Family language policy: Core issues of an emerging field

The Role of Input Factors in the Lexical Development of European Portuguese as a Heritage Language in Portuguese–German Bilingual Speakers

“…One of the factors which has been related to the quantity of language exposure is the presence of older siblings in the household, namely in families in which both parents are speakers of a minority language. According to several authors, the presence of older siblings usually alters the patterns of language use in the family, mainly because older siblings tend to introduce the majority language in the home environment [16,[73][74][75][76], which may compromise the intergenerational transmission of the minority language. In two separate studies with Spanish-English bilingual children growing up in the U.S., Bridges and Hoff [16] found that not only do bilingual toddlers receive more input in English from older siblings than from other family members, but also that children with older siblings are more advanced in the majority language than the other participants without older siblings.…”

Bilingualism as Conceptualized and Bilingualism as Lived: A Critical Examination of the Monolingual Socialization of a Child with Autism in a Bilingual Family

“…Family language policy (FLP) is an emerging interdisciplinary field that provides a framework for examining issues of explicit language planning in families, typically within the context of heritage language maintenance (Schwartz 2010;Spolsky 2012). FLP draws from and contributes to two distinct areas of study that have traditionally had little overlap: language policy, which has its roots in sociology, and child language acquisition, which has been traditionally situated in developmental psycholinguistics.…”

“…In other words, FLP is the study of what people think about language, what they wish to do with language, and what they actually do with language. The linkages between the three aspects are complex, non-linear and even conflicting (Schwartz 2010).…”

“…Drawing on the frameworks of family language policy (Schwartz 2010;Spolsky 2012), I examined the family members' stated beliefs about bilingualism, the ways in which those beliefs motivated their language management efforts, and how both their beliefs and management plans converged and diverged from the their practices with Oscar within dinnertime routines. The findings showed that although the family members' ways of speaking with Oscar appeared at first to be consistent with their monolingual plan, a more in-depth, practiceoriented analysis revealed their language use patterns to be much more complex.…”

Handbook of Early Childhood Special Education

“…When ECSE programs partner effectively with DLL families, children experience a range of important developmental benefi ts including early language and literacy skills as well as improved academic achievement (Durand, 2011 ;Jeynes, 2012 ). Families have also been shown to serve a critical role in the preservation of their home language and culture (Schwartz, 2010 ). However, most studies have found that DLL families participate in their children's educational programs at lower rates than non-DLL families (McWayne, Campos, & Owsianik, 2008 ).…”