Additive bilingualism through family language policy: Strategies, identities and interactional outcomes

Abstract

This paper summarizes data from two case studies of how two families enact language policies with the goal of cultivating early and additive bilingualism. The focus is on primary caretakers’ everyday speech and their interactional strategies. Our aim is to provide insight and additional descriptive data concerning how family language policies are established, enacted, and negotiated in the home. The findings suggest that caretaker status (mother vs. nanny) plays a role in quantity of speech, but not necessarily in the complexity of that speech. All primary caretakers (that is, both mothers and nannies) tended to stick with their stated language policy and to avoid English; in contrast, children frequently used English in interactions with caretakers. In response to children’s non-target language use, all caretakers were most likely to ‘moveon’ and to continue the conversation in the target language. However, mothers were found to be more likely than nannies to expand on and incorporate the child’s non-target language utterance into their own turn. Nannies, in contrast, were more likely to engage in explicit teaching or prompting. The findings are discussed in terms of child learning opportunities but also with an eye to how caretakers’ language use patterns are linked to their identities within the family.

Key words: bilingualism, language policy, child second language acquisition.