility and on-going changes in sociocultural contexts impact on FLP and linguistic configurations of transnational and non-transnational families in the current UK society? 2) What are the ideological factors that shape the formation of FLPs and to what extent does the dynamic interrelationship between FLP and other social forces, including macro-national/political and meso-educational language policies, influence the decision making processes of FLP? 3) What are the implicit and explicit management measures and interventions employed by caregivers to enrich their children’s multi-language development or to deal with potential incomplete acquisition or loss of the heritage languages? 4) How do similarities and differences between communities with regard to migration histories, linguistic environments, cultural conditions, and socio-political system affect the decision making processes in families? 5) How do families of different types in different communities with (dis)similar access to knowledge and resources deal with the rhythms and realities of everyday life in their different languages and through multiliteracy practices, including social media and computer-mediated communications?

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