The Multilingual Challenge

Cross-Disciplinary Perspectives

Ulrike Jessner-Schmid, Claire J. Kramsch, Ulrike Jessner-Schmid, Claire J. Kramsch

• Publisher: De Gruyter Mouton
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9781501500312
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Langues et linguistique
• Subtopic: Linguistique

This collection of scholarly articles is the first to address the challenges of multilingualism from a multidisciplinary perspective. The contributors to this volume examine both the beneficial and the problematic aspects of multilingualism in various dimensions, that is, they address familial, educational, academic, artistic, scientific, historical, professional, and geopolitical challenges.

Part I: Familial challenges

Li Wei and Zhu Hua

1 Challenges of multilingualism to the family

Corresponding Author: Li Wei, University College London, UK, [email protected]

Abstract: Transnational and multilingual families have become commonplace in the 21st century. Yet few attempts have been made from an applied linguistics perspective to understand what is going on within such families; how their transnational and multilingual experiences impact on the family dynamics and their everyday life; how they cope with the new and ever-changing environment, and how they construct their identities and build social relations. In this chapter we start from the premise that bilingualism and multilingualism mean different things to different generations and individuals within the same family. Additive Bilingualism, which is often celebrated for the positive benefits of adding a second language and culture without replacing or displacing the first, is by no means universal. Using data gathered from a sociolinguistic ethnography of three multilingual and transnational families from China in Britain, we discuss the experiences of different generations and individuals in dealing with bilingualism and multilingualism and how their different experiences affect the way individual family members perceive social relations and social structures and construct and present their own identities.

Transnational and multilingual families are becoming more common in the UK as statistics suggest. In 2011, 31% of children born in the UK had either one or both parents from another country (Hall, 2013). In the same year, the census of England and Wales which records only the ‘main’ language of individuals showed that 4.2 million people (7.7% of the national population) spoke languages other than English as the main language (Office of National Statistics, 2013). Whilst there is considerable public interest in how transnational and multilingual families integrate into the broader British society (e.g. Brown, 2013; Phillips, 2013), especially how the children from transnational and multilingual backgrounds succeed or otherwise in the school system (e.g. Davies, 2012; Doughty, 2012; Royal Economic Society, 2013), there are few attempts to understand what is going on within such families; how their transnational and multilingual experiences impact on the family dynamics and their everyday life; how they cope with the new and ever-changing environment, and how they construct their identities and build social relations.

Family interaction has traditionally been viewed as ‘private’ or ‘back-stage’ of social life, to use Goffman’s (1959) metaphor. Investigations of what is happening within the family, whilst having been done by anthropologists, psychoanalysts and others, are sometimes viewed as too detailed and trivial to the understanding of how society in the post-modern era works (see critiques in Budgeon and Roseneil, 2004; Roseneil and Frosh, 2012). Yet, it is precisely because of globalization, advancement of media and information technology, and transnationalism, all features of the post-modern society, that the boundaries between the public and the private, the front and back stages of social life have become blurred. There is an increased diversity, even superdiversity, of family structures. Different generations and individuals within the same family have vastly different sociocultural experiences. The impact of such different experiences of individual members of the family on how the family as a whole copes with the challenges of contemporary society remains largely under-explored.

This article starts from the premise that bilingualism and multilingualism mean different things to different generations and individuals within the same family. Additive Bilingualism (Lambert, 1974), which is often celebrated for the positive benefits of adding a second language and culture without replacing or displacing the first, is by no means universal. The experiences of different generations and individuals in transnational, multilingual families in dealing with bilingualism and multilingualism therefore are worthy of detailed investigation, not least because they impact on the family relations and dynamics as well as on the way individual family members perceive social relations and social structures and construct and present their own identities. We will focus on the experiences of three multilingual families from China living in Britain. Many aspects of their experiences, however, are shared by all transnational and multilingual families across the globe.

The article is structured as follows: We begin with a brief discussion of the main themes that have been discussed in the existing studies of multilingualism in transnational families. We then outline the methodological perspective of the present study. The main body of the chapter is devoted to an ethnographic account of three multilingual and transnational families from China in Britain and their experiences with multilingualism. The key issues emerging from the account and their implications for policy and practice are discussed in the final section of the chapter.

1 From language maintenance and language shift to transnational imagination

Most of the existing applied linguistic studies of transnational and multilingual families focus on the intergenerational language shift and the communicative difficulties that have been caused by such shifts (e.g. Lanza, 2007; Shin, 2005; Schecter and Bayley, 1997; Li Wei, 1994; Zhu Hua, 2008). The common recurrent pattern is that the first generation migrants find learning the languages of the new resident country is the most important and often challenging task, whilst their local-born children face the challenge of maintaining the home/heritage language. If there are grandparents joining the family in their new setting, they often take up the responsibility of childcare and interact primarily with other family and community members, and have relatively little opportunity for learning new languages. Members of transnational families have to face these different challenges together as a unit: the presence of monolingual grandparents is as much an issue to them as children not wanting or being able to speak the home language in their everyday family life. Transnational families also face the challenges of constructing new identities and fighting against prejudices and stereotypes, sometimes caused by their members not speaking the languages of the resident country.

Two issues have been highlighted by existing research of the changing sociolinguistic configurations in transnational families: necessity and opportunity. Yes, in most cases, it is necessary to have a good knowledge of the languages of the new resident country as it would enable members of the transnational family to access services, education and employment. Yet opportunities for learning the languages are not always readily available. In 2011, the coalition government in the UK announced a series of funding cuts to ESOL (English for speakers of other languages) provision including the introduction of fees for many students, a change in programme weighting, and the removal of a discretionary £4.5 million Learner Support Fund (Exley, 2011). The Ethnic Minority Achievement Grant which was used to fund bilingual teaching assistants in schools for pupils whose English is an additional language has been mainstreamed into the Direct Schools Grant covering everything, from buildings to stationery (NALDIC, online; NASUWT, 2012). With regard to the home/heritage languages, transnational families often find it necessary to maintain them for domestic communication, especially where there are monolingual grandparents around. But opportunities are not equally available across different home/heritage languages for the children to learn and maintain them. For example, some immigrant languages such as Bengali (150,000 speaker in the 2011 UK census) and Farsi (76,000 speakers) are taught in community schools and classes, while others such as Kashmiri (115,000 speakers), Tagalog (70,000 speakers) are not. Within the same ethnic community, there are better opportunities to learn and use some languages than others. In the Chinese community, for example, varieties of Chinese such as Mandarin and Cantonese are taught in heritage language schools. But no school teaches Hakka or Hokkien which also have significant numbers of speakers in the Chinese diaspora worldwide.

However, families’ and individuals’ motivations for learning, maintaining and using languages often go beyond necessity and opportunity. They are tied to the families’ and individuals’ sense of belonging and imagination. As scholars in diaspora studies point out, transnationals construct and negotiate their identities, everyday life and activities in ways that overcome the ethnic identity versus assimilation dilemma, suppressing or neutralising past differences and establishing commonality and connectivity in the building of a transnational imagination (e.g. Cohen, 1997). This imagination provides a site of hope and new beginnings (Brah, 1996: 193). Rather than looking back in a nostalgic effort of recovering or maintaining their identity, they discover or construct notions of who they are and where and what home is by essentially looking forward. Applied linguists have paid relatively little attention so far to the links between intergenerational language maintenance and language shift on the one hand and the transnational imaginations on the other amongst transnational family members both individually and collectively.

2 The present study

The present study is a sociolinguistic ethnography of three transnational families from China living in Britain. It is part of a larger, continuous ethnographic project of the Chinese community in Britain that began in the mid 1980s (Li Wei, 1997). The data for this chapter were gathered during 2006 and 2007. The research questions we set out to explore included how the families coped with issues such as family language policy, children’s language socialization, linguistic ideologies, symbolic competence and changing linguistic hierarchies amongst the languages they lived with, and struggles and aspirations in maintaining contacts with both the former and new home countries. We followed a typical ethnography process of going from reflectivity to reflexivity, that is, from observation, description, introspection, to making connections between what’s been observed in the present case and our knowledge of other cases. Whilst reflectivity emphasizes critical evaluation and analysis of the availab...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Notes on the contributors
• Ulrike Jessner and Claire Kramsch: Introduction: The multilingual challenge
• Part I: Familial challenges
• Part II: Educational challenges
• Part III: Institutional challenges
• Part IV: Scientific challenges
• Part V: Professional and geopolitical challenges
• Index
• Endnotes