I really dont know what to start with . On a personal level am very sorry to have read this unpleasant experience. Must have been very upsetting for the whole family. But I am glad that you have taken both a close and distance view of this nasty episode and have addressed it academically. I like the application of social-pscychology theory to the problem because it actually help us understand it using a differnt lens. Linguistic ethnographically I suppose we will have to see the problem in the personal biography of Ms X, the institution and histories of ideas. Look how nicely Ms X have correlated two diverse phenomenon by drawing on her understanding of multilingualism. I think the episode shows us the complex ways in which people respond to the problems and how cleverly actors draw on stable, pervasive and reified ideas . If we look closely Ms X explanation actually covered her up. She has been so successful here in shifting the question to a different dimension all together.
Khan
Lancaster

Hi Annamarie, what a great idea to look at the child care worker exam in order to understand what they might (not) know about bilingualism! Only a few days ago, Hanna Torsh observed that in the parenting advice literature (Dr Spock and the countless contemporary incarnations …) she’s reading one thing that is never mentioned is bilingualism and how, for instance, language milestones might be different for bilingual children. So, it’s a huge body of knowledge that serves to normalize monolingualism by rendering linguistic diversity invisible. Together with the training and professional development aimed at childcare workers and teachers this would make a fascinating PhD project!

Wanting to know more about how Japanese nursery school teachers form opinions about multilingual kids’ development, I downloaded past copies of the child are worker exam (hoikushi shaken). Nothing on the test addresses how the development of kids raised in multiple languages differs from that of monolingual kids in Japan, so Mrs X’s belief likely came to her from other channels.

I’d love to know how child care workers in Japan think about kids raised in multilingual environments.

Like you, most people around us have spoken approvingly of our plans to raise a bilingual daughter, speaking often of the future career opportunities she’ll have because of her presumed language skills. But in nursery school in Tokyo it seems that learning to behave well as a member of the group is top priority–maybe teachers are willing to throw multilingualism and all irs presumed future competitive advantages under the bus in order to make sure kids learn to behave well in the group? Hmm, what an interesting research topic…

I enjoyed your post and I’m curious to here more about your experiences raising multilingual kids in Japan.

I agree that all talk/practice surrounding language is ideological and that we ought to be equal opportunity critics of various language ideologies. That noted, while it might be that there is an “elitist” discourse about bilingualism in the U.S., conveyed, for instance, by the books you’ve reviewed, Ingrid, one of which I’ve read myself (The bilingual edge), I’m not quite sure what you mean by “bilingual parenting” as an “onslaught on public education”. I don’t see much evidence of this onslaught in U.S. public education, at least not in terms of actually practiced multilingual education and learning. And, although I’m not quite sure what you mean by it, I will say that I would welcome such an onslaught in many respects as, ideally, it would mean that rather than having far less than 1% of American public schools offering language immersion education, we’d have a lot more of this in the U.S. and a lot more language choice.

In fairness to the authors of the books you mention, I think a big reason bilingualism gets framed via neoliberal competitiveness is because neoliberal capitalist economics is the single most over-arching ideology of our times. Sadly, for anything to “sell” — this includes everything from environmentalism to language — it must be framed this way, or it risks being completely marginalized and ineffective.

I would personally like to raise my future children in English (my native tongue), French (my fiancee’s L1), Italian, the language of the country where we live, with an added language (I am yet undecided). We shall see how my ambitious project goes!

Heather

Thanks, Britta! Couldn’t agree more! That’s precisely why I mostly have such a negative reaction to the advice literature on how to raise your children bilingually (see this review of Suzanne Barron-Hauwaert, Language strategies for bilingual families: The one-parent-one-language approach or this review of Kendall King and Alison Mackey, The bilingual edge: why, when, and how to teach your child a second language). In the bilingual parenting advice literature, bilingualism is usually presented as a socio-politcally neutral linguistic and cognitive formation that it is an individual (parental) responsibility to instil in your children as part of making them ‘competitive’ – ‘neoliberal governmentality’, as you say. As such (and although I’m sure that’s far from the intentions of the authors of these works), the discourse of bilingual parenting also forms part of the broader onslaught on public education.

Britta, the last two paragraphs in your comment reminded me of this Thai-Japanese-Australian family (from 4:05 onwards): http://languageonthemove.com/ratchawit-kyoko

I agree with the importance of working to change attitudes toward multilingualism, but I also think it’s a very difficult challenge. Perhaps the biggest over-arching challenge, especially in the U.S., where the nationally dominant language aligns with the globally dominant language, is persuading members of the dominant fundamental language group that they have something to gain from supporting and, better yet, actually living multilingualism on a daily basis. Of course, in the U.S., this requires persuading the dominant group to learn “down” the global language ladder. This is definitely a challenge given what I view as an over-arching tendency for humans to create self-serving, hierarchical, exclusive social structures.