How Parents’ Perceived Value of the Heritage Language Predicts Their Children’s Skills

Abstract

The growing field of family language policies (FLPs), defined as overt and explicit planning in relation to language use among family members, has garnered increasing interest. FLPs influence child–caretaker interactions and are closely linked to child language development and acquisition. This study investigates the impact of FLPs on children’s proficiency in their heritage language (HL). Employing a multi-method approach, we conducted semi-structured interviews with 53 multilingual parents to explore their beliefs, ideologies, and language management within the family context. Concurrently, their children were administered standardized tasks in their heritage language (HL) to assess receptive vocabulary skills and morphosyntactic comprehension. Our findings indicate that parents’ perceived value of the HL significantly correlates with their children’s language performance, going beyond the influence of reported domestic language usage.

The attitudes at the heart of multilingual family language policies

“…Additionally, it enables more nuanced research regarding the influence of parents' attitudes towards childhood multilingualism on their language-related behaviours towards their children -and thereby, ultimately, their children's multilingual development (cf. Ronderos et al, 2022;Cangelosi et al, 2024).…”

“…In this paper, we investigate parental language beliefs, which we deem to be at the heart of multilingual FLPs because they shape parents' language-related behaviours -and thus, ultimately, their children's multilingual development (e.g. Ronderos et al, 2022; see also Cangelosi et al, 2024). We approach parental language beliefs from an attitudes perspective.…”