Raising children bilingually is hard: why bother?

Sims, Margaret ; Ellis, Elizabeth M.

ABSTRACT

This paper presents results from a pilot project that sought to establish parental motivations for raising children bilingually in regional Australia in the absence of a co-located speech community. Cultural and linguistic diversity outside metropolitan areas is increasing as a result of Commonwealth Government incentive schemes, and one effect of this is that migrant families must find innovative ways to stem the shift to English that is virtually inevitable in the absence of a systematic and committed family language policy. Five families of varied language background were interviewed regarding their motivations for and challenges in raising their children bilingually. Four key themes emerged, comprising three goals and one major challenge. The three goals were: to create a sense of belonging to a family, a community and a culture: to create a competitive advantage for their children's future: and to improve their children's school learning. The major challenge was the difficulty of the task despite their commitment to the family language plan. Results from this pilot have informed the design of a larger study of regional family language maintenance.

KEY WORDS

bilingualism, bilingual children, family language policy, regional multilingualism, linguistic identity, language maintenance

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INTRODUCTION

As of June 2013 nearly 20% of the total population of Australia spoke a language other than English at home (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2013). Whilst traditionally immigrants tended to settle In metropolitan areas, particularly where they could be close to other migrants from their home countries, they are now increasingly being encouraged to settle outside metropolitan areas, through the Commonwealth Government's State Specific and Regional Migration (SSRM) scheme (Department of Immigration and Border Protection, 2014).

Whilst the SSRM scheme stipulates that migrants must be able to speak English (Department of Immigration and Border Protection, 2014) many migrants come from countries characterised by linguistic diversity. The 10 major source countries of migrants entering Australia in 2011-2012 In the 'skill stream' (including both general skilled migration and employer-sponsored migration categories), were, in descending order of migrant numbers, India, United Kingdom, People's Republic of China, Philippines, South Africa, Sri Lanka, Malaysia, Ireland, Republic of Korea and Pakistan. In addition, 20,019 people were accepted under the refugee and humanitarian programs in 2012-2013, and they were also encouraged to settle in regional Australia. The top six source countries for these groups are: Iraq, Burma, Afghanistan, Bhutan, Congo and Ethiopia, (Department of Immigration and Border Protection, 2013), all of which are linguistically diverse. In other words, many SSRM migrants who move to Australia's non-metropolitan regions may bring one or several languages with them in addition to English.

While rural and regional Australia has always been more culturally diverse than popularly supposed (see, for example, Castles, 1992, for a history of Australia's diversity), the SSRM and refugee and humanitarian programs are increasing the cultural diversity, and also the linguistic diversity to be found in regional Australia. Since many SSRM migrants are young, they may bring children with them, or may start a family after arrival, leading to the premise from which this research proceeds: namely that families of CALD (Culturally and Linguistically Diverse) background need to choose whether they will make conscious efforts to teach their children their home language and maintain that language throughout their childhood and adolescence with the result that the children become bilingual, or to raise their children to speak English only. The term 'bilingual' is used here to include multilingual (Hamers & Blanc, 2000), and we adhere to the view of 'bilingual' that acknowledges the rarity of balanced bilingualism (equal proficiency in two languages), and recognises that most bilinguals use their languages for complementary purposes, resulting in different strengths in different domains (Grosjean, 2008; Garcia, 2009; Baker, 2011).

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Hence a bilingual may be a 'receiving bilingual' (Baker, 2011) (who understands but does not speak one of their languages) or may be bilingual in oral mode but not written: i.e. lack biliteracy. Children brought up as bilinguals in contexts where a powerful world language is dominant (as is English in Australia) are likely to have differential abilities in each language (Caldas, 2006) and we regard this as normal and entirely unproblematic.

There is widespread consensus that children both have the right to acquire and maintain their family language, and that they benefit from doing so. (There may be more than one non-English family language, but 'language' will be used here to include 'languages'). Children's rights to learn and use their mother tongue are recognised and promoted by both international and Australian organisations, in the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (United Nations, 1989, Article 30) and in literature in the fields of education and applied linguistics over the last three decades (Skutnabb-Kangas, 1981, 2000; Cummins, 2007; Garcia, 2009).

There is copious evidence of the benefits to children of bilingualism (Wong-Fillmore, 2000; Piller, 2001; Baker, 2011). Vast numbers of studies internationally have attested to the cognitive, social and academic benefits to children of having two languages, ever since the seminal paper of Peal and Lambert (1962) alerted the research community to major flaws in earlier studies that had found bilingualism to be detrimental. Australia's successive language policies have long recognised the benefits of bilingualism and have identified its benefits to the individual as being intellectually, socially, culturally, emotionally and employment-related, while its benefits to society are those related to employment, trade and diplomacy (Djlte, 2010; Lo Bianco, 2003). There is research evidence to show that children who retain and build on their first language when they enter school achieve better results In English and in academic study overall than when their first language is lost (Adesope, Lavin, Thompson, & Ungerleider, 2010; Lightbown, 2008). Bilingual children have been shown to have increased creative and problem-solving skills (Adesope et al., 2010; Blalystok, 2001). Evidence of such cognitive advantage, Including meta-linguistic awareness, has recently been supported by advances in neurobiological research which shows that bilinguals have greater numbers of neural connections and grey matter (Mechelli et al" 2004) leading to greater executive control (Carlson & Meltzoff, 2008). Children develop more sophisticated emotional understanding through knowing two languages, each of which expresses an emotional landscape in particular ways (Pavlenko, 2006).

Australia is proudly multicultural but not overtly multilingual; while over 300 languages are spoken (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2013) they are overwhelmingly spoken by first generation immigrants and Indigenous people living in remote areas rather than by the mainstream majority of Australians (Clyne, 2005). Second and third generations of immigrants undergo a language shift to English, often losing their mother tongue entirely (Bradley & Bradley, 2013; Clyne, 2005). For an immigrant family, joining the mainstream over generations all too often means becoming monolingual in English. Language and culture are of course inextricably intertwined, but the argument here is that while rights to maintain culture are well recognised and celebrated, rights to maintain family language are much less visible, less well understood and less celebrated. When an immigrant child with the potential to become bilingual becomes monolingual in the dominant language this is known as 'subtractive bilingualism' (Baker, 2011). Subtractive bilingualism constitutes a waste of potential for the individual, and a waste of resources for Australia.

As mentioned briefly above, scholars of bilingualism now recognise that a perfect command of two languages is a rare and unrealistic phenomenon, and that bilinguals' linguistic repertoire is a unique configuration of their two languages that, together, fulfil all their communicative needs (Garcia, 2009; Grosjean, 1982, 1999). Bilingualism has linguistic and psycholinguistic aspects, but it is also profoundly social, in that speakers perform a bilingual identity in situated social contexts (Pavlenko, 2006). For people who are bilingual to lose one of their languages is to lose their belonging to social networks and access to social capital (Bourdieu, 1991). A child growing up monolingual in a bilingual family loses 'potential for belonging' (Ellis & Bilbatua, 2013).

The Longitudinal Study of Australian Children (see the official government website--http://www.growingupinaustralia.gov.au/) has provided a unique opportunity to study language maintenance in young Australian children. Verdon, McLeod, and Winsler (2014) found that the percentage of children in the study using a home language varied overtime: 9.1% at Wave 1, 15.7% at Wave 2 and 15.2% at Wave 3. (There are 2 years between each wave of data collection). Most of these children maintained their language other than English over time (91.5% between waves 1 and 2 and 86.6% between waves 1 and 3). Children who spoke Arabic were more likely to maintain their language. Children who spoke Italian were more likely to increase their use of English and decrease their use of Italian.

A range of factors impacted on language maintenance: the extent to which parents spoke the language; whether grandparents were in the home with the grandchildren; whether the family were first or second-generation immigrants; and the support parents were able to access from their children's educational settings. This study did not examine the impact of religion on language maintenance but Clyne and Kipp's (1997) comparison of data from three Australian Census surveys leads to their suggestion that the use of home language in religious observances as a 'core value' (Smolicz, 1981) is one contributing factor in language maintenance. 'In the case of Greek, language is intertwined with other core values, such as religion and historical consciousness' (Clyne & Kipp, 1997, p. 464).

All of these factors combine to create a speech community which can be defined broadly as 'a group of people, identified regionally or socially, who share at least one language' (Crystal, 2010, p. 458) but in practice it is traditionally treated as a geographic entity, with numbers of speakers and the size of social networks being considered as indicators of the chances of success in passing on home language to children (Kirsch, 2012). In this context, those who are living in regional Australia, with limited access to a relevant speech community, are significantly challenged in their ability to raise their children bilingually. Certainly in her study Kirsch identified the risk of increasing the symbolic power of English given it was always used outside the home and thus detracting from the power of the first language. She saw this as a significant risk to successful bilingualism; a risk faced by immigrants across regional Australia.

It is clear that the family is a crucial site for language maintenance, and while supportive socio-educational policies help, the onus is very firmly on families if they wish their children to grow up bilingual (Pauwels, 2005). Childhood bilingualism in a monolingual society does not happen automatically but is rather a planned affair within the family (Grosjean, 1982; Piller, 2001). Family language planning, as distinct from national or state language planning, involves the goals a family has for the use of languages within the family, including what language(s) children will learn and use, and the daily strategies they use to achieve those goals. Understanding WFIY families want to establish bilingualism in their children is the first step in seeking to understand family language planning. This paper seeks to examine the underlying motivations in the context of a regional area of Australia where lack of access to a speech community makes achieving bilingualism a challenge. We contend that understanding the reasoning underpinning family language planning in this most difficult of contexts will contribute to a broader understanding of family language planning, and ultimately the community supports that can aid this process. We ask: in a context where maintaining a parent's first language is difficult (i.e. regional Australia where there is not an easily accessible speech community) what motivates parents to raise their children bilingually?

METHODOLOGY

Given our aim is to understand parental perspectives, we have used an interpretive ontology where we position truth as something created by each individual. Our epistemology is one of symbolic interactionism. We interpret this approach in the manner outlined by Blumer (1969) and as used in more recent research (as, for example in Davis, 2014; Kotarba, 2014) in that we argue parents construct their understanding of the world based on their experiences, develop a shared meaning within the family and are able to convey that shared meaning to us, the researchers, using language. This language-based sharing occurs in the context of interviews as described below.

This study is a pilot for a larger study currently underway. We have framed this pilot around the premise that parents' motivations and understandings about bilingualism underpin the development of their family language plan. Our ongoing study further explores the development and implementation of family language plans and family language communities in regional areas and we are not yet in a position to report on any of these data. Instead in this paper we focus on the shared meaning we aim to establish with parents around the underpinning motivations and understandings that inform their family language plan.

PARTICIPANTS

We used convenience sampling to recruit five families from one regional town. Several families were known to one of the researchers through her links with bilingual support. The inclusion criteria for recruitment were:

One or both of the parents spoke an immigrant language fluently. (We acknowledge that 'fluently' is a subjective term: it is, however, widely understood by non-linguists and hence was useful in recruitment advertising; further, our telephone screening procedures permitted us to elicit more information about proficiency in the home language). The family had at least one child under the age of 12 whom they were raising bilingually.

At least one parent had a sufficient command of English to be able to communicate effectively in an English-language interview, and to read and understand the Information Letter that was written in English.

Family characteristics are summarised in Table 1.

METHOD

Families were asked to participate in an interview and it was left to them to choose if both parents were interviewed together or if one parent would represent the family. Ethics approval was gained through the university's ethics committee. At the beginning of the interview the Information Letter was reviewed to ensure that families understood and were giving fully informed consent. Interviews followed a semi-structured schedule. This allowed flexibility for families to narrate stories as they wished to share their experiences and understandings and to vary the sequence of questions if this was necessary to maintain a positive interaction. Interviews were held at times and places convenient to families; some chose a home visit but others chose a more public venue. Interviews varied in length but none were longer than one hour.

ANALYSIS

Interviews were taped with family consent. The interview with Family 4 was reconstructed from field notes and written feedback from the family after the recorder was found to have failed. Transcriptions were read and re-read and a process of constant comparison (as described by Glaser, 1965) was used to identify themes. For this paper we actively sought themes that focused on families' explanations of why they wished to raise their children bilingually; the thinking behind the development of their family language plan.

RESULTS

The results are presented under the headings of the four key themes found in the data relating to family motivations for establishing and maintaining their family language plan.

THEME 1: FAMILIES WANT TO CREATE A SENSE OF BELONGING TO FAMILY/COMMUNITY/CULTURE

All five of the families talked about the importance of maintaining their identities as members of an extended family, and members of a community and culture.

They wanted their children to feel part of an extended family, and able to interact with family members in the home country. This theme is about feeling a sense of belonging to the home culture, of establishing an identity in that home culture:

I'm Chinese, my parents are Chinese and my parents don't speak English--so the language is like a bridge, you know they can communicate (Family 3).

I wanted her to be able to communicate with her grandparents--to lose that would be very sad ... We want her to know her relations in Japan ... We don't understand other families who say 'we don't need Japanese in our life' and don't make an effort to teach their kids. It's throwing away something that belongs to the family (Family 4).

Being valued by that community was critically important:

... when I use the Krama Inggil which I have use with my neighbourhood with the older people, it's really resembling all that we are a people who has a good politeness education from our family which make us so proud of it ... And some people if, 'Oh, you are using a very high level of Javanese' it seems that you are very polite person and as a Javanese we really would like, 'Oh, we are so polite' we are so very ... (Family 1).

Because it important. If she go live there and if she act the way she act, she will be, she will be look at like, the family never teach her a good manner (Family 2).

The culture and language of the home village may be different from the larger culture in which it operates. Family 2 spoke of the need to prepare their children not only to be accepted Into their local community (which required Lao language) but to the wider Thai society (which required Thai language):

... because their exposure to Lao is in the village, in Isan, where it sounds funny to be speaking Thai, like you should be speaking Lao because everyone there is speaking Lao, and there's no, that's the natural language that's spoken in the village ... so you've been, even though you speak Lao, you speak at home. When you go to school you speak Thai (Family 2).

Belonging to the home culture required children to learn and understand more than the language, but participants felt that fluency in language was an Important part of this:

Thai is this wonderful key that unlocks every, the culture ... because I think it's very important to their cultural identity, um, because I've seen half kids, um, who don't speak the other language and to me they always appear disconnected from that half of their culture (Family 2).

I think learning the language is a window to culture ... so you can learn more from different cultures for example you can change culture from our own culture so the key things for understanding both is language (Family 5).

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The focus of this theme was about language as a tool to assist belonging: language was seen as an important component of the children's identity and ability to participate in family, community and culture.

THEME 2: FAMILIES WANT TO CREATE A COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE FOR THEIR CHILDREN IN THE FUTURE

Some of the families saw their efforts to rear their children bilingually as an investment in the children's future. In an increasingly globalised world, the ability to operate effectively in more than one culture and more than one language was perceived as a significant advantage.

Mum: And English for sure, because we consider that, the ability of using English is really, prestigious, and also really good opportunity to get, to get accepted in a good university and also having a good job position (Family 1).

Dad: I reckon you're letting your kids down in some ways if you've got the capacity to do it and you don't, I reckon you're kind of letting them down.

Mum: It's not about letting them down for me though, for me it's about give them future opportunities. Like opportunity in the future should I say (Family 2).

... it's an employment advantage in the future (Family 3).

Families here saw two advantages to bilingualism. One was the competitive edge for those who were fluent in English, given increasing globalism and the hegemony of the English language. The other was the flexibility in thinking and behaviour that came with speaking two languages and being able to live in two different cultures.

They saw this latter as giving their children more choices in later life: the ability to live and work in more than one culture and country.

THEME 3: FAMILIES WANT TO IMPROVE LEARNING THROUGH THE SCHOOL YEARS

Families also saw shorter-term advantages arising from their children's bilingualism. Some families had done research or read about the advantages of bilingualism:

And also for the reasons of, um, kind of cognitive development and I think if they can get their brains around speaking another two or three languages, then that'll help them get their brains around a lot of other things ... (Family 2).

In some ways this theme is linked to the second theme above: where families are positioning bilingualism as an advantage for their children. In this theme parents talk about the immediate advantages their children experience. Family 2 noted:

I really noticed it with [child], that as her English improved, reading and writing, her Thai improved because some of the concepts overlap (Family 2).

THEME: FAMILIES FOUND IT HARD (DESPITE WANTING TO) TO STICK TO THE FAMILY LANGUAGE PLAN

Families in this study used the language other than English mainly in their homes rather than outside the home because of the lack of access to a wider speech community. Some of the families operated a one-parent-one-language (OPOL) approach (Barron-Hauwaert, 2004), which limited children's exposure to the language and sometimes caused difficulties when other family members in the home could not understand all that was being said:

OPOL does cause some problems though. I am often the odd one out. The household is mainly Japanese speaking and I don't understand. It can be unfair and lead to misunderstandings. It makes parenting and family communication much more complicated when parenting occurs in two languages and one parent is not really proficient in one of them. But then again if I understood Japanese (child) wouldn't speak English to me and the system would break down. It's a balance really between those two things (Family 4).

This approach also caused a strain on the parent who was speaking the language other than English and who was the only resource person for this language:

It seems that It's impossible, it's only by myself that try to promote Bahasa to him (Family 1).

DISCUSSION

The focus of assimilation policies in the past (Jupp, 1995) was for migrants to change their beliefs and practices to fit more closely with those of the host culture (Bullrich, 1989). Even today with a focus on multiculturalism, migrants still tend to undertake this mapping (either consciously or unconsciously) and identify beliefs and practices they wish to maintain in order to 'fit in' and others they are willing to modify (Sims & Omaji, 1999). The end result for many migrants is a shift In identity:

In a sense, migration has changed these families into people with no cultural home: they are aware they still function very differently to the majority in their new country, but have changed too much to be comfortable in their home country. (Sims & Omaji, 1999, p. 95)

Global mobility Is recognised as a risk for confused identity (Grimshaw & Sears, 2008) but there is evidence that those who maintain strong identities in both cultures are advantaged (Lee, 2010). One study showed improved scores on cultural empathy and open mindedness (Dewaele & Stavans, 2014) and those children who have a secure 'third culture' are thought to be hugely advantaged in the world of International business (Selmer & Lam, 2004).

If we think about these Identity challenges posed by migration, then it is not surprising that families in this study want to provide their children with the language tools needed to maintain a sense of belonging and feelings of acceptance into the home country family, community and culture. The families in this pilot study clearly saw this as the key driver of their family language plan. The efficacy of this thinking is demonstrated in the Dewaele and Stavans (2014) study which shows that those with advanced knowledge of more than one language exhibited higher levels of social initiative, open mindedness and cultural empathy.

Also In support of this thinking is evidence that multi-racial (and multi-lingual) identities are richer and more complex (Herman, 2004). Identity Accumulation Theory suggests that multiple identities provide a resource upon which people can call to manage stress, and this improves self-esteem and coping (Owens, Robinson, & Smith-Lovin, 2010). The ability to choose which identity from which to operate In different situations (Tajfel & Turner, 1979; Norton Pierce, 1995; Norton & Toohey, 2011) is equivalent to the code-shifting children are thought to undertake when they move from one language to another (Francis, 2011). The family language plans underpinning this study aimed to provide these benefits to the children through their bilingualism. Families wanted their children to belong to both the home culture and the culture of residence and language was a key resource children needed to achieve this.

Belonging in the culture of residence was positioned by some of the families as important for their children's future. The language used in this culture of residence, English, was thought to be the vehicle that would provide their children with opportunities for educational success and expanded employment options. These families are clear in their minds that English is the language of globalisation (as, for example, Is argued by Haberland, 2009) and that their children need to be able to function well In English.

Being bilingual, they felt, not only benefited their children's future study and employment options, but also Improved their educational performance in the present. A similar finding is identified in Piller (2001) where families saw the effort they put into rearing their children bilingually as an investment. There is a significant literature on the advantages of bilingualism (for example Adesope et al., 2010; Carlson & Meltzoff, 2008; Mindt et al., 2008; Treccani, Argyri, Sorace, & Della Sala, 2009) and it is not the role of this paper to review this evidence. Rather, we point out that some of the families in this study were aware of these advantages and this contributed to their desire to rear their children bilingually.

Despite these underpinning beliefs that led families in the study to develop their family language plans, they faced challenges that Impacted on their implementation. These challenges were particularly related to their residence in a regional area of Australia where there was a limited speech community, which poses a risk to language development and maintenance. Rodriguez (2010), for example, suggests that language maintenance requires the 'support of the minority language outside the home, with collaboration among the schools, the families, and the community' (p. 1). For some of the families in our study, the one parent who spoke a language other than English was the only language resource available and this put a strain on both parents. Firstly this was because, as suggested by one family, it took more time to communicate when other family members did not easily understand. This was coupled with a perceived pressure to use the language all the time because there were no other speakers to operate as back-up. Secondly, this was because when family members were communicating in that language, the parent who did not speak it felt excluded.

CONCLUSION

Families in this pilot study clearly desire to rear their children bilingually in order to support their children to feel they belonged both in the home culture and in Australia. They want their children to be able to move between cultures and languages and see that this will prepare them for a competitive employment market in the future. They also see immediate advantages for their children's educational attainments. Despite their strong desire to rear their children bilingually they face a range of challenges, partly due to the limited speech communities available to them in regional Australia.

Our ongoing research project aims to explore how these families continue to follow their family language plans, and the strategies they use to continue to rear their children bilingually. In the ongoing project, we investigate family language planning and practice in three families in each of three small regional towns, over a period of three years.

Families are given a digital video recorder and asked to record short segments of normal family interaction in one or both languages, in two cycles per year. A cycle consists of a baseline interview (first cycle only) followed by three visits by a research assistant who discusses the footage with the family, identifying patterns of practice, use of technology to compensate for lack of a traditional speech community and monitoring changing family language policy.

The study is yielding rich data on the language maintenance hopes and experiences of families in regional areas who lack a co-located speech community.

We hope that understanding these experiences in more depth will provide information useful to parents in developing their family language plans, enabling them to see what has worked for others, and also to enable services, including teaching of languages, to provide better targeted supports so that Australia can capitalise on the wealth and experience of its future bilingual citizens.

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Margaret Sims is Professor of Early Childhood at the University of New England. Her research Interests focus around quality community-based services for young children and their families. Her recent projects include an International study on professionalisation in early childhood and another on mental health/ emotional wellbeing in family day care in Australia. She and the co-author have recently been involved in reporting Margaret's research on grandparents who have little or no contact with their grandchildren using a different approach: that of ethnotheatre. The film created from this project is freely available at www.une.edu.au/grandparents.

Liz Ellis Is Senior Lecturer in Linguistics at the University of New England. Her research interests are in family and adult bilingualism and second language learning and teaching. She is the Chief Investigator on the ARC Discovery Project: Ellis and Sims: Bilingualism in the Bush: reconceptualising 'speech community' in immigrant family language maintenance in regional Australia, of which the data reported here was the pilot study.

Table 1: Characteristics of participating families

Family   Languages       Family members    Participant   Languages
         known by at                       in the        used with
         least one                         interview     child in
         family member                                   the family

1        1) English

         2) Javanese-    Mum                             English
         Ngoko and       Dad               Mum           Javanese--
         Krama Inggil                                    Krama Inggil
                                                         Indonesian
         3) Indonesian   Child 5 years

         4) Arabic

2        1) English      Mum               Mum           English
                                                         Thai A
         2) Thai         Dad               Dad           little Lao

         3) Lao (Suai)   Child 8 years

                         Child 6 years

                         Child 21 months

3        1) English      Mum
                                           Mum           English
         2) Chinese      Dad               Dad           Mandarin
         (Mandarin)
                         Child 6 years

                         Child 7 years

4        1) English      Mum               Mum           English

         2) Japanese     Dad               Dad           Japanese

         3) German       Child 9 years

5        1) English      Mum               Mum           English

         2) Persian      Dad               Dad           Persian

                         Child 6 years