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10CHILDREN'S PARTICIPATION IN HERITAGE LANGUAGE
PRACTICES Abduvokhidov A.A.
Abduvokhidov Abbosbek Abduvohidovich - Student, ENGLISH LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE DEPARTMENT, FACULTY FOREIGN LANGUAGES, ANDIJAN STATE UNIVERSITY NAMED AFTER Z.M. BABUR ANDIJAN, REPUBLIC OF UZBEKISTAN
Abstract: maintenance of the heritage language is a constant concern for families raising children bilingual or multilingually in communities where their language is a minority language. Sociolinguistic research has produced an extensive body of knowledge about the general trends that characterize language maintenance and the strong tendencies towards language shift in the second generation of immigrants . While research on bilingualism/multilingualism in families has suggested particular approaches to language maintenance and highlighted the interplay between wider societal processes and parental perspectives on family language policies, the family, like many domains of social life, constitutes a complex, intergenerational context for negotiating language policies and expectations regarding language use.
Keywords: children, adult, bilingual, multilingual, language.
Studies adopting a dynamic perspective on language socialization have demonstrated that children's language choices and interactional practices significantly influence and shape parental language behavior[1], and that children actively contribute to language maintenance [2] or language shift (replacement of a language by another one), for instance, by resisting use of adults' heritage languages study of intergenerational use of Kinyarwanda in an immigration context demonstrated how children, by displaying their problems in understanding the heritage language, initiated negotiations about language choice for adult child interaction. The adults resolved the language negotiations by adopting the child's selected code, French, and established the majority language as the medium of conversation.
Children's participation in educational practices in the majority language, together with their siblings and peers, constitutes a strong language socializing factor that contributes to generational language shift [3]. Children tend to choose language varieties that they use with their peers, and parent-child interaction becomes the crucial site for children's development of competences in the heritage language.
Some interactional studies have shown that language choice in families serves a range of interactional purposes and is locally negotiated [4]. Furthermore, children can deploy various, compliant or resistant, strategies in response to parental language policies, using the multiple languages available to them strategically. They can align themselves with the parent or challenge parental authority[5]. For affective and social reasons, parents may accommodate children's language choices rather than insisting on heritage language use, by, for instance, allowing a parallel mode of interaction -children using the majority, and parents their heritage language - or adjusting to the child's choice of the majority language[6].
Thus, in the present study, we direct our attention to interactional practices through which family language policies are realized in face-to-face interactions and examine parents' requests for translation (which are viewed as successful in prompting and achieving the child's use of the heritage language). We explore interactional development and instructional/socializing potentials of these practices, and focus on the participants' language choices, as well as on the social relations and identities invoked and negotiated in parent-child interactions.
The present case study is part of a larger ongoing project on language socialization patterns in five bilingual/multilingual Iranian families in Sweden (first generation adult immigrants with children born in Sweden, all families with a middle-class background and occupations).
Iranians constitute a significant number of immigrants in Sweden. They are a heterogeneous group with regard to class, ethnicity[7] and language. The data consist of video recordings of everyday family interactions (mealtimes and sibling play; approximately five hours of video-recordings from each), ethnographic observations, and interviews with the parents and the children. The interviews dealt with the families' ethnic background, leisure activities, parents' and children's views on language, language ideologies, traditions, contact with Swedish society and speakers of their heritage languages, and children's schooling. Field notes were taken during several visits to each family (during and after the video recordings). The recordings were made by the parents themselves, using a camera on a tripod [8]. Family mealtimes were chosen because they are important social events that not only give family members an opportunity to get together and share experiences, but also provide an intergenerational multiparty pragmatic context for socialization and negotiations regarding what constitutes valued language and cultural behavior [9].
The present study focuses in detail on the language practices of the only family in which the children actively used heritage languages (daily interactions in the other four families in the larger study were characterized by Persian-Swedish adult-child parallel discourse). Video recordings of family interactions were logged and transcribed (eight mealtimes and sibling play sessions). Repeated viewings, readings of transcriptions, interviews with family members, as well as observations of the family's cultural and media habits informed the analysis.
References
1. Luykx Aurolyn. 2005. Children as socializing agents: Family language policy in situations of language shift. Proceedings of the 4th International Symposium on Bilingualism (ISB), 1407-1414.
2. Paugh Amy L. 2005. Multilingual play: Children's code-switching, role play, and agency in Dominica, West Indies. Language in Society, 34(1). 63-86.
3. Rindstedt Camilla & Karin Aronsson. 2002. Growing up monolingual in a bilingual community: The Quichua revitalization paradox. Language in Society, 31 (5). 721-742.
4. Ogiermann Eva. 2013. On the inclusive and exclusive functions of the 'other' language in family talk. Multilingua- Journal of Cross-Cultural and Interlanguage Communication, 32(4). 463-484.
5. Pitton Liliane Meyer. 2013. From language maintenance to bilingual parenting: Negotiating behavior and language choice at the dinner table in binational-bilingual families. Multilingua Journal of Cross-Cultural and Interlanguage Communication, 32(4). 507-526.
6. Gafaranga Josef. 2010. Medium request: Talking language shift into being. Language in Society, 32 (2). 241-270.
7. Moinian Farzaneh. 2007. Negotiating identities: Exploring children 's perspectives on themselves and their lives. Stockholm: Stockholm Institute of Education Press dissertation.
8. Heath Christian, Jon Hindmarsh & Paul Luff. 2010. Video in qualitative research: Analyzing social interaction in everyday life. Chennai: India.
9. Blum-Kulka, Shoshana. 1997. Dinner talk: Cultural patterns of sociability and socialization in family discourse. Mahwah, NY: Lawrence Erlbaum.
