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362 Children's Multilingual Language Development

Decent Essays

Work in Progress
361 The examination of the maintenance of minority languages and development of
362 children’s multilingual competencies remains a primary focus of current work in bi-
363 and multilingual language socialization research; however, this work takes a multi-
364 sited and multifaceted approach with greater attention to language practices and
365 ideologies across time and space as well as the sociopolitical context that shapes
366 family-internal processes. One line of research focuses on shedding light on why
367 families who seem to adopt similar sorts of strategies (e.g., OPOL, or One Parent
368 One Language) often have very different outcomes in terms of child language
369 proficiencies, with much of this work pointing to …show more content…

373 One continuing trend in language socialization research on the effectiveness of
374 OPOL and other parent strategies for developing bilingual language competence has
375 been a closer focus on children’s agency in socializing interactions. Some of this 10 L.W. Fogle and K.A. King 376 work has extended the focus on the bidirectional nature of language socialization in
377 the family by studying older children’s agency, and specifically resistance to the use
378 of a heritage or minority language at home. Gyogi (2014), for example, highlighted
379 children’s agency, and specifically their construction of flexible bilingual identities,
380 in her study of two families with Japanese-speaking mothers in London. Similar to
381 Fogle (2012), she argues that children’s agency in family language socialization is
382 multiple and contextual as the children resisted the mothers’ monolingual language
383 policies, but demonstrated different practices in interaction with the researcher.
384 In a further study that integrated language socialization and family language
385 policy (see King and Fogle 2017, in McCarty & May volume Language …show more content…

Pietikäinen et al.
446 (2008), for example, examined how one Sami boy in the Finnish north appropriated
447 and rejected different language resources in moment-to-moment interaction. In this
448 study, nexus analysis provided a tool for drawing together multimodal data collected
449 from the research participant to understand his multilingual languaging practices.
450 The framework also usefully captures language ideologies and practices across
451 scales of space and time and brings together analysis of public discourse, habitus
452 and socialization, and interaction and offers an effective tool for language sociali-
453 zation research that seeks to capture simultaneous processes (Scollon and Scollon
454 2007).
455 Thus, as one line of research continues to focus closely on family-internal
456 processes of raising bilingual children and promoting bilingual competence, other
457 studies have begun to propose innovative ways for researching language socializa-
458 tion processes across contexts to better investigate the contingent nature of bilingual
459 language competence and identity. This has been productive work, but it is

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