This article examines views of Albanian immigrant parents regarding home-language maintenance in Greece. It aims to reveal language ideologies in relation to broader ideologies about schooling and education. Following a qualitative interpretative approach, we conducted semi-structured individual and group interviews with 19 parents of bilingual students. Parents express a range of ideological stances from total resistance to the dominant school monolingual ideology to passive acceptance and could be grouped into three categories: (a) the "fighters," who make a conscious claim for home-language use and education; (b) the "probilingualism" parents, who partially consent to the dominant discourse of monolingualism in the Greek school; and (c) the "indifferent" parents, who appear not to be concerned about the future of the Albanian language. Data from interviews suggest that dominant school-language attitudes and practices play an important role in shaping the language views and practices of immigrant parents.

The goal of the study was to assess differences between native Greek and bilingual, immigrant children of Albanian descent learning Greek as a second language on a receptive vocabulary measure. Vocabulary measures were obtained at five time points, 6 months apart, from 580 children attending Grades 2–4. Individual variability on both initial performance (intercept) and growth rate (slope) was assessed using hierarchical linear modeling, which included linguistic/ethnic group, parental education (as a socioeconomic status [SES] indicator), gender, and a measure of nonverbal cognitive ability as time-invariant predictors of vocabulary growth. Results indicated that linguistic/ethnic group, parental education, and baseline nonverbal cognitive ability were significant predictors of initial vocabulary scores, whereas only linguistic/ethnic group and nonverbal ability accounted for significant variability in vocabulary growth rates. Additional analyses confirmed that linguistic/ethnic group remained a significant predictor of receptive vocabulary knowledge at both the intercept and the slope levels even after controlling for the initial differences between groups on parental education and block design subtest scores.

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