ABSTRACT: Guided by translingualism, this ethnographic case study explores the HL literacy practices of a mother-scholar’s two young children growing up in a trilingual (Farsi, Korean, and English) household in Georgia, in the United States. The children’s writings and drawings, as well as conversations around literacy, collected over a four-year period, serve as data sources. The qualitative data analysis revealed the important roles the siblings played in translingual writing across scripts. Their collaborative translingual engagement with literacy was facilitated by their interactions, as demonstrated by examples of written letters, contracts, and written tokens of endearment. The siblings served as an authentic audience for each other in their HL writing, superseding adults within the family. The findings highlight the affordances of the sibling relationship in a translingual approach to HL literacy development and have implications for parents of HL learners as well as HL researchers.
ABSTRACT: Drawing on translanguaging and a translingual approach to literacy, this case study seeks to examine why and how a trilingual child engaged with writing across two heritage languages (HLs), Korean and Farsi, as well as English over 5 years. I enter the study by taking on the role of a motherscholar to address the research question “What, how, and why my son, a trilingual child, wrote across three scripts at home?” The analysis of a large number of writing samples across the three scripts as well as video and audio data sources collected at home showed the child’s complex navigation and orchestration of his lived experiences, interests, and social relationships across scripts with a clear audience in mind over developmental stages. He engaged in writing at home to reconstruct his literate world, to express interests and lived experiences, and to express discontent in required tasks in a playful manner. The study has important implications for caregivers and teachers of multilinguals as well as for policy makers who must create more opportunities for multilingual children to draw on languages and scripts they use on a daily basis in school learning.
ABSTRACT: School literacy in North America continues to focus on society’s dominant languages. Literacy curriculum — particularly during early grades — has an urgency for children to quickly master mergent literacy skills in the official languages, vindicating the exclusion of literacy in other minoritized languages that multilingual children bring to school. Guided by a translingual approach to literacy, this motherscholar research explores how and why a multilingual child utilized his Korean linguistic resources in translingual compositions across scripts, genres, modalities, and contexts during kindergarten and first-grade years. The qualitative analysis of the child’s compositions brought from school and completed at home revealed that he solidified social relationships with others through letter writing and asserted multicultural affiliations and identities in various genres. He did so through natural attunement to differences and laborious orchestration of resources. His minimal engagement with translingual writing at school compared to home practices has implications for literacy teachers and parents of multilingual children.
ABSTRACT: This case study examines emergent, evolving language ideologies of a trilingual child, from age 3–7, who was simultaneously acquiring two heritage languages, Korean and Farsi, as well as English in the United States. A qualitative analysis of the child’s conversations in a naturally occurring home context extends the literature centered on the language ideologies of adults and older children. Findings grounded in the language ideology and translanguaging theories revealed that the child navigated the tension between competing language ideologies imposed upon him while also trying to exercise agency by leveraging his multilingual identity. He was learning about and deciding whether to accept or reject different elements of language norms and the implicit monolingual ideology behind them, while at the same time figuring out where his identity as a multilingual person fits into his environment. These findings have useful implications for teachers and families of multilingual children.
ABSTRACT: I am raising a five-year-old son and two-year-old daughter as trilinguals in a multilingual household where we speak Korean, Farsi, and English. We have consistently maintained a one-parent-one-language (OPOL) policy in which I only speak Korean to my children while two other caregivers, my partner and mother-in-law, exclusively speak Farsi to them. Promoting my children’s proficiency in home languages in an English-dominant society, the United States, has been my priority. As a successive multilingual, having learned English and Farsi after acquiring my first language of Korean, and as a professor and scholar of language and literacy education, I am well aware of the multiple benefits of multilingualism (Bialystok, 2011).
Although my children have not been formally assessed, I can say that they have sufficient speaking skills in both Korean and Farsi appropriate to their ages; they are often praised by others, both multi- and mono-lingual adults, for these skills.
However, concerns have also been a frequent reaction to their developing trilingual abilities. Some intimate family members, friends, neighbors, and school personnel have commented on the confusion that my children must experience because of them acquiring three different languages simultaneously, the urgency in mastering English, and the shortlived nature of home languages once school starts in the United States. These common assumptions have troubled me. I know very well that these remarks collectively reflect a deep-seated ideology prevalent in schools, communities, and society at large; an ideology that still operates within a monolingual frame of mind and within a static and monolithic view of languaging (Garcia & Wei, 2015). I find such perspectives disturbing because they deprive multilingual children and families like mine of the right to draw on all of their linguistic repertoires, gradually making them become English-only speakers at the expense of losing their home languages (Olsen, 2008; Wong Fillmore, 1991). I have been particularly protective of my children’s home languages due to my own experience of once favoring English over my first language (Choi, 2014) and of teaching and researching Korean American students, many of whom forget their home language during precollege years in the United States (Choi, 2015; Choi & Yi, 2012).
In this essay I unearth the common assumptions that I have encountered while raising multilingual preschoolers in an English-dominant society. I detail each perception as well as my responses to it, both refutations and my own insecurities, by referring to pertinent research in addition to transcripts of my children’s conversations from my ongoing research study.
ABSTRACT: Increased international marriages and transnational mobility have prompted more children to grow up learning more than two languages simultaneously. However, despite well-known benefits of multilingualism, helping a growing number of trilingual children to reach their full potential has been challenging in the US, as prevalent monolingual policies and biases inhibit home language maintenance and development. The current study aims to describe rich language practices of a trilingual child from birth to age six in communicating meaning across three home languages: Korean, Farsi, and English. This ethnographic study utilised the translanguaging as well as sustainable translanguaging frameworks. The findings show that the trilingual child engaged over time in complex, nuanced, and sophisticated language practices, namely translation and codeswitching, that are unique to trilingual practices. He did so to accomplish different communicative functions by meeting and contradicting needs and practices of his audiences. The study also discusses unique contributions to translanguaging research as well as important implications for home language development for immigrant parents and teachers who work with multilingual learners in schools.
ABSTRACT: It has long been acknowledged that immigrant children who are originally exposed to home languages become rapidly socialized into using only English. Although many children ultimately develop receptive skills in their home language, they often become English dominant and rarely have the opportunity for literacy development. There is also a common misperception that allowing children to acquire three languages and scripts simultaneously is either too difficult or too confusing, or both. That children do not realize their full multilingual, multiliterate potential is not only a loss to their cognitive, emotional and academic development but also a violation of their language rights. As a way to help demystify simultaneous triliteracy development, I study my own child as a motherscholar. He is growing up in the United States as a simultaneous trilingual and triliterate in three alphabetical languages using two non-Roman scripts, Korean and Farsi, as well as a Roman script, English. I examine the ways in which he makes sense of and communicates in his literate world from age three to six by focusing on his emergent writing practices, particularly letter recognition, directionality and name writing in three distinctively different scripts. Social semiotic and translanguaging theories have guided my analysis of video and audio data as well as artefacts pertinent to his writing. Qualitative analysis rooted in an ethnographic case study approach demonstrated that he recognized different orthographic symbols across scripts but made linkages between them, applied correct directionality in scripts but with flexibility, and stamped a trilingual identity and met audiences’ needs through name writing. The findings show the trilingual child engaging in a more flexible and creative process of letter designing as well as name writing in three scripts in more sophisticated and nuanced ways. The study provides insights into educational practices for multilingual children at preschools and schools.
ABSTRACT: In this poem, a letter to my trilingual preschoolers, I urge parents and educators to challenge the monolingual ideology and the discourses against immigrants that have become more prevalent since the 2016 presidential election. This poem is situated within an ethnographic study in which I explore how my children make sense of their world and express their minds by drawing on all of their linguistic repertoires, Korean, Farsi, and English, at home.
ABSTRACT: Linguistically rich country like India has children speaking multiple languages. This is more prevalently observed in the urban Indian metropolitans. Though bilinguals have cognitive gains, trilingual children and their cognitive gains need to be evaluated. A sample of 55 children aged 6 to 8 years, with 27 in bilingual and 28 in trilingual groups, was recruited through purposive non-probability sampling technique from parental reports of their functional linguistic use. They were assessed for background measures of developmental level, intellectual functioning, and socioeconomic status. Working memory tasks comprising of verbal and visuospatial components were conducted on the sample. Results depicted a significant difference between the groups with bilingual children outperforming the trilingual children. Evidence concordant and discordant to these findings are discussed. Recommendations are provided to implore further studies for multilingual homes and formal education set-ups.
ABSTRACT: This case study explores Turkish-English-Arabic multilingual identity sequentially and simultaneously constructed by two refugee siblings raised by their multilingual mother in the family environment where they interact in English and Arabic while they are exposed to Turkish in societal surroundings. By focusing on the multilingualism experiences of a 7-year-old boy and a 10 -year old girl, the study aimed to explore the multilingualism of the children practising their languages. The study is filling the void of refugee children identity and language development under scrutiny via data triangulation, consisting of field notes of the researcher, a metaphor questionnaire, and semi-structured interviews. The findings suggest multilingual identity development is a way socialization and achieving success in their host country. The study offers implications for multilingual child-raising in a refugee setting offering the simultaneous use of the language repertoire of children fostering their interlanguage development, results in better awareness and improved use of the languages.
ABSTRACT: This study examines the role of agency in a young trilingual child’s language choice in interaction with her Mandarin-speaking grandparents. The child was born in Japan to a Chinese mother and a Japanese father. English is used as a lingua franca in the family. The study demonstrates how the child asserts her agency to negotiate the decisions and efforts made by the grandparents. The bond of the heritage language and culture, and the value of child trilingualism are strongly desired and explicitly implemented in the grandparents’ monolingual or ‘bilingual-like’ discourse strategies in dealing with the child’s mixed codes. Meanwhile, the child’s flexible language use is not a passive response to the grandparents’ strategies but an exercise of her four significant senses and behaviour, which are: (1) resisting through no response; (2) moving on in a dual-lingual conversation; (3) assisting the grandparents to decode her non-Mandarin speech; and (4) modifying the language choices of herself and others. This study suggests that language choices of trilingual children are complex. It also provides empirical evidence that grandparents provide an important incentive in the planning of family language policy.
ABSTRACT: This article examines the multilingual repertoires of adult and adolescent Poles living in Norway. The study draws on language portraits and interviews conducted with 14 adults and 12 adolescents living in and around Oslo. The article first discusses multilingualism of the research participants through an analysis of the 26 portraits and then zooms in on the drawings and interview data provided by one family in order to shed light on the ways the participants experience and construct the roles of their different linguistic resources. The study demonstrates that, in general, the research participants are multilingual and that three languages in particular – Polish, English and Norwegian – form an important part of their repertoires. The findings suggest that these linguistic resources and the roles they take on in the individual repertoires, however, might be experienced very differently by the participants. Furthermore, the analysis points to the existence of competing language ideologies among the researched cohort.
ABSTRACT: The goal of this study was to determine how trilinguals select the language they intend to use in a language switching context. Two accounts are examined: (a) a language-specific account, according to which language selection considers the activation level of words of the intended language only (i.e., language co-activation without language competition), and (b) a language non-specific account, where activated words from both the intended and non-intended languages compete for selection (i.e., language co-activation with language competition). Results showed that, in both groups, all three languages competed for selection and that selection was achieved by inhibiting the currently non-relevant languages. Moreover, extending findings from previous research, the study reveals that, in both Experiments 1 and 2, the amount of inhibition was influenced not only by language proficiency but also by the typological similarity between languages. Overall, the study shows that language switching performance can be accounted for by a strategic and flexible inhibitory account. In particular, the controlling system is “strategic” in the sense that it aims at preventing potential conflicting situations, such as typological closeness between languages, and it is “flexible” in that it adjusts languages’ activation levels, depending on the conflict to be solved.
ABSTRACT: The script-dependence hypothesis was tested through the examination of the impact of Russian and Hebrew literacy on English orthographic knowledge needed for spelling and decoding among fifth graders. We compared the performance of three groups: Russian–Hebrew-speaking emerging triliterates, Russian–Hebrew-speaking emerging biliterates who were not literate in Russian (but only in Hebrew) and Hebrew-speaking emerging biliterates. Based on similarities between Russian and English orthographies, we hypothesised that Russian–Hebrew-speaking emerging triliterates would outperform both other groups on spelling and decoding of short vowels and consonant clusters. Further, we hypothesised that all groups would face similar difficulties with novel orthographic conventions. Russian–Hebrew-speaking emerging triliterates demonstrated advantages for spelling and decoding of short vowels and for decoding of consonant clusters. All three groups experienced difficulty with spelling and decoding the digraph th as well as the split digraph (silent e).
ABSTRACT: This article deals with the language development of two children, now aged eight and five, who acquired two languages, Spanish and German, simultaneously from birth, and a third, English, when very young. The different circumstances of the acquisition of the third language have resulted in distinct patterns of linguistic development and proficiency. The article first considers certain linguistic aspects of language development and goes on to take into account wider social and psychological factors which have influenced the children’s rate of acquisition, the proficiency attained and the communicative strategies employed. Reference is made to the largely similar acquisition of the phonological, grammatical and lexical systems of German and Spanish. This is followed by a brief outline of their acquisition of English, which followed a slightly different process in the case of each child. Mention is also made of the older child’s experience of learning to read in her first two languages. The overall aim is to make a contribution to longitudinal case studies of the development of bilingual children. Attention is therefore focused on the issues normally associated with this development, including social and psychological aspects: patterns of interference and code‐switching, language dominance, the role of parents, the social environment and the child’s personality.
ABSTRACT: Trilingualism has often been studied within the framework established for bilingualism. Although there is overlap, the dynamics around trilingualism pose greater variations than is the case with bilingualism. The aim of this study is to analyse the language practices of different groups of trilingual families. Particular attention is paid to the influence of various sociocultural and linguistic factors on whether or not parents used their native languages (NL) with their children. In semi-structured interviews parents in 35 trilingual families in England and 35 in Germany described their language practices with their children. It was found that parental language choices were significantly influenced by their linguistic background. Parents who spoke one NL other than the community language were highly motivated in both countries to pass on their NLs and cultural values to their children. This was mainly related to the effectiveness of the One Person One Language strategy and support from grandparents. In contrast, bilingual/trilingual parents tended to use only one NL with their children, partly because the One Parent One Language was impractical or the beginning of school made it harder to use additional languages. The implications of these findings for typologies of trilingual families are examined in this article.
ABSTRACT: The last decade has witnessed a rapid increase in interest in multilingualism. Whereas a number of scholars in language acquisition research still base their work on the monolingual native speaker norm, others have developed more realistic viewpoints. This article provides an overview of international research on third language learning and teaching, including examples mainly from a European background. It describes sociolinguistic, psycholinguistic and educational aspects of multilingual teaching and emphasizes current research trends in this fairly young area of language teaching. The challenging ways which have been suggested to achieve multilingualism for all necessarily have to address learners, teachers, educators and policy makers. It will be argued that multilingual education can only be successful if language teaching in general is restructured and oriented towards multilingual norms.
ABSTRACT: Most studies involving trilingualism have been carried out within the theoretical framework of bilingualism research. No attempt has been made to delimit trilingualism as a concept in its own right, and often it has been assumed to be an extension of bilingualism. In young children, trilingual language acquisition largely follows the path of bilingual acquisition. With regard to language behavior there are again similarities, but certain differences can be observed. As an overview of studies of individual trilingualism, the present article aims to provide a framework for the discussion. Models of bilingual language competence serve as a starting point to an investigation of possible defining features of trilingual competence. Of particular interest are the pragmatic component of language competence; the trilingual’s ability to make appropriate linguistic choices in monolingual/ bilingual/ trilingual communication modes; and observed codeswitching. The question of how and when a trilingual’s languages become activated or deactivated leads to a consideration of language processing and metalinguistic awareness. In the absence of research involving trilinguals, bilingual models are examined with a view to pointing out possible similarities and differences. It is suggested that these are both of a quantitative and qualitative kind, and therefore trilingual competence is distinct from bilingual competence.
INTRODUCTION: My research focuses on the trilingual family – parents who speak two different languages and live in a third language country and their children – to explore the question how a family copes with the three languages and cultures. Involved are questions as to how the languages are acquired, the parents’ educational choices, and the social and cultural issues arising from daily contact with two or more languages and cultures. The main aim of this research is to show several different aspects of trilingualism and to examine the manner in which these phenomena interconnect and overlap within a trilingual family.
The teenage years are a fascinating time in the life of any family, but what happens when the challenges of parenting teenagers are combined with the desire to help your children build on their multilingual abilities? In this follow-up to Growing up with Three Languages: Birth to Eleven, Xiao-lei Wang offers a unique insight into the dynamics of a multilingual family. She combines practical, evidence-based advice with rich detail from observations of her own family to offer support and inspiration on an aspect of multilingual parenting that has received comparatively little attention. By placing language within the wider context of teenagers’ cognitive and social development, this book will enable parents everywhere to help and guide their children through the next step in their multilingual journey.
This book examines the language development of two children from the ages of two till four, who are growing up exposed to English, Swiss German and French. Its aim is to ascertain the importance of different environmental factors in fostering active trilingualism. These factors include the quantity of input for each language, whether or not the societal language is spoken in the home, and the conversational style of the caregivers. Although increasing numbers of children are being raised trilingually, research in this field is scarce; this study thus makes an important contribution to our knowledge of trilingual language acquisition. A special point of interest lies in a comparison of the acquisition of two minority languages by a single child, since this allows us to pinpoint more precisely how the development of non-societal languages can be influenced. This book will be of considerable interest to researchers and students working on multilingualism and language acquisition alike.
This book aims to enable parents in trilingual families to consider possible language strategies on the basis of analysing their individual circumstances. It includes a tool for diagnostic self-analysis that will help each reader to identify their situation and learn how parents in similar situations have approached the task of supporting their children’s use of languages. Based on a unique survey of parents in trilingual families in two European countries, the book highlights the challenges that trilingual families face when living in mainly monolingual societies. It takes into account the recent emergence of a ‘New Trilingualism’ among educated parents who find themselves in trilingual families because of global trends in migration and the recent expansion of the EU.
This book is a guide for parents who wish to raise children with more than one language and literacy. Drawing on interdisciplinary research, as well as the experiences of parents of multilingual children, this book walks parents through the multilingual reading and writing process from infancy to adolescence. It identifies essential literacy skills at each developmental stage and proposes effective strategies that facilitate multiliteracy, in particular, heritage-language literacy development in the home environment. This book can also be used as a reference for teachers who teach in community heritage language schools and in school heritage (or foreign) language programmes.
This book is based on an eleven-year observation of two children who were simultaneously exposed to three languages from birth. It tells the story of two parents from different cultural, linguistic, and ethnic-racial backgrounds who joined to raise their two children with their heritage languages outside their native countries. It also tells the children’s story and the way they negotiated three cultures and languages and developed a trilingual identity. It sheds light on how parental support contributed to the children’s simultaneous acquisition of three languages in an environment where the main input of the two heritage languages came respectively from the father and from the mother. It addresses the challenges and the unique language developmental characteristics of the two children during their trilingual acquisition process.
Countries in Africa, America, Asia and Europe provide the sociolinguistic contexts described in this volume. They involve settings where three or more languages are spoken and where speakers are trilingual. With the focus on family, school and the wider community, the book illustrates personal, social, cultural and political factors contributing to the acquisition and maintenance of trilingualism and highlights a rich pattern of trilingual language use.
Hoffmann. C. (2001a) The status of trilingualism in bilingualism studies. In J. Cenoz, B. Hufeisen and U. Jessner (eds) Looking Beyond Second Language Acquisition: Studies in Tri and Multilingualism (pp. 13–25). Tübingen: Stauffenburg Verlag.
