Discourse, Ideology and Heritage Language Socialization

Micro and Macro Perspectives

Martin Guardado

• Publisher: De Gruyter Mouton
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9781614515449
• eBook ISBN:
  9781501500732
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Communication Studies
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

The book examines the development and maintenance of a minority language, engaging on both micro and macro levels to address open questions in the field. Guardado provides a history of the study of language maintenance, including discussion of language socialization, cosmopolitan identities, and home practices. In particular, the author uses 'discourse' as a primary tool to understand minority language development and maintenance.

1Introduction

I am my language. Until I can take pride in my language, I cannot take pride in myself. (Anzaldúa 1987: 59)

Language is central to human life. It is intricately interknitted in culture and in how people see themselves in the world. Language is the main vehicle of cultural values and meanings and therefore plays a key role in shaping the worldview of individuals and communities. At the local level, language is the primary means by which families help young children become members of a cultural community. If language is essential to a wide range of human endeavours for all groups, fostering the heritage language is a critical necessity for linguistic-minority families living in multilingual settings. Their language is the means through which they can more successfully socialize their children into the beliefs, values, ideologies, and discursive practices as well as into their conceptions of the world. This process of socialization also involves the shaping of children’s particular identities, drawing them to identify with a community of speakers, and expecting them to interact competently and appropriately with the broader society. Heritage language development, then, is not a trivial matter for linguistic-minority families. Rather than viewing language development and maintenance as a narrow pursuit, inspired by a “backward” and nostalgic stance based on families’ intractable wish to cling to their past through their heritage language, it should be seen as an essential component of their adjustment, integration, and overall well-being.

As an interdisciplinary project, this book takes both micro and macro perspectives on heritage language development and draws on three interrelated theoretical and conceptual perspectives as organizing principles and analytical lenses, namely, discourse, language ideologies and socialization. I take a macro perspective that draws on critical discourse studies in order to analyze the ways in which language development and maintenance is “talked about” in popular and academic circles. I draw on ethnographic data to construct a typology of discourses of heritage language development and maintenance and then apply it to a selection of the research literature, which becomes the catalyst for engaging in a critical examination of the research area and of the typology itself.

The broad perspective taken in the book also includes a close examination of the interaction between issues of heritage language development and the macro sociopolitic o-cultural structures in society. These interactions are indelibly implicated in relations of power, which are critically confronted throughout the book. At the micro level, I discuss the patterns of communication between children and caregivers in multilingual settings. This discussion is facilitated via analyses of day-to-day interactions in homes and community groups. Using analytic tools borrowed mainly from the conversation analysis (CA) tradition, I describe the linguistic strategies that adults employ in attempts to regulate the language use of children. Taking a critical stance, I demonstrate how certain strategies have a positive effect on family interactions, potentially expanding the conversations, while other strategies act negatively by ending communicative sequences.

Concerns have emerged recently within the linguistic anthropology of education research about the usefulness of the micro/macro scale as a heuristic. In particular, questions have been raised regarding the perceived narrow, deterministic, and potentially misleading nature of this scale (Wortham 2012). While acknowledging these as valid critiques, a decision was made to apply this heuristic in the present book for several reasons. First of all, while much research has been conducted within education from micro and macro perspectives, significantly informing the field through nuanced analyses of agency and structure, the study of HLs has not yet benefited from such analyses at the micro and macro levels. Indeed, leading scholars in this and related research areas continue to utilize this framing fairly productively (e.g., Lanza 2001, Piller and Takahashi 2006, Lanza 2007, Talmy 2010, Fogle 2013, Fogle and King 2013). Therefore, it is argued that HL socialization is not yet at the stage of moving beyond this social scale and into a more fluid consideration of, for instance, contingent emergence and enduring constraints (Wortham 2012). It is expected that once these more traditional scales have been sufficiently explained, HL socialization may also outlive a micro/macro distinction and perhaps benefit from currently emerging models that draw on different spatial and temporal scales. In this regard, Wortham (2012) discusses the concept of “enduring struggles” used by Holland and Lave (2001) in their work on practice theory, from among several possibilities. Finally, Wortham acknowledges several problems with approaches that attempt to move beyond the micro and macro distinction as obstacles for fully implementing them in the linguistic anthropology of education and in other fields, positing that these need to be fully articulated to be useful. The time may come, but it is not yet here, for HL socialization to draw on appropriate approaches that can take the field further in this regard.

Throughout the book, language socialization is used as the theoretical lens that facilitates the analyses at both the micro and broader scales, productively connecting the two. The language ideology concept is used throughout the book as the critical thread that interweaves all issues and perspectives. Thus, at the microlinguistic level, it frames discussions related to the adults’ views of different languages and how they should be used in their daily interactions. It also helps illuminate how children are socialized into language practices and views of the world. Therefore, provocative conceptualizations of heritage language development and maintenance are put forward as a result of the synergistic interaction of discourse, ideologies, and language socialization.

Dell Hymes stated in 1974 that a multidisciplinary approach was indispensible for studying language, positing that just as linguistics was obviously needed in this endeavour, so were anthropology, sociology, education, and other fields. Hymes’ words have perhaps never been truer than they are today, as evidenced by the multidisciplinary developments in language-related areas of research, but especially in relation to the study of heritage languages. In this book, I attempt to heed Hymes’ call and take the position that the scholarly study of heritage language development and maintenance is a necessarily interdisciplinary endeavour. It is a highly complex phenomenon that plays out at micro and macro levels, both for individuals and communities and thus is connected to several fields and research areas. As a result, it has been investigated from various disciplinary perspectives combining different methods. Some of the fields from which heritage language development and maintenance has been examined include, but are not limited to, linguistics, applied linguistics, ethnolinguistics, sociolinguistics, anthro-political linguistics, education, early childhood education, and speech-language pathology. Perhaps partly due to the diversity of scholarly backgrounds involved in heritage language studies, the terms used in heritage language scholarship have also been varied. The perspective more closely associated with this book falls within the scope of linguistic anthropology, sociolinguistics, and the sociology of language. In the next chapter, I discuss the sociology of language and sociolinguistics more specifically as a way of setting up the body of the book. In most chapters, a variety of linguistic anthropological focal points are also foregrounded.

1.1Why heritage language studies?

A pressing research issue in societies with local linguistic minorities (including aboriginal groups) and immigrant receiving societies is the need to better understan d how families, communities, and governments deal with minority languages and cultures. As the world becomes more interconnected and the mobility of people intensifies globally, language contact also increases, individuals continue to add new languages to their repertoires, and more children are born and raised among several languages. In this rapidly evolving living environment, parents invariably wonder what the best child-rearing practices are in relation to language, they want to know what to do with the languages in their lives and how these affect their parenting styles and outcomes. Many questions emerge among parents about how these languages relate to them as families, to their children as individuals, to who they are, and to how they can see themselves in their communities. They continue to wonder whether to keep or abandon their languages, and if so, how. They nervously speculate about whether their actions hinder or enable their children’s futures. They ask themselves and their friends what other families in similar situations do and what their experiences are. Many would like to know what language experts think and know about these concerns and what advice they can get from them.

Policy-makers and educators would like to know how to better cater to their increasingly multilingual classrooms in a culturally and multilingually sensitive manner that is pedagogically sound. It is important for them to access research findings concerning the language and literacy attitudes, goals, and practices of families in order to design curricula that is consonant with families’ efforts in supporting their children’s schooling and work cooperatively in pursuing common educational goals. Indeed, research on heritage language attitudes and home practices can provide critical insights for educators to better understand the experiences and characteristics of families who face differing circumstances (e.g., in relation to educational background) and possible differing educational goals (e.g., literacy, biliteracy, monolingualism, multilingualism). By identifying such goals and circumstances and designing programs that take these issues into consideration and offering more flexible, culturally responsive, and effective programs (DeBruin-Parecki and Paris 1997), stakeholders may be able to more successfully address the education desires and goals of differently advantaged families. Relatedly, it is essential for governments to know what appropriate and fair language policies are and what programs to support and how. The future is increasingly multilingual and societies need to be prepared for this reality and learn how to capitalize on such resources.

All of the above questions, concerns, and issues are often talked about in academic, family, community, and other circles in various ways. These ways of talking—discourses—are of course prompted by particular ideologies, situations, and contextual realities. One of the key arguments that I make in this book, following Michel Foucault and others, is that discourses are not only produced by, but also producers of, “the subjects and the worlds of which they speak” (Lessa 2006: 285). Thus, engaging theoretically and empirically with such talk is a fruitful direction as it has the potential of contributing to enacting heritage language development in the new generations. This book addresses these and related areas and attempts to move the conversation further into as of yet unexplored directions.

Finally, as part of the process of building this emerging area of research (heritage language studies), the book attempts to expand HL socialization theorization across increasingly complex settings, social scales (micro and macro), drawing on a variety of concepts borrowed from neighbouring disciplines, research methodologies, and analytical techniques. The unifying thread in this book is its broad—and yet deep—treatment of a large set of relevant characteristics of heritage language socialization. The centeredness of ideology and discourse in this process is salient in relation to issues of identity, power, agency, negotiation, and resistance. All of these features are intertwined and, as such, are addressed separately and in relation to one another throughout the book.

1.2Reconsidering the first language maintenance construct

An array of themes and processes are investigated across disciplines in connection with the terms language maintenance and loss, including language shift, language attrition, language forgetting, language obsolescence, multilingual development, and heritage language development. Although the term language maintenance is arguably more widely known and understood, and it is the term that leading scholars originally used to launch this and related areas of study (see, e.g., Fishman 1965), in this book I mostly1 use heritage language development and maintenance in order to emphasize development, and not just keeping an already-developed level of language ability, as the term language maintenance seems to suggest. Adding the word heritage to the term also helps to bring attention to the fact that the minority language might never have been the child’s dominant (native) language, and indeed only have been spoken by the parents, with the children having mere receptive abilities in the language.

Furthermore, the term first language (L1) maintenance, and its variations (e.g., mother tongue maintenance, heritage language maintenance), has been used widely in applied linguistics scholarship. However, so far the exact meaning of the term has not been fully fleshed out. In general, although L1 maintenance also entails complex socialization processes of cultural continuation and the development of particular identities, it may create the impression that it is an autonomous, amorphous, linear, and unproblematic phenomenon. Additionally, though maintenance connotes something that is already present, for second-generation linguistic-minority children this is generally not the case as they need sufficient exposure to the family language in order to acquire it. Moreover, their socialization experiences tend to be much more complicated; outside the home, they are often socialized through a societal language that is usually different from that of their parents or through a mixture of languages or language varieties. In the home, these children may be socialized through their parents’ languages, through the societal language (in the case of language shift at home), or also through a combination of languages or language varieties.

Even if this is not the central focus, the discussions in this book underscore such complexity and highlight the need to reconceptualize L1 maintenance as a multifaceted, contested, and socially situated process whose meaning goes beyond retaining something concrete that is already in one’s possession (i.e., language ability). Rather, language maintenance comprises fostering, developing, and using both a repertoire of language/literacy knowledge and practices and a particular cultural orientation in individuals in childhood and beyond. More than maintaining, to be successful this process entails a more active and deliberate transmission of linguistic ideologies and cultural connections to younger generations. The families may already share these ideologies and connections, but the final “product” of socialization may be a symbiotic blend of the families’ histories, beliefs, and practices in relation to language and culture and those of the milieus in which these children interact, which may be rather different from what their parents experienced in their own primary and subsequent socialization. The detailed descriptions and analyses in which I engage in this book, from various angles, provide a nuanced understanding of this phenomenon and draw attention to the limited explanatory power and thus the inadequa...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Preface
• Contents
• 1 Introduction
• Part I: Setting the stage
• Part II: The discursive construction of heritage language development
• Part III: Socializing strategies and metapragmatic practices
• Part IV: Family, community and education in global perspective
• References
• A note on the texts
• Subject index