Children’s and adults’ language habitus and practices: Exploring harmonious bilingual experiences in an Australian immigration context

ABSTRACT

This study explores the language habitus and practices in one Vietnamese immigrant family in Melbourne. It contributes to research on family language policy in multicultural contexts. Using a Bourdieusian framework to explore the interrelationships between language beliefs, practices and management in a nuanced way, the article discusses how the children’s and adults’ language beliefs are situated in their lived experiences as a result of their participation in the different social fields of family, school, and the workplace. The article then further examines the “structuring” feature of the habitus through an exploration of the children’s agency in family language policy in two aspects: their manifestation of their agency as well as how their habitus and their accumulated capital shape their language practices. Findings point to the shared multilingual habitus between the grandmother, mother and the two children and children’s agency in family language practices and management. The data analysis and theoretical discussions suggest that Bourdieu’s concepts are useful and nuanced lenses to investigate family language policy and are complementary to Spolsky’s seminal theoretical framework of family language policy.

Acknowledgments

The author wishes to convey her sincere thanks to her research participants for spending their precious time participating in the research project. She is also grateful to her supervisors Associate Professor Anna Filipi and Associate Professor Marianne Turner for their great guidance and support throughout the doctoral research project. Her appreciation further goes to all anonymous reviewers who provided valuable and constructive feedback for the refinement of the manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. There have been a number of terms to refer to a person’s first language such as “first language,” “mother tongue,” “heritage language,” “home language,” “native language” and “primary language” (Stavans & Hoffmann, 2015). For consistency in the use of terms, this article will use “home language” to refer to a person’s first language, with the justification that this is usually the language children acquire at home and speak with their caretakers before attending formal school (Eisenchlas et al., 2013).

2. Italics was used in the original quote.

3. Pseudonyms of the research participants.

4. Elly and Tilly were chosen as pseudonyms to reflect the participants’ name choice at home.

5. Pseudonym for example of data analysis.

6. Due to space limitation, only extract 8 was chosen for analysis of the family language practices.