This book details a study of sign language brokering that is carried out by deaf and hearing people who grow up using sign language at home with deaf parents, known as heritage signers. Child language brokering (CLB) is a form of interpreting carried out informally by children, typically for migrant families. The study of sign language brokering has been largely absent from the emerging body of CLB literature. The book gives an overview of the international, multi-stage, mixed-method study employing an online survey, semi-structured interviews and visual methods, to explore the lived experiences of deaf parents and heritage signers. It will be of interest to practitioners and academics working with signing deaf communities and those who wish to pursue professional practice with deaf communities, as well as academics and students in the fields of Applied Linguistics, Intercultural Communication, Interpreting Studies and the Social Science of Childhood.

Summaries of Sign Language Brokering in Deaf-Hearing Families can be found in BSL, ISL, and International Sign.

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Transcript

Emily: Welcome to the Language on the Move Podcast, a channel on the New Books Network. My name is Emily Pacheco and I’m a Master of Research candidate in Linguistics at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia.

My guest today is Dr Jemina Napier. Jemina is a professor in the School of Social Sciences, Language and Intercultural Studies at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, Scotland. Her work includes researching interpreting and translation, linguistic and cultural diversity, gender inequality and interpreting in academic professions, higher education and leadership, and sign language brokering.

Today we are going to talk in general about an area of study in linguistics known as child language brokering, and in particular about a 2021 book that Jemina wrote entitled Sign Language Brokering in Deaf-Hearing Families.

Jemina, welcome to the show, and thank you so much for joining us today!

Dr Napier: Thanks, Emily. Thanks for the invitation. It’s really a real privilege to be here.

Emily: Oh, thank you so much again! And just to start off, can you tell us a bit about yourself, how you became a linguist, as well as what led you to research sign language interpreting?

Dr Napier: Sure. So, I’m, as you can hear, I’m a hearing person, but I grew up in a multi-generational deaf family. So, there are four generations of deafness in my family. Going back from, in my generation, I have one cousin, but my parents, siblings, their cousins, my grandparents and also great-grandparents and several aunts and uncles.

So, I grew up with British Sign Language as my home language and grew up bilingually between British Sign Language (BSL) and English. So, I have the lived experience of child language brokering, which I know we’ll come back to, and began work as a professional sign language interpreter when I was very young, when they were just establishing the profession in the UK, sort of separating out interpreting from social work, support for deaf people.

So, I was in the very early stages of that professionalisation. So, I did my first paid interpreting job when I was 17, and there wasn’t any interpreter training available at that time. But then, so I started working and kind of learning on the job, if you like, but went to university to study sociology.

And then I was lucky enough to enrol in a master’s program in BSL interpreting, which was finally set up. So, I was already working as an interpreter, but then I did training and through that interpreting program, I discovered linguistics and thought, ooh, linguistics! This has been an interesting way to kind of analyse what we do as interpreters and have a better understanding of what we do as interpreters.

So, I applied for a scholarship to do my PhD, a Commonwealth scholarship, and that actually took me to Macquarie University, where you are, where I did my PhD in the Department of Linguistics at Macquarie University, so I graduated with my PhD in 2002, and I looked at linguistic coping strategies of sign language interpreters when they work in university lectures.

Emily: Yeah, yeah, that’s fascinating and awesome to hear how you got that start in-from interpreting into linguistics, kind of similar to myself. And as you’ve mentioned, quite a bit of your work has to do with the sign language interpreting profession, but there is a form of non-professional interpreting that exists and it is sometimes known as child language brokering. So, could you explain what that term means and why it’s something that linguists study?

Dr Napier: Sure, so child language brokering is a term that was coined by Nigel Hall, I think, back in the late 80s, early 90s, but there’s been a real explosion of research in that area probably over the last decade or so, 10, 15 years. Initially, child language brokering research was done to understand the kind of brokering. So basically, child language brokering is a form of interpreting that children do for their parents.

So typically, originally, research has been focused on migrant parents or people who relocate to a different country, whether it’s as refugees, asylum seekers, or for work, for marriage. And if they have young children, often children, as we know, children tend to acquire languages more quickly than adults do, especially if they’re exposed to a new majority language. So, there’s been a whole plethora of research that’s focused on this interpreting that children do between their parents and other people.

So, whether it’s in hospitals, at the local shop, at the bank, all these interactions that their parents might have. And the reason that the term child language brokering was coined was to try and distinguish it from professional interpreting, because what children do, or young children, or young people do is, obviously they are still interpreting. So, you know, language A to language B and back again, but they’ve got more of a vested interest and they’re more involved in it.

And also, there’s a kind of cultural mediation aspect. So, children might take responsibility to explain more, or, you know, they understand what their parents do or don’t know, or family members do or don’t know. So, it’s actually kind of seen as a slightly broader task, if you like, than just the sort of nature of the interpreting and sort of mediation that professional interpreters do and are trained to do. Because they are typically, they remain more impartial than, you know, they’re there just to facilitate the communication and not give any opinions. Whereas, as you can imagine, children can give opinions, but also have power to decide what to interpret and not to interpret. So that’s kind of the broad reason why this term has been coined.

And initially a lot of research was done by psychologists, like educational psychologists, child development psychologists looking at the impact of brokering on children, whether they know there’s sort of parentification, reverse parenting roles, and so on. But over the last 10, 15 years, more linguists and interpreting study scholars have become interested in it because of understanding more about bilingualism, how brokering can be an asset. It can be a cognitive asset for children to develop bilingual skills and actually utilise their bilingual skills. That they develop empathy probably from a younger age because they’re thinking about, well, who I’m interpreting for and what they need. And then linguists now and interpreting study scholars are more interested in looking at the act of brokering, just understanding more about the act of brokering itself. So not just the kind of emotional, psychological, cognitive effect, but actually just as a languaging practice. How, as you’ve said, I’ve done a lot of research on professional interpreting in different contexts like health, legal, education and so on. But child language brokering is a masked interpreting practice. And so, it helps us to understand interpreting needs, you know, where access needs are paramount and maybe not being provided by professional interpreters, but also just as a languaging practice in itself, it’s interesting to see how children manage, and young people manage those practices.

Emily: Yeah, I think it’s fascinating as a language broker myself growing up, I just think the act of brokering is something that needs a lot more research, right? So, it’s great to talk about this today. And thank you so much for defining what child language brokering is. A lot of people don’t know what’s the difference between that and interpreting. Aren’t you, isn’t it just kids interpreting?

So, I really appreciate that. And to move on to the next question, we can talk about your book, your 2021 book, Sign Language Brokering in Deaf-Hearing Families. In the book, you apply the concept of child language brokering to heritage signers in deaf-hearing families. So, what does sign language brokering mean and how might it appear as a language practice in deaf-hearing families?

Dr Napier: Sure, thanks. So just to start off with why I became interested in this, because I often used to be told, oh, you must have interpreted for your parents all your life and you must have been an interpreter all your life. And I used to say no, I used to say no, I’ve not interpreted all my life. Because I never felt that – interpreting wasn’t something that was imposed upon me by my parents. So, it was never something that I was required to do. And so, I always used to deny that and say no, it’s not true.

But then once I had my daughter, she was very young, she was only about 2 or 3, and I actually discovered her interpreting or brokering for my mother when she was watching TV once and the captions weren’t working or something, there was a cartoon on. And so, she was telling my mother what they were saying on the TV. And my mum said to me, I didn’t ask her to do that. And so, it piqued my interest. And I thought, hold on a minute. I realised that actually that’s exactly the kind of thing that I did when I was young, because when I was young, we didn’t have captions, we didn’t have video relay services, we didn’t have professional interpreting services.

So of course I did interpret for my parents, but because it didn’t feel like an imposition, I didn’t think of it in that way. And so, I started, so it piqued my interest, and I realised that I did that. So, I did do that. I did broker when I was a child. I did help my parents, but it was not from being asked, it was because I offered. And so, I started reading around and I discovered the early work on child language brokering and realised, I was like, this is it. This is actually, this captures what it was that I did and from my lived experience. And then I realised that there was no research on it. There was one seminal book that was published in 1994 by Paul Preston, where he did an extensive study with heritage signers, which is the term I prefer rather than children of deaf adults. And there’s a whole other reason for that. We might come on to later. And so, he did his study with heritage signers and touched on their experiences of interpreting or brokering for their parents, but he was focusing more on their sense of identity and linguistic and cultural identity.

So, he did touch on it. But apart from that, there was nothing. And there’s some anecdotal things here and there, but there was really nothing, no substantial empirical research anyway. So, I decided to do this. And so, I coined it sign language brokering because I felt it was important to distinguish between the child language brokering practices that might manifest in families that had deaf and hearing members, whether that was hearing children with deaf parents. And if you think about my family, there were lots of different deaf and hearing people in my family. And most of the hearing people could sign, but other families don’t have that makeup necessarily. So basically, I set out to explore what the parallels were. So, what the similarities and differences were between child language brokering, which has been identified as happening in a whole range of settings.

And even though there are lots of taboos around, you know, using your child as an interpreter or as a broker, we know it still happens. The research shows that it happens, and it happens everywhere and regularly. So, because I was able to draw on that data, I was able to replicate some of that and say, okay, well, let’s look at then how this happens in deaf-hearing families and is sign language brokering the same as child language brokering and what the synergies are and perhaps what the differences are as well.

So, what I found essentially is that, yes, sign language brokering happens in exactly the same way as child language brokering. It happens everywhere, it happens regularly, but it’s actually quite complex and quite nuanced as a languaging practice when you consider the different perspectives of the people that are involved.

Emily: I think it’s fascinating because, like you mentioned earlier, from child language brokering, typically the context is on migrant families, right? And in deaf-hearing families, you don’t always have that migrant aspect, but there is still brokering happening. I think that’s really, really interesting.

Dr Napier: And just add to, yeah, on that point is that many deaf parents might well be very bilingual, you know, in written English. And some parents might choose to speak at times, but for them it’s about accessing and participating in the world around them, which is not accessible because they can’t hear. Annelies Kusters and Maartje De Meulder, who are two deaf scholars, have coined the term sensorial asymmetries, that’s it. Sensorial asymmetries, because they were saying that even though a deaf person could be professionally qualified, professionally educated, you know, very bilingual, multilingual even, in sign languages and written languages, but they can’t access what’s going on around them. And they, you know, many people use different strategies, like, you know, gesturing and writing notes and all that kind of thing. But when you’re getting into quite complex conversations, then there’s some kind of access is needed through interpreters or whatever.

So, I think that’s one of the slight differences is that people might have competence. So, for example, in the UK context where I live now, deaf parents might well be very competent in English, but they still, their children are still brokers for them. And that’s where it becomes really complex and nuanced.

Emily: Yeah, and in your book, you present data from three stages of the four-stage project you did. And stage one utilised international survey across several countries. Stage two involved interviews conducted in Australia. And then stage three applied group interviews in England using vignette and visual methods. Can you explain what vignette and visual methods are and tell us a bit more about the innovative methods you used in stage three, as well as what ethical considerations were needed to work with signing communities?

Dr Napier: Sure. Yeah, that’s a very big question. (laughs)

Emily: I know. (laughs)

Dr Napier: I started off at stage one. Again, I think, I just to give context, I think which is important. So, stage one was the survey, which I actually adapted from a survey that had been done with child language brokers with Latino children in schools in America.

So, I adapted the survey so that it was more culturally sort of specific to deaf communities to get a picture of, okay, is this happening where it’s happening? And then that confirmed that it did. And then I went on to do follow up interviews for people who’d responded to the survey and who lived in Australia, which is where I was living at the time, who were willing to sort of delve a bit deeper and talk about their responses.

And then I did in stage three, when I was back in the UK, I did these focus group interviews with deaf parents and with young children. So up until that point, I’d only been interacting with or collected data from people who were 16 plus. And then I did interviews with some teenage, a couple of teenagers who are sort of 14, 15.

So, once I did the workshops in the UK, we had a workshop that was facilitated by a deaf parent. So, I worked with Deaf Parenting UK, an organisation here. So, I had a deaf parent facilitate a focus group with deaf parents. And then I facilitated a group with young heritage signers, and they were aged from 5 to 15. So, I really wanted to use visual methods because I wanted to engage the children in talking about what they were doing. And I wanted to do something equivalent for the parents.

So, I did a lot of reading around about visual methods and understanding that visual methods are a really great way to engage deaf communities as well as visual language users. And so, I ended up using art elicitation method. So, I asked after talking to children about what we mean by brokering and asking them if they do it, then I asked them to draw pictures and to represent what they did.

And then with the parents, the equivalent was how do you feel about when your child brokers for you? How does that make you feel? And I had photos, pre-existing photos, which were spread out on the floor, and they could pick them up and then talk about why that photo represented for them, how they were feeling.

But another component was the vignette methods where there was actually a video, it went, a video that went viral. I think it was around 2010, I think, at this little girl called Laura in America and she was signing a Christmas Carol, a Christmas concert, and it went viral because the mother posted the video on YouTube saying, oh, isn’t my little girl cute? And all of these people were saying, well, she shouldn’t have been doing that, there should have been an interpreter, and they shouldn’t have asked her to do that. And then the parents were like, hold on a minute, we didn’t ask her to do that, she did it herself. And it turns out that there was actually a professional interpreter there, it’s just that the girl, she was wanting to engage with her parents, and she was doing it for them, and she was very funny. So, I showed that video and asked the parents and the children to respond to that because vignette methodology is a way to present a case which might resonate but gives people a bit of distance.

So rather than saying, I do this, or asking them, do you do this, you can present a case study and then they can talk about their response to it, what they think about it, what they feel about it and then if they’re comfortable, then they can start to say, yes, actually, I do that too, or no, I never would do that and this is why, or I have done that but I wouldn’t do it now. So, it gives you a chance to respond to something, but you can kind of create a bit of distance from your own personal experience if it makes you uncomfortable. So, I used that video as one example and I also created a couple of case studies, written case studies, which I showed and talked through, which were again adapted from case studies that had been used in child language brokering studies with spoken language, in spoken language families, migrant families. So again, because I wanted to be able to have that point of comparison across the different child language brokering and sign language brokering.

The second part of your question was about ethics. And so, I think there are two key things there. One is about working with deaf people, using visual methods and thinking about how you make sure that informed consent is received. So, I made sure that all of my consent forms were available in British Sign Language. Everything was conducted in British Sign Language with the deaf parents. And I brought in a deaf parent so that they would perhaps feel more comfortable talking about some potentially sensitive issues with rather than someone who is a child of deaf parents, but also had to be sensitive to children, thinking about how do we get consent for the children? So, I had to ask parents for their agreement to have the children involved. Also had to ask the children as well about if they understood what they were being asked to do. And I tried to make it as fun as possible, but it was really interesting to see there was a definitely different engagement from the 5-year-olds compared to the 15-year-olds. And the 5-year-olds got bored quite quickly. Yeah, there’s the Sign Language Linguistic Society having a terms of reference for doing research with deaf communities and signing deaf communities and around involvement of deaf researchers, making sure that information is available in sign language, the consent is received and so on. So, I was very careful about adhering to those guidelines.

Emily: I loved reading about your methodology in your book and seeing the visual methods. I thought that was so interesting. And I loved seeing the drawings that you put. And most of the drawings were of children drawing about interpreting at McDonald’s. It’s pretty funny just at the drive-thru, ordering food. I loved seeing that. That was a nice different perspective that I hadn’t seen in brokering research so far. So, I really enjoyed reading about that.

Dr Napier: Thank you.

Emily: And then a really interesting theme you discuss in your book is shame resilience. You point out strategies used by deaf parents and heritage signers that normalise brokering in their families. What are some examples of direct stigma and courtesy stigma? And how did brokering overcome shame in your study?

Dr Napier: Yeah, and thanks for that question. So, Erving Goffman came up with the terms direct and courtesy stigma or indirect stigma. And I drew on another theory of shame resilience and shame web. I can’t remember the name of the author now off the top of my head, but from cognitive psychology and developmental psychology. And I really liked Goffman’s framing of stigma because so when direct stigma basically is when you experience stigma directly that you’re discriminated against directly because someone perceives you as being inferior in some way. So, for deaf people, typically that’s people making fun of them signing, perhaps making fun of the way their voices sound and using derogatory language such as deaf and dumb and just being, quite cruel. And so that would be like, so deaf parents potentially could experience direct stigma.

So, children who have deaf parents could experience courtesy stigma or indirect stigma. So, they see people making fun of their parents teasing their parents, being cruel towards their parents. But also, they can also experience direct stigma as well because a child might be bullied because they have deaf parents or teased because they have deaf parents at school. So, children, heritage signers can experience both. And in my book as well, I should also clarify that I did collect data with deaf and hearing heritage signers who have deaf parents because most research talks about children who have deaf parents as, because 90% of deaf parents typically have hearing children. But I wanted to make sure that I collected data from deaf people as well, because some deaf heritage signers also talk about similar experiences of brokering for their own deaf parents for lots of different reasons. So of course, you’ve got that kind of complexity then of the fact that you can experience direct or courtesy stigma. And what I found in my data from talking to the parents and from young brokers and older brokers is that often brokering is a way, is a form of shame resilience.

So rather than, some of them acknowledge that they did feel shame if they witnessed some kind of bullying or experienced bullying or witnessed teasing or cruelty towards their parents. But they often talked about the fact that they wanted to overcome that and kind of move towards shame rather than back away from it. So actually, kind of confront it almost. And brokering was a way to do that because they could stand up in front of people. And if people were like, I don’t understand what you’re saying, then the child would step in and broker and say, I can tell you what they’re saying. This is fine. My parents not an idiot. And they saw that as a way to almost like take control, not take control, but to support and help and mitigate against that kind of stigma. And the parents also commented on how it was very nuanced for them. It created a lot of tensions for them because parents often talked about the fact that they want to be independent. They don’t want their children to help them, but they appreciate that there’s times when perhaps there’s no other option. And also, they can see that sometimes the child’s pride in wanting to help, wanting to do that. And so, they don’t want to say no because they don’t want to diminish what their child is trying to do for them.

So, there’s kind of a tension there between I don’t really need your help, but I appreciate what you’re trying to do for me, and I want to support you to do that. So that was a very, really strong theme that came out through all of the interviews.

Emily: Yeah, and it’s super interesting to hear the perspective of deaf parents. That’s not really widely researched yet either. And this brokering act, what parents think and feel. So, thank you for explaining a bit more about that, about that shame resilience. I thought that was really, really interesting. And as I’ve mentioned briefly, I am a heritage signer, so both my parents are deaf, and I also am a sign language interpreter who’s now focusing more on linguistics. But just from my own lived experience, I believe your project really has lasting impacts on understanding sign language brokering as a languaging practice. So how does studying sign language brokering raise awareness for signing deaf-hearing families, their experiences with schoolteachers, health professionals, and even opportunities for heritage signers to become professional interpreters and translators?

Dr Napier: Yeah, thanks. As you’ll know, having read the book that the last chapter, I talked very specifically about the implications for these different groups. So not only for theoretical implications, but for parents and other professionals who come into contact with their parents. And I think the key things there are that, because I think child language brokering has been a taboo subject for a really long time. So, I think there was a kind of pendulum swing. When sign language interpreting was professionalised, there was a definite rhetoric, a definite kind of discourse in deaf communities saying, you should not be using your children as interpreters. You don’t need to. We have professional interpreters now. And there was, and I mentioned it in the book, there was actually a whole campaign from a video relay interpreting company in the United States, where they showed a video of a girl talking about how she used to missed school because she used to go to interpret for her parents. And they were saying, you don’t need to do this now. We have this company, we have this video interpreting, you don’t need to do this. So, they actually kind of really perpetuated that discourse.

And what was happening from my point of view is that people then didn’t talk about it. They masked, they was like, no, no, no, I don’t ask my children to interpret. But then through this research, we found that, okay, yes, they do, they broker, but it’s nuanced. I keep using the term nuanced because I think it’s really important because it’s not cut and dry. It’s not, they either, they do, or they don’t. So, okay, yes, sometimes they do and in certain circumstances, and there’s a reasoning behind it, and then there are mixed feelings about that on both sides.

So, I think it’s really important to raise awareness amongst deaf families or deaf parents of mixed hearing families that brokering is actually a normative practice in mixed deaf hearing families and that it’s okay to recognise it and talk about it and not say, no, you shouldn’t be doing that, but also not saying, yes, you should be doing it all the time either. It’s about finding a way to kind of identify, because in one of the chapters in my book, I talk about children’s need to feel helpful and want to cooperate, and that’s natural for kids to do, and they help with chores. So, this is a natural instinct for children as they grow up developmentally. So, for parents to lock that down actually could have an impact, a negative impact on children. So, I think it’s really important for families to have an awareness of what this means, why it happens, the different perspectives that are involved. So, I’ve given various presentations to deaf parent groups and CODA organisations about these findings.

But I think it’s also important to raise awareness amongst professionals like teachers. So, for example, if parents go to parent-teacher night or they bump into a teacher in the school playground, what’s appropriate? So, okay, if the bump into the teacher in school playground and the child turns around and offers to broker a brief conversation with the teacher, okay. So the child has offered, but for the teacher to think through what it means, it means if they say to little Jenny, can you interpret for your mom for me, what that imposition might feel like, both for the mother and for the child, and also not to expect that when you’re having quite detailed conversations with parents, that, I mean, I used to, I interpreted for my parents’ evenings when I was young, because we didn’t have interpreters available back then, but we don’t need, we shouldn’t need to do that now, but we know it still happens, especially in regional or rural areas where there might not be interpreters, but there shouldn’t be an expectation that the children do it. So, they should bring in professional interpreters for some things and then also recognise when it might be appropriate to say to the child, yes, okay, you want to tell me what your mum’s saying? Great, tell me what your mum’s saying, because it’s actually about recognising their bilingualism or their multilingualism and fostering that and making their pride in that.

And so I did another study with a group of people involved in mental health and healthcare research, and we interviewed 11 heritage signers here in the UK, specifically about whether they are a broker in healthcare context, and I was shocked that, I mean, we collected this data in 2017, 18, just before COVID, and all of them said, yes, I regularly interpret for one of my parents in a GP appointment, which, and I live in the UK, where there are very well-established, well-funded healthcare interpreting services, so it shouldn’t be needed, but it still happens. So it’s about educating professionals that they can book professional interpreters, there are mechanisms to book interpreters, and so if a deaf person turns up with their child, don’t just ask the child to interpret, especially if you’re giving a diagnosis and then the child is interpreting for health issues, and how’s that kind of transference and how that makes them feel, especially if it’s quite serious. So, we really need to raise awareness amongst professionals that come into contact.

And it’s the same applies to child language brokering, with migrant parents to speak other languages. It’s the same principle, is that you should be bringing your professional interpreters in these kinds of interactions. But acknowledging that it’s okay, if you come out to the waiting room and the kid says, hey, the doctor says your name has been called, fine. So, it’s all relative, really, isn’t it?

Emily: Yeah, absolutely. And if I could just get you to touch a bit on heritage signers becoming professional interpreters and translators, do you think brokering provides an opportunity to do so? If you could talk a bit about that.

Dr Napier: Absolutely, I published an article about that based on the first survey that I did in 2017, where a lot of the people who responded to the survey and they were made a lot of open comments, like getting the opportunity to provide open comments. And they talked about their brokering experiences being a pathway for them into sign language, professional sign language interpreting. You might feel like this, I know, I certainly feel like this, because I realised it was something I was good at, and I enjoyed. And then when there was the opportunity there to become an interpreter, I followed it. I didn’t even, when I was a kid, I didn’t even know interpreting was a thing, a professional thing that you couldn’t do. Because it wasn’t really, I had never seen examples of it when I was young, very much.

So yeah, talking to people now that are professional interpreters, a lot of them will say, well, yeah, it was a natural process for me. And some said they kind of fell into it by accident because they were kind of pushed into it or they were strongly encouraged by parents or family members. And they didn’t really know what else to do. So, they were like, well, this is something I know that I’m good at. I can wave my hands around, I can sign. And then some talked about making conscious decision that this is something I want to do. And especially for younger generations, they could seek out interpreter training programs. And it tends to be the older ones that kind of fell into it because there wasn’t any training and it was just like, oh, you’re bilingual. We need someone you know. But interestingly, with the younger kids I’ve spoken to, professional interpreting is much more widely available. Some of them were saying, I think only about a third of them in all the interviews and things I did said that they were thinking about interpreting as a career. Others weren’t, but some of them were quite young. And I know that they might change their mind later on. So, there’s definitely a connection, a strong connection there. But interestingly, when we look at other research I’ve done in the last couple of years, looking at diversity and representation in the sign language interpreting profession, we found that numbers of heritage signers who do work as professional interpreters is quite low. And it’s probably gone, in the UK, it’s gone up from about 10% to about 30%, primarily because we have a lot more deaf interpreters now, deaf practitioners who, interestingly, a lot of deaf practitioners are heritage signers. Proportionately, there are more deaf interpreters who are heritage signers than hearing interpreters. So, I’ve actually been saying, well, we need to be thinking about how we try and actively recruit heritage signers into the profession, because maybe they’re not getting that message that it is something that they can do. So, I think we still have a bit more work to do in that area, I think.

Emily: Yeah, yeah, I agree. I think for myself, for me, I always loved brokering, growing up, or interpreting as I knew it then, that I did enjoy it, I wanted to help, I loved signing, working with signing communities, people, and so I just, I wanted to become an interpreter so bad. So, for me, I actively sought it out, but a lot of other friends that have deaf parents or people I know in the community are like, I know that’s not for me, but I don’t know if they fully understand what it means to be an interpreter, or what it looks like and all those things. So, I definitely, more work is needed to be done there and kind of the promotion, recruitment or education, I guess, maybe. Yeah, yeah, I agree. And just to kind of bring our conversation to a close, my last question for you is, what is next for you in your work? What other research are you working on now?

Dr Napier: Yeah, thanks. So, I’m actually just submitted a book proposal. So, I’m planning on writing another book, which focuses on data that I have previously collected, but I just had too much data for the last book.

So, this is going to be a smaller manuscript, hopefully, but actually draws on, kind of replicates the study that was done by Valdes and Angelelli and others in the US, probably about 20 years ago now, but they actually asked young Latino children to broker a meeting between a parent and a teacher. So, what I’ve done is replicated that study, but I’ve done it with sign language brokers all hearing with a deaf parent and meeting a teacher. And so, I’ve adapted the methodology slightly.

So, what I’ve done is I’ve brought in a range of different people. So, I have a professional interpreter who’s not a heritage signer. I have professional interpreters who are heritage signers. And then I have adult heritage signers who don’t work as interpreters. And then two young teenage heritage signers who obviously are not working as interpreters. And I get them all each, I’ve got each of them to interpret or to broker the same interactions. So, the teacher and the parent repeated the same interaction 7 times. So, I’m writing, I’m doing the analysis on that data now and writing that up. So, I’m hoping that book will come out. It’ll probably be 2026 by the time it comes out, I think. So that’s my kind of major, major focus at the moment. So alongside, I’m still doing research on professional sign language interpreting in other contexts. We’re just wrapping up a project on interpreting in Mental Health Act assessments and how mental health professionals work collaboratively with interpreters in that context. Because it was obviously such a high stakes context. So, I’ve had a few publications coming out of that, but I’m still loving the sign language brokering research. So, I plan to continue on that path.

Emily: Yeah, that’s awesome. I’m so looking forward to that book coming out. That sounds like really exciting to read. And something that I’ve always thought is the dream to do is to do that kind of data collection and that kind of method. So, I’m really looking forward to that. Those are all the questions that I had for you today. Anything else you want to add before we go?

Dr Napier: I think it’s probably worth just making the point because I alluded to it earlier on about why I don’t use the term Coda, which is very common. So, Coda stands for child of Deaf adults. And there’s a whole section in my book where I talk about why I don’t use that.

Historically, I think that I kind of moved away, if you like, from that term because I felt that there was a lot of quite paternalistic views of deaf people and their capacity and a kind of an assumption that Codas experienced a lot of imposition as children, you know, and had ruined childhoods or spoiled childhoods because they had a lot of responsibility. And I didn’t have that experience. So, I didn’t want to associate myself with that kind of terminology. I also felt like, well, I’m not a child and my parents aren’t just adults to me, they’re my parents. So, I never quite felt comfortable with using child of deaf adults. So, I coined the term people from deaf families because I also felt it was important to recognise deaf people that grow up in deaf families can also have very similar experiences to hearing kids growing up. And also, to recognise that there are partners or extended family members or people that might have deaf grandparents, but not parents who also have very similar experiences. So, I started to use the term people from deaf families. And then when I was writing my book and came across the concept of heritage speakers and then so, and then a few people have started to talk about this notion of heritage signers. And I really liked that. It really spoke to me a lot more. It’s actually, because I wanted to focus on the use of sign language and the fact that these people growing up, they’re using sign language as their home language, which is different from the majority language that they’re surrounded by.

And actually, it was a heritage language for them. So that’s why I wanted to recognise. But one other area potentially for future research is also acknowledging that a lot of children who do grow up with deaf parents who are hearing don’t necessarily develop fluent sign language skills. And there’s a whole range of reasons for that. And I’ve done some research with Annelies Kusters and Maartje De Meulder on family language policy in deaf-hearing families and who speaks when they speak or sign, who decides, all that kind of stuff. So that’s a whole other area of research around children who have deaf parents, because you can’t assume that everyone necessarily is a heritage signer. So, I just kind of wanted to make that qualification as well.

Emily: Yeah, absolutely, thank you so much for adding that. I think that’s important to mention as well. And I encourage everyone, if this conversation was interesting to you, to go read Jemina’s book, Sign Language Brokering in Deaf-Hearing Families. And I’m looking forward to your next book coming out for sure.

So, thank you again, Jemina, and thanks for joining everyone! If you enjoyed the show, please subscribe to our channel, leave a 5-star review on your podcast app of choice and recommend the Language on the Move podcast and our partner, the New Books Network, to your students, colleagues and friends. Till next time!

You may have seen the movie, CODA, which portrays the experience of a hearing teenager that has a Deaf family. A Coda, a child of Deaf adults, is an identity that represents the experience of having Deaf parents. Jessica showcases a perspective that is not widely discussed, which is the perspective of a Goda, a grandchild of Deaf adults. Her memoir explains the navigation of Deaf and hearing cultures in Australia with grandparents who migrated from the UK. The House With All The Lights On highlights and discusses themes around oralism, language deprivation, Deafness and music, and more!

The House With All The Lights On explores linguistic and cultural dynamics within Deaf-hearing families. Jessica shares her experience having Deaf grandparents and navigating the cultural borderline between Deaf and hearing cultures. It is a wonderful memoir about family, the complexities of identity, and linguistic diversity.

Enjoy the show!

This is early days for the Language on the Move Podcast, so please support us by subscribing to our channel on your podcast app of choice, leaving a 5-star review, and recommending the Language on the Move Podcast and our partner the New Books Network to your students, colleagues, and friends.

Transcript

Emily: Welcome to the Language on the Move Podcast, a channel on the New Books Network. My name is Emily Pacheco, and I’m a Master of Research candidate in Linguistics at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia.

My guest today is Dr Jessica Kirkness. Jessica is an author, researcher, and teacher of nonfiction writing at Macquarie University. Her work includes researching the value of life writing and creative nonfiction in animating the hearing line: the invisible boundary between Deaf and hearing cultures. As a Goda, spelled G-O-D-A, which stands for a grandchild of deaf adults, she writes about deafness, disability, and family.

Today we are going to talk in general about linguistic diversity in Deaf-hearing families, and in particular about a 2023 novel that Jessica wrote entitled The House With All The Lights On.

Jessica, welcome to the show, and thank you so much for joining us today.

Dr Kirkness: Thanks so much for having me, Emily.

Emily: It’s wonderful to have you here! And so just to start off, could you tell our listeners a bit about yourself? What led you to undertake your PhD in life writing and Deaf studies?

Dr Kirkness: Well, I guess family and love, which sounds trite, but I grew up in a house next door to my grandparents, so it was sort of a dual occupancy household where my grandparents lived in a granny flat on one side of the property and then my family, my mum, dad, brother and sister and I were in the main house. And so, I grew up with Deaf people all around me.

So, my grandparents had a huge hand in my upbringing, and they always hosted really lively Deaf parties and gatherings where I was around sign language and Deaf culture. And I guess naturally I was fascinated by that, I suppose, and just the you know, it was at once kind of part of my everyday life but also a point of intrigue and so when I got really into writing, particularly telling true stories, so creative nonfiction and life writing, I started to dabble with telling stories about my family and my upbringing and I wrote this little essay in an undergraduate course at Macquarie actually. (Emily and Dr Kirkness laugh) Which was called Telling True Stories, and I had this wonderful tutor who encouraged me to keep going. So, I wrote this 3,000-word essay, which then became a series of essays which then became a book.

So it was, also part of the PhD that I wrote. So, this was really investigating this idea of the hearing line that you mentioned in your opening, this boundary, this kind of cultural borderline that exists between Deaf and hearing cultures and again, I was really obviously invested in that having been sitting at that threshold, at that boundary for much of my life and thinking about how I embodied hearingness, how I enacted hearingness as a, as an identity and that was something that I came to in my studies and that was quite radical.

I’d always sort of understood my grandparents to be marked as different and other and that they had a cultural and linguistic background that was their own that they were that you know they identified as part of a cultural and linguistic minority group. And I had a relatively sound understanding of that, but when I started doing my PhD research and I found a lot of Deaf studies material, was doing a lot of research, I was kind of floored by the idea that hearing culture exists and that there are hearing ways of understanding the world and being in the world and it was this real sort of Aha! sort of a moment where it was like, yes, that’s so true! There are particular idiosyncrasies that I have that that show me to be a hearing person that I’m very auditory and that I, you know, I like listening to lectures and podcasts, for example, and I, learn about the world through through that particular sense, whereas my grandparents were very, very visual people and very tactile as well. So, sign language is obviously a kind of a spatial and visual language and so they used their bodies and to communicate but they were also highly sensitive to anything visual unfolding before them. And I really wanted to write about that and that kind of the boundary, the borderlines between our cultures, the ways that we were both similar, I suppose, but then and different in a way that was really important.

Emily: Yeah, yeah, I love that. I absolutely love everything you just said. (Emily laughs) I think it is really, fascinating because you know, I myself, I have Deaf parents which we’ll talk about a bit later in the interview, but, you know, being raised by Deaf people like you were in your childhood being raised by your grandparents where they were very present in your childhood. You have a moment where you’re like, oh, like my ability to hear has influenced the way I function as a human, right?And so, people, there is a Deaf culture and I think people kind of are like, oh, what does that mean?Like, isn’t it just a language difference or a linguistic thing? But no, that visual language, that visual nature really shapes the Deaf community and certain things that are important, that maybe hearing people are perplexed by or don’t kind of relate to and that’s always fascinating to talk about and discuss I think for sure that people don’t realize they have the label as hearing, you know, that Deaf people refer to them as hearing and they may refer to the Deaf as Deaf but that is the thing, that is that difference, that boundary of difference which I think is really interesting that you talked about so thank you for that great kind of introduction.

And so, to talk about your memoir, in particular, The House With All The Lights On, definitely resonated with me as a Coda which is spelled C-O-D-A, a child of Deaf adults for those who might not be familiar with that term. So could you explain the meaning behind the title and other deaf-friendly technologies that you discuss in chapter 3, kind of those cultural things that might be different, people might not be aware of.

Dr Kirkness: Absolutely. So I think, just as preamble, I think a lot of people are surprised to learn that there is a vibrant Deaf culture and that we tend to understand in our culture deafness as a medical problem as something that needs to be fixed and every time I brought a new person home, a new friend or a partner, for example, I always had to navigate that threshold where there was some languagebrokering, there might be some interpreting, people tended not to be able to understand my grandparents voices.And so there was a lot of sort of cultural bridging that I was doing in those moments. And I was always astounded that people weren’t sure.They were very uncertain about how to communicate first of all, but also like, oh, there is a Deaf culture?And so, it felt to me like there was a real need to write a story that came from a Deafcultural space. But to be a sort of a facilitator or that cultural bridge so that I could allow hearing people an insight into the kind of the richness of Deaf culture and language.

But The House With All The Lights On really refers to the idea of literally light being in the house all the time. So, my grandparents needed to have conversations with the lights on because without the light one cannot see. (Emily and Dr Kirkness laugh) And so you can’t read lips. You can’t also read sign language. So, the house was always awash with light and so my grandmother had a million and one lamps on of an evening and she was quite frightened of the dark, because it was, I think it was just very, it took away her ability to understand the world and so darkness had a very different meaning for her I think than it did for me.

And so, the house was always full of light, but also there’s a sort of double meaning here in that sign language is often referred to as the language of light and Deaf people are often referred to as the people of the eye. And so, this kind of light and visual sort of phenomenon was something that I wanted to tease out and flag in the book, which is why the book is called The House With All The Lights On.

Emily: Yeah, I think that’s great. And certainly, sometimes people when they find out I have Deaf parents they will say oh it must be so quiet in your house, and I think that’s not the case either you know sometimes people have these assumptions but just the importance of light like you said. And The House With All The Lights On I just love that visual I think myself, so I wanted you to kind of highlight that in our interview as well.

I really enjoyed reading about the different language practices as well in your family. So could you maybe explain how your grandparents’ upbringing influenced their language and what communication looked like in your family in particular.

Dr Kirkness: Yeah, so communication was a really mixed bag in my family, and I guess for some sort of, a potted history, I suppose. Sign language was banned in many educational contexts for much of the 19th and 20th century. So, my grandparents went to schools where they were encouraged to speak and to lip read and they had a lot of speech therapy and things like that as a vital part of their education. And this was all part of a practice called oralism. And this was basically a pedagogy that encouraged children, not just encouraged, did in fact force them to speak and use auditory kind of practices. If, possible if the, if the child had any residual hearing as well. And that had left a real mark on my grandparents, and I think that they grow up, grew up, acutely aware that they were different. And that their language was not celebrated or encouraged, certainly not when they were in “hearing spaces”, and so there was a real self-consciousness that they developed. Signing in public was something that was quite difficult for them at times. They were always really aware of people staring, sometimes just out of pure curiosity, which was fine, but I think it after a while it would grate, but also people saying unkind things, or being punished at school for signing, for example.

So back in the days of oralism, children had their hands tied behind their backs. They were beaten, they were caned, they were called animals, monkeys, apes for using their native language, which is incredibly sad. But that kind of perception that speech is and and verbal language is better than signed language has been something that I think a lot of Deaf communities have had to contend with over the last several 100 years. And so that really, I think influenced the way that they felt within themselves.

So, they could be quite shy and protective about sign language and where they would sign. So, at home they would sign to one another, and they would sign with their Deaf friends and when we were very small, my siblings and my cousins and I, we would use fingerspelling, which is a, a manual way of representing the alphabet. And we did that for clarification purposes, and we knew very basic signs. So, food, home, more, chocolate, the things that we would want to ask for, the kind of the basics of communication, I suppose. But there was a limit, I think, to how we were able to communicate with one another. And once we went to school and, I actually went to a signing bilingual preschool. So, I was taught to sign at preschool, and it was a sort of I think they called it reverse integration where there were hearing and Deaf kids present and so there was a bilingual educational program and I really loved that, and my brother went to the same one. My sister actually missed out because of mum’s work.

But we, we all knew how to communicate at that basic level, but then there was just this big gap once we went to school. Signing fell to the wayside, and it was something that we, communication was something that we always had to work on. You know, it was never seamless. It was never easy. It wasn’t a thing that we took for granted. But I think as with many families with Deaf members a lot of us didn’t know how to sign fluently and that was something that I learned later in life. So even though I could always use, do the basics, my grandfather went blind in one eye later in his life and that meant that lip reading was incredibly difficult for him and was no longer a solution for us. And so, I put myself through multiple Auslan courses and got myself accredited, which was great. But it also, I guess it really enabled us to have a more meaningful relationship. It was a really beautiful thing to learn, but also a wonderful way of connecting to my grandfather in the last sort of decade of his life. And that was a really radical thing for the both of us and, and something that I still really treasure being able to, to sign with my grandmother now. That’s a real gift.

Emily: Yeah, absolutely. I think a lot of people don’t know what oralism means and thank you for explaining that and also how recent those practices were still in place I’m from the US and so that practice is not really as common anymore, but it was for even the early stages of my parents’ education. So, it’s just recently that signed languages around the world have finally been celebrated and cherished like you said for the cultural values they have and that importance there, but it was something that was kind of, you know, something you did in secret and not in public. So, I think people often don’t realize that experience of Deaf people like your grandparents and how that does influence the language practices your family had, but that’s awesome that you, you know, got to take formal Auslan courses and have that, you know, opportunity. So, thank you for sharing a bit of that story.

And if we can kind of shift now to talk about, in chapter 14 of your book, you discuss the misconceptions around cochlear implants, which are also known as CIs, and maybe the clashes that exist there with Deaf culture. So, I personally was shocked to read the comparison of the implantation rates. So, in the US, it being 59% of profoundly deaf babies receive CIs. While, in Australia, it is as high as 98% for candidates under the age of 2. So, can you tell us more about the misconceptions you’ve researched around CIs and how Deaf communities are responding to technology?

Dr Kirkness: So, I think, on that question of technology, there are lots of technologies that my grandparents did use, they were not implanted with cochlear implants and there’s a long history there that I will go into.But the technologies that were in their house were things like a doorbell that had a flashing light system, and that was connected to the main electrical system in the house.And so, when there was a caller at the door, they’d ring the, press the button and all the lights in the house would flash.There were also alarm clocks that had light functions where they would flash or vibrate and things like that.So, there were all those kinds of technologies too, but one particular technology that is quite, has been quite controversial in the Deaf community has been cochlear implants and they are an Australian invention, so, Graeme Clark pioneered these devices, and they were developed in Australia.

And so that’s one of the reasons that Australian children in particular have a very high uptake of them. And I think the, the comparison with the US is a really interesting one because we have different health systems. And so, there’s, I guess, limited access for potentially to cochlear implants in the US. I think here they’re there are rebates and sort of government incentives that allow children to be implanted at a young age. But they have been without their controversy.

So, I think back in the eighties when they were really becoming, when the public were becoming aware of them a lot of hearing people saw them as a medical miracle and it, you know, they were the bionic ear and it was fantastic and they were going to be this panacea, you know, it’s gonna fix deafness, it’s going to cure deafness. But that is antithetical to what Deaf people believe about their own state of being, that deafness is part of what makes them, them. And that they belong to a linguistic and cultural minority group and though they absolutely understand and, and experience barriers, cultural barriers and barriers with access to information, they don’t always have interpreting when it’s needed. There are, you know, all sorts of kind of barriers that Deaf people are confronting. Nevertheless, deafness and their, language and their close-knit communities and the kind of incredible, close-knit community that Deaf people have is rich and wonderful and they they don’t want to be cured and so that was a real point of tension I think between medical ways of understanding deafness and cultural ways of understanding deafness.

And so, these devices have been seen as a form of eugenics, you know, to eradicate the scourge of deafness and people have used that kind of really loaded language and there is also a long history of eugenics, and you know Deaf people being killed and exterminated in World War 2 and you know this is a really sensitive issue. But I think nowadays people have a more nuanced perhaps take on cochlear implants. There are many culturally proud Deaf people that still want to give their children cochlear implants so that they have access to the world of sound, but they want them to be raised as culturally and linguistically kind of bilingual I suppose, you know, bicultural, bilingual, so that they have access to the Deaf world from a young age but also have access to the hearing world.

So, I think it’s a really complicated thing, but they have been, you know, there’s been protests over the years about cochlear implants. And also, just challenging this idea that once you fit a child with a cochlear implant that they are hearing because they’re not that device gets switched off or taken off at the end of the day and that child remains deaf and there are lots of kind of challenging factors to understand and audiologists have their work cut out for them here. You have to learn to hear with a hearing device, whether it’s a cochlear implant or a hearing aid. And that takes a lot of investment. It takes a lot of investment from the child that’s being fitted with the device, but also from the parents, a lot of speech therapy and audiological training, you know, this is an improving technology, it’s improving all the time, but it’s not the same as hearing and that child, that person once they grow up will still be deaf.

So, I think a lot of a lot of culturally Deaf people really advocate for the use of bilingualism and giving a child access to sign language from a young age because there is that period where it’s incredibly exhausting to get used to the device and there’s a lot of arguments about fitting a child very early so that they have access to language. But there’s also another argument to be made that giving that child any language, whether it’s wherever you come from, I guess in Australia it’s probably spoken English, or whether it’s sign language, you just have to give them something so that you avoid that problem of language deprivation. So, there’s lots of conversation around this, but yeah, that’s, I guess, a little bit of the history of the (Dr Kirkness laughs)-

Emily: I know, I know it’s a loaded question, hey, and it’s definitely something the Deaf community still, is discussing and you know, audiologists do have their work cut out for them, I agree, but I think it is important to bring to the forefront like the voice and opinion of the Deaf community regarding these devices. And so, people are aware, you know, that it’s not as easy as, oh, like now you can hear and that’s, there’s a lot of work that goes into this. I think that’s important to mention. Yeah.

Dr Kirkness: Yeah, exhausting work, you know, really exhausting.

Emily: And in your novel as well, you also discuss the language barriers, which you kind of mentioned a bit so far in the interview, language barriers that you witnessed your grandparents face. And in particular, you share a few stories about the barriers your grandfather faced in hospital. So, in my personal experience I have done a fair bit of language brokering for my parents but what was it like for you to witness the language barriers and you having access to both Auslan and English in those situations?

Dr Kirkness: I think, I open the book with a passage about the moment I had to tell my grandfather he was going to die, that he was quite unwell for the last years of his life and he was rushed to emergency having had a, I don’t know if it was a heart attack, but a heart failure, he was in organ failure and there was nothing more that the doctors could do for him at that time. And he just regained consciousness and there was no interpreter available. And so, I ended up being the one to tell him that there were no more medical interventions possible. And that was a really difficult conversation to have. Not one I imagined having. And one that I, I had because I wanted to spare my mother and my uncle from having to be in that position. And I think Codas often do a lot of that language brokering as you, as you would well know and I, I think that in that moment they really wanted to be family members and they didn’t want to be a conduit for that information, particularly that information. And so that ended up coming to me and it also made sense I think because I had the skills to be able to do so and in a way it was a privilege, but it’s that double-edged sword, I think, of, of having that intimacy with a family member, and delivering such awful news, and being able to break it gently and in a way that I would like him to be treated. I suppose, you know, being able to choose the words is a sort of privilege. But also, an incredibly huge responsibility that weighed on me and I would have loved to be a family member in those moments too.

And I think his experience in hospital was, I’m going to say traumatizing and I don’t say that lightly, it was really awful to feel that he didn’t receive adequate care during his time in hospital. At various hospitals throughout Sydney, the language barriers were so profound that we didn’t feel safe to leave him on his own at any time. And so, we developed a roster so that someone would be with him to be his advocate. We, my mother would write handwritten signs and stick them on the walls with communication tips, you know, things like make sure you tap Grandpa on the shoulder to get his attention before speaking. You can’t yell, yelling will just distort your lip patterns and will mean he can’t understand you. You know, raising your voice does nothing in fact and it’s just confusing. So, there were lots of things like that, that we tried to put in place and there were some end-of-life meetings that we had at the hospital where we had an interpreter present and that was wonderful, but there were lots of moments throughout the day where, you know, an interpreter can’t shadow your loved one, 24/7. That’s just not possible.

So, there were many times that we turned up and and grandpa had had procedures without having informed consent being taken and that was very distressing for him and very distressing for us to witness and we would arrive first thing in the morning with things having been done overnight. And just grandpa having no understanding of them whatsoever. And so there was a lot of sort of calming and pacifying that we had to do for him in those moments. And it was very, very difficult. And in palliative care spaces as well, just that kind of communication breakdown and the lack of cultural awareness and lack of Deaf awareness and this is a really hard systemic thing you know, there’s not a lot of Deaf awareness in the world and you know, medical practitioners are not given a lot of training in this if at all. They might have a couple of hours in a lecture about hearing loss, not about deafness and certainly not about cultural Deafness. And so, you know, and then there’s all the other kind of structural systemic issues within hospitals themselves that I have a lot of sympathy and empathy for, but it was very very difficult to watch a loved one be so alone and so unsupported in that, in that space.

Emily: Yeah, I’m sorry to hear your family had to go through, you know, a traumatizing experience for your grandfather and for you as family members to see that happen to someone you cared about so deeply and people don’t always realize that sometimes in those instances having an interpreter is a luxury almost like you said you know, because there’s interpreter shortages in the US and inAustralia from what I’ve heard for Auslan interpreters, there is a desperate need for more people to become professional Auslan interpreters.And so, when you do get one because they’re very busy and these instances typically in medical situations are last minute or not always planned far in advance, like to book someone in can be, you know, a miracle.(Emily laughs)So, to speak, but we, I wish it wouldn’t be that way, you know, that, hospitals would have a better system and it is a systemic thing like you mentioned and then, families are impacted by that when they should be just thinking about their loved one and caring for them as a family member and not as a language broker or interpreter and so. Yeah, I think it is a huge systemic issue.So, thank you for discussing that and your personal experience. And I really do hope doctors and medical professionals really get that Deafness training because Deaf people exist and they’re gonna be their patients one day.It’s not an if chance there are Deaf people that exist and it’s important to recognize them as part of the population that they’re going to be servicing and giving care to, right?

To switch gears a bit again to discuss some of your fieldwork that you did for your PhD. It was fascinating to read the chapters where you describe doing your fieldwork for your PhD in England. You discuss oralism, Deaf education, Deaf musicians, and how diverse the experiences of the Deaf community are. So could you tell us a bit about how Deaf communities might be misunderstood by hearing society; some people might even be confused by me saying there are Deaf musicians. So, if you want to talk a bit about that.

Dr Kirkness:

Yeah, absolutely. So, I had the great pleasure of going to the UK because my grandparents were raised in the UK and they moved to Australia when I was one years old, one year old, (Dr Kirkness laughs) when I was an infant. And they were from the UK originally and went to schools for the deaf in the UK and so I got to go to both of their schools, which was really incredible, and I got to stay on site at Mary Hare Grammar School where my grandmother went to school, and they have this incredible music program which is initially what sparked my interest. I also am quite musical myself. I grew up performing a lot at school in plays and musicals and singing and playing piano. They were things that I did regularly and I actually had a little keyboard in my grandparents’ home when I was a child and I would come over to their granny flat and I would play on the keyboard and write songs and Nanny, my grandmother, would come and bring me little cups of pineapple juice because I told her that it was good for singing (Dr Kirkness laughs) and she would watch me play on on the piano, the keyboard and she would ask me about music and she was really interested in what I was doing. And then I sort of reached a point in my adolescence where I felt it was this illicit thing that I was really interested in music, and I started hiding it away from my grandparents. I felt this guilt that this was a hearing activity that I was participating in, and I thought that, you know, my grandparents can’t have any access to that world or to that particular cultural practice. So, I best keep it from them.

And so later on when I started doing some research around deafness and music, I realised in fact that I’ve been really quick to make an assumption there and in fact there are many people who are interested in music, many Deaf people who are interested in music and even perform and play professionally as deaf musicians, they might also identify as being culturally Deaf and they might also use sign language, but they’re really they love music as a language and as a phenomenon that is not just an auditory phenomenon. It’s something that is felt in the body, something that exists on a piece of paper, you know, a written score where they’re interpreting a piece of music on the page where there’s a sort of imaginative process and even in some cases with the musicians I spoke to a kind of synesthesia where all these kind of senses are kind of overlaid on one another in different sort of sensory pathways, neural pathways, in the ways that they understand music. And that was fascinating to me, and I was really, really pleased to work with an organization called Music and the Deaf, which are the only organization of their kind as far as I’m aware in the world, and they’re based in Yorkshire in the UK. And they do all sorts of work with deaf children and introduce them, particularly to rhythm and then they move on to pitched instruments and some of these kids have cochlear implants or hearing aids and so they have some auditory perception of music but there’s also that sort of embodied aspect I was talking about and one musician in particular his name’s Sean, he would talk about taking his shoes off when he plays trumpet so he can feel the drum so when he’s playing in a group he would take his shoes off so he’d feel the vibrations and keep time in that way. And he had this really interesting sort of perfect pitch and a way of locating pitch within his body. I think he talked about F sharp being his nose and F natural being in his lips or something like that. It was really, really interesting to hear his take and along with a lot of the other musicians.

I also came to realize that my grandparents were not just interested in me playing the piano because I was playing the piano, they were really fascinated by music in the world too and my grandfather in fact loved musicals and all of his favourite movies were musicals. He loved the sound of music and when my mom was a little girl she actually before captions existed, she actually transcribed the entire film including the songs by hand and my grandfather had a handbook that he would put on his lap as he was watching the film so he could move between the screen and the paper. And he just loved it. He loved the kind of the spectacle of music, performed music, especially dance and things like that. My grandmother loved dance. A lot of rhythmic things, marching bands, my grandfather loved marching bands, The Last Night of the Proms and the the Military Tattoo as well. He was fascinated by that and also things like Songs of Praise. There’s a BBC program called Songs of Praise, which is sort of a, it’s a religious program, but there’s a choir that sings and my grandmother was fascinated by faces in the ways that they would be animated when singing. So, there were all these visual elements that I was suddenly privy to as I started unpicking that assumption that I had that, oh well, music belongs in the hearing world. But in fact, just like sound, Deaf people have an understanding of sound. It’s just not an auditory one all of the time. It’s something that they feel through vibrations. It’s something that they identify with mouth movements and shapes and all sorts of other ways of apprehending the world. Yeah, and I guess that was linked in with this idea of the hearing line that music for me was this kind of threshold. So, there are, I mean, it’s not always adopted in Deaf culture. Sometimes it is seen as a kind of, belonging to the hearing world and almost as a normalising force. There are some people for whom music is just not for them. They say, I’m Deaf, music just that doesn’t appeal to me, it’s not my thing, but there are equally people for whom, music is for them. And I think that was really interesting to consider.

Emily: Yeah, absolutely. I absolutely can resonate with what you’re saying and, you know, my parents, they love music, you know, (Emily laughs) like you’re saying, certain Deaf people in the community do like want to be a part of that, you know, musical experience and I’ve taken my mom to like heavy metal concerts and she loves it! (Dr Kirkness laughs) Like it’s a great experience. Everyone should take their Deaf parents, their Deaf family to a heavy metal concert a lot of the vibration and being close up to the speaker, the spectacle it is, right? And the feelings that you feel in an environment like that, I think it’s awesome! So yeah, I loved reading about that in your book. And kind of to bring our interview to a close, what is next for you and your work? What other research are you working on now? If you could tell us a bit about that.

Dr Kirkness: Yeah, so another memoir actually that I’m working on, and I’m really fascinated with you know ideas around the body and so I’m interested in health and disability and embodiment and all those things. So, the next book I’m writing is actually about sudden illness and I had, it’s a personal story, so it’s about my lived experience being a carer for someone who had a very kind of cataclysmic life changing event. He had a sudden cardiac arrest in his sleep when he was very, very young and I was the first person to find him. So, I’m really writing about you know, what happens to that person who has that kind of life-altering moment, but also what happens to the people around that individual, what happens to the witness and to the to the carer and the people who provide that network of care.

Emily: Yeah, yeah, fascinating. I can’t wait to read your next memoir!

And so, thanks again, Jessica! And thanks for joining, everyone! If you enjoyed the show, please subscribe to our channel, leave a 5-star review on your podcast app of choice, and recommend the Language on the Move podcast and our partner the New Books Network to your students, colleagues, and friends.

Till next time!

Child at annual Mongolian Festival (Naadam) in Sydney (Image credit: What’s On)

Maintaining their heritage language is paramount for migrants internationally as language is not just a communication tool. It carries our culture, tradition, beliefs and identity. Therefore, passing our language on to our descendants is a crucial responsibility.

Living up to that responsibility can be difficult in countries such as Australia, where a monolingual mindset prevails. Small languages of emergent communities, such as Mongolian, face particular challenges.

The Mongolian language

There are 8.4 million Mongolian speakers in the world. Only 3.4 million of them live in Mongolia. A larger number of 4.1 million Mongolian speakers live in Inner Mongolia.

You might wonder what the difference between Mongolia and Inner Mongolia is. Mongolia is an independent country located between China and Russia, while neighboring Inner Mongolia is an autonomous region within China. These contiguous heartlands of the Mongolians were separated in the course of the 20^th century.

The separation had linguistic consequences, too: in Mongolia, Mongolian is written in the Cyrillic alphabet but in Inner Mongolia the traditional Mongolian script is still in use.

SBS hosts a Mongolian channel

Mongolian in Australia

The separation also has consequences in the diaspora: only Mongolians from Mongolia are captured in statistics, but the number of Mongolians from Inner Mongolia are not captured, as they are Chinese nationals.

According to the Embassy of Mongolia, approximately 25,000 citizens of Mongolia currently live in Australia. I am one of them.

In addition to being an immigrant from Mongolia, I am also the mother of a 3-year-old boy.

Despite my commitment to raising him bilingually, my son is currently English-dominant, and the same is true of my nephew, and other children in my social circle.

The perspective of Mongolian migrant mothers

To find out more, and motivated by a study of parents’ emotional investment into their children’s heritage language learning, I interviewed five migrant mothers from Mongolia about their children’s proficiency in English and Mongolian. Between them, the five mothers had ten children, who have been living in Australia for 6 months to 6 years.

This is what I found:

• Preschool children regularly mix English and Mongolian, and, by and large, do not distinguish between English and Mongolian words.
• Primary school children are all English-dominant. This is particularly true when it comes to reading and writing. All six children in this age group read and write English well, but only two of them had any literacy at all in Mongolian.
• As children grow older, their oral proficiency in Mongolian declines. They only speak Mongolian to their parents, they hesitate and search for words, and some have completely lost their productive abilities.
• The only fluent Mongolian speaker among the children is a 5-year-old recent arrival, who is quickly learning English and seems to be in the process of transitioning to English dominance since starting childcare a few months ago.

Children in traditional costume at annual Mongolian Festival (Naadam) in Sydney (Image credit: What’s On)

Although this was a small-scale informal study, the trend is clear: second-generation Mongolians in Australia are not developing their Mongolian. In fact, they are rapidly losing it once they enter formal schooling.

How can we preserve Mongolian in the second generation?

Research suggests that there are many things migrant parents can do to support the bilingual development and heritage language maintenance of their children, such as sending children to bilingual schools, attending community schools, speaking only the heritage language at home, or engaging in heritage language literacy practices, such as joint book reading or use of social media with family back home.

These are all great strategies. But they are extra difficult for speakers of small, under-resourced languages such as Mongolian. For instance, there is only one Mongolian community language school at preschool and primary level available in NSW and the community languages directory of the State Library of NSW does not hold a single entry in Mongolian.

While the need to maintain Mongolian into the next generation is keenly felt in our community, the path to achieving this goal is less clear. To preserve Mongolian, we need to find new ways to support our next generation to acquire it.

Related content

• Mongolian language
• Multilingual families

教堂的中文 标识在 悉尼的 语言景观 中越来 越突出 在以英 语占绝 对主体 地位的 语言 环境中 这些 双语 的标 识是 引人 注目的 更何况 汉语 并非 基督 教的 传统 语言 教堂中英双语标志的使用预示着澳大利亚华人皈依基督教的比例成增长趋势。

新书的第十三章探讨了中国的新移民皈依基督教的经历 揭示了宗教皈依 移民定居和语言学习相互关联 我们 （Yining Wang 和 Ingrid Piller 对中国移民信仰转变的研究兴趣并非仅仅源于教堂的双语标志 更多是受到参与Yining博士课题的中国家庭的启发。 在31个参与课题的中国家庭中 有8个家庭是来澳后皈依基督教的 其它的家庭或多或少表达过对基督教的兴趣或者参与过基督教的活动

基督教之所以在这些中国家庭中广受欢迎和关注 和这些为人父母者在澳州教养子女时碰到的困难和心中的迷惘息息相关 许多参与者既不想沿袭中国式的“虎爸虎妈”的教育理念 同时他们也不觉得西方的育儿方式多有吸引力 他们经常在自己的社交群里面分享一些负面的育儿故事 比如说某些失控的中国孩子 已经完全脱离了中国的价值观，这些孩子学业失败抑或沉迷于毒品或滥交 因此 加入教会经常被认为是一种折衷的方式，即可以相对轻松的教养孩子 又可以引导下一代树立良好的价值观，走上有意义的人生之路

一份关于澳大利亚生活中多语使用 宗教信仰和精神依托的论文集征稿为我们提供了一个机会 我们得以探讨宗教皈依与移民定居之间的交叉点 在此 我们采访了七位来自中国的第一代移民 记录了他们移民前的对宗教的态度 移民后的皈依之旅 以及基督教在他们语言学习 定居生活和育儿经历中的所起的作用。

移民的危机

参与者均在中国受过高等教育，持有学士、硕士或博士学位。在移民之前，他们都曾在学术界、工程界、金融界、IT界和医学界拥有一席之地。移民后，绝大部分都经历了职业生涯的下行。

受访者在中国时都有稳定的职业和收入，来澳后突然发现很难找到专业对口的工作。职业的下行带来的不仅是经济收入的不稳定，还滋生了巨大的心里落差，导致自信心的缺乏，以及对自己的否定，而这一切都与语言障碍息息相关。当他们难以在公众面前重塑自己职场的成功时，生存的危机感油然而生，生活和职业的双重压力使其对婚姻质量和亲子关系也产生了负面地影响。

一位参与者很精辟地总结了移民给其生活带来的创伤，她说：“我们那时真的是心力交瘁，情感和身体上大崩溃。”移民带来的生存危机让这个群体开始在宗教信仰中寻求新的出路，七名参与者中的六名用了同样的词汇来描述当时的心境：“人的尽头应该就是神的开始。”

皈依–人生的重建

正如参与者直言不讳地承认，他们参与教会活动最初的动机并非寻求耶稣，而是希望在困境中能在这个新的国家寻求些许实实在在地帮助，比如说能够建立新的朋友圈，获得更多的人脉，从而弥补因移民而带来的社会资源的缺失。

参与者们都非常肯定他们在教会中所获得的帮助，尤其是他们在教会群体中所建立的相互信任、相互支持的情谊，这在很大程度上弥补了她们远离家人和失去了曾经的社交群体的遗憾。一位参与者明确地将她的教堂定义为家庭，她说：“我去教会的目的不是为了参加活动。教会是我的家。我每周都要回家去看望我的兄弟姐妹们。”

当然，要融于教会这个新群体，需要接受最初与他们格格不入的信仰，首先他们得相信神是一个无所不能的存在。这种信仰需要他们与当初坚定的无神论和科学的世界观彻底决裂。

总的来说，最初参与者们去教会是为了寻求实际帮助来应对他们所遇到的生存危机，结果导致参与者的社交群体和信仰系统发生了根本性的转变。参与者们反复强调，他们的新信仰导致了他们“生命的彻底翻转”。

移民–多重身份的混合体

到2020年采访时为止，这些参与者受洗后的平均时间已超过十年。这意味着，他们最初的移民困境和随后的信仰转变已经过去多年，他们有充足的时间来塑造自己新的身份，他们也非常认可自身的多重新身份（如中英双语使用者和华裔澳大利亚人）。

多语言实践是这些移民宗教活动的核心组成部分。参与者发现，在宗教活动中，不同语言的使用及其风格带给他们不一样的感触。对他们而言，中英两种语言都推动着他们信仰的转变，他们的双重身份也因此而融合。

对参与者来说，移民的成功最终是达成了民族身份、语言身份和宗教身份的融合，即达到语言使用、民族认同和信仰体系的一体化。这种融合使这些一代移民为自己在澳大利亚找到一个舒适的空间。然而，让下一代继承这样一种积极的混合身份则似乎更为困难。

移民和育儿

如上所述，这篇关于宗教皈依，移民定居和语言学习的研究是来自于之前语言传承的课题。此项关于中国移民的课题——和其它对各类移民群体的研究一样——发现语言传承的最终结果是英语成为第二代移民的强势语言。 虽然一部分第二代移民也许可以流畅地用汉语交流，但第二代的汉语识字水平总体较低。

移民父母和他们的孩子在语言能力上的差异可能会导致“中国父母”和“澳大利亚孩子”之间的话语鸿沟。比如，参与者家庭普遍认为澳大利亚的个人主义文化对中国式的父母权威构成了巨大威胁。他们觉得基督教可以给孩子输入客观的道德依据，从而弥合了这一差距。那就是，基督教义为这些参与者向第二代灌输中国价值提供了理论依据。

给非宗教组织的建议

我们的研究为如何促进移民融入当地社会提供了三个重要经验。

第一，我们注意到移民经历容易引发生存危机。这种危机是由经济的不稳定、社会地位的丧失、移民初期的语言障碍、在另一种文化中如何应对婚姻困境和教养子女的挑战等因素造成的。这些种种问题其实与新移民社交圈的缺失紧密相关，远离至亲好友原本让人深感不安，而不安定的情绪很可能使日常问题进一步升级（例如，停电时怎么办，应该呼叫谁？孩子生病了不知如何向学校请假怎么办？），并将其提升到个人危机级别。教会团体为解决这些生活问题提供的具体支持无异于雪中送炭。当然，教堂提供的最重要的帮助是将新移民纳入新的社会群体。我们认为，所有移民，如论他们是什么宗教背景，都应该获得当地社会的关爱和支持，包括帮助他们重建新的社会链接，这对于移居初期尤其重要。

第二，从长远来看，参与英汉双语和双文化实践能更好地促使移民融入社会，将自己的语言文化带入新的社会生活让这些新移民觉得被接受。教会的双语活动非常务实，只要核心教义不受影响，教会愿意并且身体力行地将基督教和中国的文化习惯结合在一起。这种语言和文化的融合显著促进了新入会者的长期语言学习、移居的稳定过渡和全面融入澳大利亚社会。基督教会对双语活动的推行与澳洲中小学、大学和工作场所等非教会机构的语言行为形成了显著的对比，后者继续实行在他们的单语习惯，一切以英语为主体。

第三，教养子女是具有挑战性的，对于移民尤其如此。如何保护下一代免受伤害，发挥他们的潜力，并引导他们树立正确的道德观并实现其人生价值，这一切都是移民父母的焦虑所在，因为他们不仅要跨越代际差距，还要跨越语言和文化差距。本章所记录的这些中国家庭在子女教育中的迷惘和挑战表明，澳大利亚的学校显然未能帮助这些移民家庭跨越差距，减轻焦虑。这种失败有两个层面：首先，它反映了澳大利亚的教育对语言传承的忽视，这使得许多二代移民没有能力参与父母的社会生活、了解他们的世界观并或与他们进行深度的会话。其次，这也表明学校未能有效地和非英语背景的父母沟通，这意味着父母对孩子在学校的状况缺乏了解，从而引起他们对子女教育现状的担忧和恐惧。因此，促进移民家庭的语言传承和增强家校沟通对于社会和谐至关重要。

References

Piller, Ingrid. (2021). What can churches teach us about migrant inclusion? Language on the Move. https://languageonthemove.com/what-can-churches-teach-us-about-migrant-inclusion/
Wang, Yining, & Piller, Ingrid. (2022). Christian bilingual practices and hybrid identities as vehicles of migrant integration. In Robyn Moloney & Shenouda Mansour (Eds.), Language and Spirit: exploring languages, religion and spirituality in Australia today (pp. 307-326). Cham: Palgrave Macmillan.

(Image credit: Markus Spiske via Unsplash)

Parental engagement is a critical aspect of student achievement

When we think about student achievement, we typically think about student qualities: how smart a student is, how hard-working, or how personable. What we tend to overlook is the role parents play in their children’s school success. However, parental engagement is critical to student outcomes: parents choose a school or program for their child, they socialize their children into ways of interacting with institutions and their representatives, and they lobby for the needs of their children.

Obviously, different parents have different levels of capacity to engage with their children’s education. As a rule of thumb, middle-class parents are good at engaging with schools and this can secure significant advantages for their children. By contrast, working-class parents often face barriers to engaging with their children’s education.

Language as a barrier to parent engagement

The role of class in parent engagement is well-known, thanks to the work of US sociologists such as Shirley Brice-Heath, Annette Lareau, or Jessica Calarco.

But what about language proficiency?

For children, limited proficiency in the language of the school is a leading cause of educational disadvantage. Children who face the double burden of having to learn new content while learning a new language are bound to struggle, particularly when their double burden is not recognized, and they are compared to peers who are fully proficient in the language and ‘only’ need to learn new content.

Parents who are learners of the school language face the same challenge: being an engaged parent if you are struggling with the language of the school is extra difficult.

Given what we know about the advantages of parental engagement, language thus becomes a social justice issue: parent exclusion from full and equitable participation in their child’s schooling may negatively impact their child’s educational achievement, and have lifelong consequences for their social advancement.

How do schools bridge the language barrier?

Parents with limited proficiency in the language of the school constitute a substantial group in many societies. In some schools they make up the majority of parents.

Can a parent with low literacy in English readily find the enrollment form in their language?

What do schools do to level the playing field for these parents and their children?

That’s what my colleagues Ana Sofia Bruzon, Hanna Torsh, and I wanted to find in a recent research project investigating how enrollment information is communicated to new parents on the websites of some of Sydney’s most linguistically diverse primary schools. The findings of our research have just been published in Language and Education – the article is open access so feel free to click through to the journal!

Schools present themselves as monolingual

One of our key findings is that the school websites and their enrollment information is resolutely monolingual. Languages other than English simply do not seem to exist and they are absent from the websites. Other languages are simply not there – neither for communicative purposes (there is no information available in another language) nor for symbolic purposes (there are no phatic words such as greetings in another language).

We had selected only schools with above-average enrollment of children from non-English-speaking backgrounds. In some of the schools in our sample, the percentage of non-English-speaking backgrounds was as high as 98%. Even so, there is no linguistic trace of this diversity on the school websites.

We argue that this absence of languages other than English shuts out parents with limited proficiency in English from the moment of enrollment; in other words, even from before their child actually starts school.

Translated materials follow a monolingual information architecture

Most of the websites we examined provided the Google Translate plug-in and all had links to translated forms available on the Department of Education website.

This certainly demonstrates an effort to include parents with limited proficiency in English.

Unfortunately, a not-negligible level of English language proficiency is needed to access those translations: you need to know to watch out for English words such as “language,” “translation” or “translated version;” you need to know the name of your language in English and in the Latin alphabet; and you need to be familiar with the conventional sort order of the Latin alphabet.

All of this requires a level of English literacy that renders the translated documents inaccessible for those who need them most.

How can enrollment information be made more linguistically inclusive?

Based on our study we suggest that more attention needs to be paid to linguistically inclusive design.

Specifically, schools should provide a central hub for information in each of the school’s most frequently used languages. This is highly practical as different schools cater to different clusters of languages and 3-5 languages in addition to English will cover the vast majority of languages used in a school’s catchment area.

Such a hub page could explain what further language-specific resources are available and how they can be accessed.

Placing a link to such language-specific pages on the home page and in the flow-through navigation bars in the language-specific name (and script, if applicable) would also add a multilingual dimension to the overall website that makes visible the fact of a school’s linguistic diversity.

In short, such hub pages in languages other than English would address both the information gap and the recognition gap. And it would allow parents with limited proficiency in English to get a foot in the door from day 1 of their child’s schooling.

Read the full research article

Piller, I., Bruzon, A. S., & Torsh, H. (2021). Monolingual school websites as barriers to parent engagement. Language and Education, 1-18. doi:10.1080/09500782.2021.2010744 (open access)

In a new book chapter, Yining Wang and I explore the conversion experiences of a group of first-generation migrants from China. Our interest in the intersection between conversion, settlement, and language learning was not only raised by bilingual church signs but also by the fact that many of the Chinese families in Yining’s PhD research about heritage language maintenance were interested in Christianity. Eight of the 31 participating families had converted to Christianity since coming to Australia and others professed an interest and occasionally attended church.

The reason Christianity was such a popular topic among these families was that many participants struggled with parenting in Australia. They did not want to raise their children in the strict and uncompromising Chinese ways they had been raised themselves, but they did not find western parenting appealing, either. They regularly shared horror stories of out-of-control westernized children who failed academically or had slid into drug addiction and promiscuity. Against this background, joining a church was frequently pondered as a middle path that might allow parenting that is both relaxed and emotionally connected yet guiding the next generation on a path to good morals and a fulfilled life.

A call for papers for a book about multilingualism, religion, and spirituality in Australian life provided us with an opportunity to explore the intersection between conversion and settlement further. We interviewed seven first-generation migrants from China about their pre-migration religious beliefs, their post-migration conversion journeys, and the role of Christianity in their language learning, settlement, and parenting experiences.

Arrival crises

The participants are highly educated and hold at least a Bachelors’ degree, which they obtained in China. Prior to migration, all of them had worked in professional roles in academia, engineering, finance, IT, and medicine. After migration, all experienced downward occupational mobility.

The transition from enjoying stable professional careers in China to their inability to find employment at their level in Australia came as a deep shock for the participants. Their economic insecurity was compounded by an attendant loss of status and self-confidence, strongly related to the language barrier, which made them feel incompetent. Their inability to re-establish themselves as highly successful competent adults in public turned into an existential crisis through the ways in which this affected their marriages and their relationships with their children.

One participant summed up the trauma of migration by saying: “We felt broken, both emotionally and physically.” The existential crisis of migration constituted the beginning of their religious seeking. Six of the seven participants used the exact same phrase to describe the situation in which they found themselves during their early time in Australia: “人的尽头” (rén de jìntóu; literally “the end of humans”; “ultimate hopelessness”). And where human capacity ends, the divine begins, as they went on to say: “神的开始” (shén de kāishǐ; “the start of God”).

Conversion as turning point

Spiritual seeking was not the primary purpose of turning to church, as the participants freely admitted. What they sought initially was practical support in the crises they experienced by making new friends that could fill in for the networks they had lost through migration.

The practical assistance offered by the church community helped to build up a supportive and trusting relationship that could partly compensate for the loss of family and friendship networks in migration. One participant explicitly framed her church as family: “I don’t go to church to attend activities. The church is my home. And I go home every week to see my family.”

Gaining entry into this new community, of course, involved accepting beliefs that were, initially at least, alien to them – most notably belief in the existence of a transcendental deity. Such a belief constituted a complete break with their strong socialization into atheism and the scientific worldview.

Overall, what started out as a search for practical support to face the existential crisis of migration resulted in a radical transformation of the participants’ social networks and belief systems. In the vocabulary of their new faith, participants repeatedly stressed that their new beliefs had led to “生命的翻转” (shēngmìng de fānzhuăn; “complete life transformation”).

Hybrid identities

At the time of the interviews in 2020, the average time since baptism had been more than ten years This means that not only the crisis of initial settlement but also the period of transformation through conversion was well in the past. Participants had had time to consolidate their new identities, and they had become comfortable in new hybrid identities as Chinese-English bilinguals and Chinese Australians.

Multilingual practices were central to their new faith. Participants had discovered that different languages and styles touched them differently. In the same way that both languages contributed to their spiritual development, their dual identities became fused, too.

For the participants, successful migration was ultimately a fusion of different national, linguistic, and religious identities; an integration of languages, national identities, and belief systems. This integration allowed the participants to find a comfortable space for themselves as first generation migrants in Australia. However, grounding the next generation in such a positive hybrid identity was more complicated.

Migrant parenting

As mentioned above, our study of conversion, settlement, and language learning developed out of a study investigating heritage language maintenance. That study – like many others with many different migrant groups – found that English dominance of the second generation is the most frequent heritage language learning outcome. While oral proficiency may be more variable, Chinese literacy levels were consistently low in the second generation.

These differences in linguistic repertoires between migrant parents and their children may result in discursive gaps between “Chinese parents” and “Australian children.”

Partly due to different linguistic repertoires, participants perceived Australia’s individualistic culture as constituting a formidable threat to their parental authority. They felt that Christianity allowed them to bridge this gap by providing an objective source of moral reference. Ironically, Christianity thus provided the participants with the vocabulary to instill what they considered Chinese values in the second generation.

Lessons for secular institutions

Our study holds three key lessons for migrant integration into secular institutions.

First, we noted that the experience of migration triggered an existential crisis for the participants. This crisis arose from a combination of economic insecurity, loss of status, the initial language barrier, marital difficulties, and parenting challenges. These migration traumas were closely connected to the loss of social networks in migration. The absence of family and friendship networks itself was deeply unsettling. Furthermore, it could escalate relatively mundane problems (e.g., who to call in the case of a power outage; how to send a sick note to school) and elevate them to personal crisis level. Church groups provided instrumental support to address these problems. This included a host of practical matters but, most importantly, the creation of new social networks. We would argue that in a secular society practical settlement support and human fellowship through new network building should be accessible to all migrants, irrespective of whether they accept a new belief system or not. To this end the provision of culturally-sensitive migrant support services particularly in the initial settlement phase is of paramount importance.

Second, in the long-term, participants thrived by engaging in English-Chinese bilingual and bicultural practices. Being able to draw on both their languages and cultures, and bringing them together in a holistic hybrid fusion made them feel settled and comfortable. The Christian congregations they attended were pragmatic about the use of bilingual repertoires. They also readily combined Christian and Chinese ways of doing things, as long as core doctrine was not affected. This linguistic and cultural syncretism significantly contributed to participants’ long-term language learning, settlement, and overall integration into Australian society. This constitutes a significant contrast between these Christian churches and secular institutions such as schools, universities, and workplaces. The latter continue to implement exclusive English-only practices ingrained in their monolingual habitus.

Third, all parenting is challenging and migrant parenting maybe even more so. How to guide the next generation to keep them save from harm, to fulfil their potential, and to lead ethical lives contributing to the common good can be an enormous source of anxiety for migrant parents as they navigate not only generational but also linguistic and cultural gaps. The parenting experiences documented here show a clear failure on the part of Australian schools to minimize those gaps. This failure is twofold: first, it relates to the well-documented inability of the Australian school system to support the language learning aspirations of heritage language learners. This means that the second generation, by and large, does not have the capacity to deeply engage with the discourse worlds that shaped their parents’ socialization, world views, and values.

Second, it relates to weaknesses in institutional communication with parents from non-English-speaking backgrounds. This means that parents lack a good understanding of their children’s Australian education. This may give rise to fears of and anxieties about the education their children are receiving. In the interest of social cohesion, it is vital to overcome these barriers by improving heritage language education and home-school communication.

To read the full study, access this open-access preprint:

Wang, Y. & I. Piller. (in press, 2022). Christian bilingual practices and hybrid identities as vehicles of migrant integration. In Moloney, R., Mansour, S., & J. Troy. Eds. Language and Spirit: exploring languages, religion and spirituality in Australia today. Basingstoke: Palgrave.

This lecture – delivered as a keynote at the 2021 Approaches to Migration, Language, and Identity conference – offers another way to learn about the relationship between conversion, settlement, and language learning:

Dr Loy Lising (2nd r.) with members of the SABA collective at the Annual Hazara Academic Awards Night 2021

Editor’s note: Members of the Language-on-the-Move research team undertake numerous forms of service and community outreach throughout the year. We often speak at community events about aspects of intercultural communication, language learning, and bilingual education. In this post, Dr Loy Lising shares a brief report of the Fourth Annual Hazara Academic Awards Night. She attended the event as an invited keynote speaker about heritage language maintenance.

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Hazaras are a persecuted ethnic minority group in Afghanistan and many have resettled in Australia. Young Hazara Australians have formed an organization called Saba, which is dedicated to inspiring Hazara Australians to pursue their dreams through education.

As part of these efforts, SABA celebrates an Annual Awards Night in honor of community members who have performed exceptionally well in their high-school leaving exams or their university degrees.

This year’s Annual Hazara Academic Awards was featured on ABC News and you can watch short interviews with some of the young achievers who are set to become community leaders and role models for the next generation.

In addition to the awards and cultural performances, the program for the night included a speech about the importance of heritage language maintenance. It was a great honor for me to deliver that speech as a representative of the Language-on-the-Move team and of Macquarie University, where many SABA members study for their degrees.

My task for the evening was to speak about the importance of bilingualism in ensuring community cohesion across generations. At the same time, the evening was a great opportunity to hear powerful stories of resilience, determination, and success.

I sincerely congratulate the awardees on their achievements and thank the Hazara community and particularly the Saba group for letting me share their special night.

Additionally, multilingual crisis communication has been the focus of the research projects conducted by Master of Applied Linguistics students at Macquarie University as part of their “Literacies” unit. We close the year by sharing some of their findings.

In this final post in the series, Claire Livesey shows that children from migrant and refugee families with limited English and limited computer access have been particularly negatively affected by remote learning. She argues that preparing for the needs of vulnerable families during emergencies needs to be incorporated into disaster preparedness.

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Home-schooling during lockdown is really hard

(Image credit: Glen Carrie via Unsplash)

In mid-March this year, Australian schools began to close in response to the escalating Covid-19 pandemic. By early April, most schools had shifted to online learning, and families were faced with the new challenge of having to teach their kids at home.

For this research project, I recently asked a number of parents what it was like to home-school children during a global pandemic. Along with a few curses and tears, the majority offered the same response: “it’s hard. Really, really hard.”

It’s hard for students, separated from their peers and the comforts of routine. It’s hard for teachers, new to the joys of Zoom and having to adapt an enormous amount of material on the fly. It’s perhaps especially hard for parents and carers who suddenly find themselves thrust into the role of full-time educators.

How much harder, then, must this experience be for those whose first language is not English, now expected to help children with schoolwork delivered entirely through an unfamiliar medium? This has been the situation faced by many migrant families during the Covid-19 crisis (and the focus of a research project by the Language on the Move team for which findings are expected early in the New Year).

Home schooling information and linguistic barriers

For first-generation migrants and refugees, the challenges of home schooling are often compounded by language barriers. According to the 2016 census, the majority of Australian migrants speak a language other than English at home, and 17% of those who speak a language other than English are not proficient in English. This number is even higher for migrants entering Australia under refugee status, with nearly a third found to have low levels of spoken English.

For these families, communicating with schools about distance learning and Covid-19 can be highly problematic. When Australian schools closed in response to the virus, teachers and principals were having to relay changing government guidelines to parents on a daily basis. Official statements from the Department(s) of Education at this time contained complex, technical explanations of Covid safety protocols and changes to schooling procedures. Tasked with passing on this barrage of information, many schools sent out e-mails which were equally long, dense and often indecipherable (see also Tazin Abdullah’s research for the same problem with information overload faced by ELICOS students).

Understanding this type of communication requires a level of English literacy which is unrealistically high for many parents, and particularly so for those from non-English language backgrounds. As a result, many migrant parents have been unable to access ongoing communication from schools and government in regard to safety measures around Covid-19. This is a worrying finding during a crisis where, as Ingrid Piller has pointed out, every individual needs to have access to timely health information to ensure the safety of the community as a whole. A prediction borne out by the recent finding of the Victorian government that people born outside Australia were over-represented among Covid-19 infections by 20%.

Teaching in an unfamiliar language

Home schooling lessons present yet another linguistic hurdle for migrant families. Officially, parents in Australia were not expected to “teach” their children during lockdown home schooling, but rather to “guide, aid and facilitate” their learning. In reality, however, many of the materials being sent home by schools look very much like lesson plans, and require much more than casual supervision to implement.

Home schooling lessons have proven to be confusing and at times overwhelming for many migrant parents. Even with high levels of English proficiency, helping children with subjects such as maths can be a challenge due to the highly specific vocabulary required. For the 17% of Australian migrants who aren’t proficient in English, explaining complex concepts in an unfamiliar language poses an even greater challenge. Parents report feeling helpless at the prospect of having to decipher material at a primary or high school level, while they themselves are in the process of learning English.

(Image credit: Kelly Sikkema via Unsplash)

A lack of access to previously available translation services has compounded this problem. Despite considerable efforts by many schools to provide interpreters and translated materials, lockdown restrictions have made it difficult to give families the support they need. Refugee agencies also report that they are stretched to capacity due to current demand for interpreters. Many parents from refugee backgrounds have limited literacy skills in their own languages, and access to support services is particularly important to meet the demands of home learning.

Additional home schooling challenges for migrant families

A rapid research study by the University of Tasmania found that Australian children from culturally and linguistically diverse (CALD) backgrounds are at risk of long-term disadvantage from home schooling. The report shows significant disparity in levels of access to basic schooling equipment and services, with many vulnerable families lacking the physical space and resources to support home learning.

Of particular concern is the finding that many vulnerable Australian families still lack basic access to computers and reliable internet service. This includes a large proportion of recently arrived migrant and refugee families, whose access to technology is below the national average. A number of recent media reports highlight this issue, interviewing Australian migrants with no home computers, needing to share mobile phones in order to access online schoolwork.

This has serious implications for migrant families in the current pandemic. Students and parents rely on internet access to engage with schools and services. There has been some government recognition of this ongoing problem, with a ministerial briefing paper acknowledging that: “for many Australian families online home learning is not a practical option without additional resourcing”. Additional equipment such as computers and modems have reportedly been made available by the NSW Department of education, and in April the Victorian government announced a program to subsidise NBN connections for students in need.

Better disaster preparation needed

Digital inequality is an ongoing problem in Australia, and the current pandemic has merely highlighted the fact that many vulnerable groups are being left out of this mode of communication.

For migrant and refugee families, increased access to computers only solves half the problem. Digital literacy training is also necessary for parents to be able to navigate online learning programs, with the majority of home schooling material only accessible through platforms such as Google classroom. Targeted services such as interpreters and teaching assistants need to be made available to parents on a consistent basis, with strategies in place for future lockdowns and periods of home schooling.

Individual schools and community groups have gone to enormous lengths to assist migrant families throughout the pandemic, placing considerable strain on already limited resources and personnel. Responsibility for providing these services needs to be at a government level, however, and specifically targeted at vulnerable communities.

As a matter of national disaster preparedness – given the ongoing nature of the pandemic but also considering other future crises – there is an urgent need to ensure that families of all backgrounds are able to communicate with schools, and to prepare for future home schooling events.

Now is the time to take stock of the lessons learnt from the pandemic and incorporate the needs of migrant families into everyday schooling practices.

Image credit: Alexander Dummer via Unsplash

In the current crisis, when schools and childcare centres may be closed for long periods, many families have to make choices about work and childcare in new ways. In many households, mothers are finding that the burden of working and looking after children falls to them, while their husbands’ job, with its higher wage and lower flexibility, comes first. One writer has suggested that for women in the West, the pandemic has sent them back into the 1950s, when married women did not work outside the home.

This is not news to those of us looking at issues connected with women, work and the unpaid labour of childcare and the domestic sphere. In my work, I look at minority language transmission, through the lens of family language work, building on Toshie Okita’s book Invisible Work: Bilingualism, language choice and childrearing in intermarried families.

I started thinking about this topic while working as an English language teacher in Sydney in 2008. A student sought my advice on what language she should speak to her daughter. Her English-speaking husband wanted her to switch from speaking Thai to English, which she had been speaking to her daughter since birth. She wanted some “expert” advice to negotiate with her husband about the family’s language policy; I told her she was right to speak her language and she seemed happy with that.

But the episode stayed with me. Who wouldn’t want their child to grow up with two languages? And why would the husband ask his wife to stop speaking her strongest language to their child?

My resulting doctoral research draws on interviews with participants in 30 linguistically intermarried couples. Questions of what to do about children and language came up often. For mothers in particular, these questions were linked to a sense of primary responsibility for the child’s language development. Even, surprisingly, when they did not speak a second language themselves.

“And I never asked them to do it, it happened naturally”

In her book, Okita pointed out that many of the British husbands of Japanese migrant wives felt it was natural that their wives spoke to the children in Japanese, especially when their English was less proficient. The migrant mothers I spoke to in my research were highly accomplished multilinguals, which seemed to make the language choice both less clear-cut and more fraught. In fact, the majority of families reported that their kids were not actively bilingual. This was a source of great regret for those parents whose children could not effectively speak to family and friends in the first language of the migrant parent.

One exception was the family of Lucia and Marc, who had a sense of great pride that the kids spoke Spanish with each other, and not just with their Spanish-speaking mum:

And I never asked them to do it, it happened naturally and they always talk to each other in Spanish, of course they mix English words when they don’t have them, when they don’t have the Spanish word they, you know, insert the English word, but you know all the structure and the communication’s in Spanish. […] (Lucia)

Unlike many couples I spoke to, Lucia and Marc, were hopeful and positive about the idea of raising their kids with two languages. Perhaps Lucia’s positive attitude towards language mixing through language contact played a part in their approach. Related to this is the fact that Lucia, herself an English/Spanish bilingual from a young age, felt equipped for and was prepared to do the work of speaking Spanish to the children. For other migrant mums, working and integrating into a new country was enough to make the job of bilingual childrearing an ongoing and often insurmountable challenge.

All his friends said “oh my god, you’re not, your children aren’t speaking Polish”

The situation was different again for the English-speaking background mothers I interviewed, who were either monolingual or had become bilingual later in life, often without much formal education in the language. Despite this, they felt responsible for the presence (or absence) of the other language in their children’s lives.

They spoke about mothers-in-law sending books from overseas; about enrolling kids in language classes; about listening to music and watching television in other languages; and about the pressure they felt for their kids to be bilingual, as in this example from Michelle:

All his friends said “oh my god, you’re not, your children aren’t speaking Polish” and I would just say to them “that’s the whole, that’s why it’s called mother tongue, you generally, as a kid you generally spend more time with your mother” and so you know, um, I think that’s it.

Michelle argues against the pressure to raise her children bilingually by subscribing to a mother tongue ideology. Her mother tongue is English and so she feels she has done her duty. Other mothers talked about how they saw their role as encouraging their husbands to speak the language with the children, such as Megan:

My husband, he’s more than happy to read them books in Hindi but I have to be the instigator of everything (laughs). “Why don’t you sing them a song in Hindi? Why don’t you read them a book in Hindi?” (Megan)

This is similar to the findings of Piller and Gerber’s (2018) study of how parents conceptualised their children’s bilingualism in an online parenting forum. They found that English-speaking background mothers were the main contributors to the forum, and that their multilingual partners were often represented as failing in their duty to speak their language to the couple’s children.

This was echoed by the mothers in my research who, whether they had proficiency in the language or not, positioned their role in their children’s language education as a primary one. In contrast, many English-speaking background husbands saw their role as marginal, as supporting their bilingual wives’ efforts by sometimes just permitting the language in the home and tolerating the fact that this often left them excluded from conversations. They saw their wives, as speakers of the language, as the primary decision-makers around language choice in the home:

Hey look, I’m happy to help. If you’re trying to teach the baby something or talking to it in Serbian, teach me a couple of phrases like, “put that down, don’t do that […]”. (Jonathon)

In these examples, mothers are positioned as the parent who makes bilingualism in the home happen. This is not to say that fathers did not value bilingualism for their children, in fact almost all participants of the study were generally positive about bilingual childrearing. It just meant that they did not hold themselves as primarily responsible for it, even when the wives did not actually feel equipped to pass on the language. Thus, I argue that gender trumps language when it comes to bilingual childrearing.

Over the past thirty years there has been a welcome social shift in many places towards supporting families to pass on their indigenous or migrant languages in our transnational, globalised world. To better support families, researchers need to start paying attention to how social roles, such as motherhood, determine and shape family language policy experiences in very significant ways.

*This blogpost is based on chapter 5 of my new book on this and other topics to do with language in couples and families: Linguistic intermarriage in Australia: Between pride and shame, published by Palgrave Macmillan and available as an e-book and print edition.

References

Okita, T. (2002). Invisible work: Bilingualism, language choice, and childrearing in intermarried families. Amsterdam; Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Piller, I., & Gerber, L. (2018). Family language policy between the bilingual advantage and the monolingual mindset. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, 1-14. doi:10.1080/13670050.2018.1503227
Torsh, H. (2020). Linguistic Intermarriage in Australia: Between Pride and Shame. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

The Twitter thread below offers a quick teaser for each episode. Indulge yourself, head over to the Earshot website, download the 5 episodes, and enjoy 2.5 hours of linguistic bliss!

In Episode 1, you will learn about the global #language hierarchy, and discover why a #multilingual person may not be able to say "take a shower" in all their #languages https://t.co/JfTzWUyqDV

— Language on the Move (@Lg_on_the_Move) December 23, 2019

Part 3 takes us to #Armenian–#English #bilingual Galstaun College, an #Arabic community school, and to a frustrated #Japanese teacher in a Sydney public school … and you will begin to understand why #language #education in Australia is such a disasterhttps://t.co/L5OL2d3yG6

— Language on the Move (@Lg_on_the_Move) December 23, 2019

And in Episode 5 @birdpham and @masakofukuisyd finally figure out that #English is a #migrant #language, too …

Ultimately, #multilingualism is not about #languages but about creating more inclusive societieshttps://t.co/DY5u9MzLvH

— Language on the Move (@Lg_on_the_Move) December 23, 2019

Dr Kerry Taylor-Leech researches early childhood education in an English-Samoan bilingual preschool

Early childhood is an important period in the physical, social, emotional, cognitive and linguistic development of a child. To support child development during that period, care for young children has been increasingly professionalized and moved out of the family and into preschools. Formal early childhood education, particularly in the year or two before entering primary, is widely considered to enhance school readiness. Overall, preschool is assumed to be beneficial for educational success.

But how does institutional childcare affect bilingual families? Most of what we know about early childhood bilingualism comes from research conducted with families where one or both parents are not only the main caregivers but also the main providers of linguistic input.

What happens to bilingual development when young children spend a significant amount of their time in institutional childcare is still an under-researched field. One reason it is under-researched is that it is rare. Where it does not exist and where childcare is through the medium of the dominant language we know that the minority language loses out early, even in institutions and contexts that ostensibly value diversity.

Against this background any form of bilingual childcare is to be welcomed. But how do they actually work?

Bilingual signage in the a’oga amata (Image credit: Kerry Taylor-Leech)

In this week’s Lecture in Linguistic Diversity, Dr Kerry Taylor-Leech from Griffith University addressed precisely this question for an English-Samoan bilingual preschool program in Queensland. The preschool, or a’oga amata in Samoan, was established in 2018 in Logan City, and the researcher and her colleagues followed the children in the program for seven months.

Although designed as an early bilingual immersion program, English dominated as medium of communication. Samoan was mostly used symbolically: it was on display in the preschool’s linguistic landscape and was used to greet, thank and praise children.

Dr Taylor-Leech explained that the main reason for the relatively limited presence of Samoan was that not all children in the room were of Samoan heritage and even those who were did not necessarily speak the language. In fact, one mother reported that, as a result of attending the program, her four-year-old daughter was more proficient in Samoan than she was herself.

Parents valued the program very much. Even more than the language, they valued that their children were oriented to Samoan values of usitai, faaaloalo, alofa and tautua – obedience, respect, love and service. In addition to providing the children with a sense of cultural belonging and a positive affirmation of their Samoan identity, the program also succeeded in enhancing the children’s school readiness.

While the program was highly successful with regard to cultural affirmation and preparation for mainstream education, it was not so successful with regard to bilingual proficiency. Because English was the dominant language in the program, the children’s exposure to Samoan was ultimately limited. Furthermore, as the presenter explained, there was no program available that would continue to support Samoan after the children had transitioned to primary school.

Bilingual childcare by Dr Victoria Benz (Multilingual Matters, 2017)

To me, the bilingual development – or rather lack thereof – in this Queensland a’oga amata sounded uncannily similar to that in the Sydney-based English-German bilingual childcare center studied by Victoria Benz. This researcher observed a number of asymmetries between the two languages – with regard to teaching practices, material resources and student proficiencies – all of which resulted in the predominance of English in this ostensibly bilingual childcare center.

If you are up-to-date with your 2019 Language on the Move Reading Challenge, you will have read the full study, the gripping sociolinguistic ethnography Bilingual Childcare: Hitches, Hurdles and Hopes, in May.

Dr Benz also found that the predominance of English was further assured by the policy environment and the attitudes of parents and teachers. Unwittingly, these meant that the two languages were pitted against each other. Even more problematically, the goals of developing bilingual proficiency and ensuring school readiness were conceptualized as in conflict with each other because when we talk about “literacy” in Australia we mean “literacy in English” and in English only.

That school readiness and bilingual proficiency are currently conceived as incompatible was also confirmed in another study investigating parental attitudes towards bilingual childrearing conducted by Livia Gerber and myself.

As long as our education system is based on an artificial tension between bilingualism and educational success, it is hard to see how even the most well-intentioned bilingual early childhood programs can actually support the aspirations of bilingual families.

References

Benz, Victoria. 2017a. Bilingual Childcare: Hitches, Hurdles and Hopes. Bristol: Multilingual Matters.
Benz, Victoria. 2017b. Bilingual parenting in the early years. Language on the Move
Piller, Ingrid. 2015. Paying lip-service to diversity. Language on the Move
Piller, Ingrid, and Livia Gerber. 2018. “Family language policy between the bilingual advantage and the monolingual mindset.” International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism
Vaá, Unasa LF. 2009. “Samoan custom and human rights: An indigenous view.” Victoria U. Wellington L. Rev. 40:237

Dr Van Tran, Charles Sturt University, presented this week’s Lecture in Linguistic Diversity

In Australia almost a quarter of the population speak a language other than English (LOTE) at home but relatively few succeed in maintaining their home language across generations. The typical pattern in migrant families is bilingualism with LOTE dominance in the first generation, bilingualism with English dominance in the second generation, and English monolingualism in the third generation.

There is a gap between parents’ desires to raise their children bilingually and their success in achieving their aspirations (Piller & Gerber, 2018).

Why do some parents succeed in their efforts to maintain the home language and to raise their children bilingually in English and a LOTE while others fail? Our guest speaker in this week’s Lecture in Linguistic Diversity, Dr Van Tran from Charles Sturt University, explored precisely this question with a focus on Vietnamese in Australia.

As part of the “Vietspeech” research project, the researcher surveyed over 150 first generation Vietnamese parents living in Australia with children aged below 18 years. The questionnaire study asked parents to rate their children’s proficiency in Vietnamese and English, respond to questions about language use practices, and identify characteristics of the child, the parent, the family, and the community. She then went on to identify the factors that differed for children with above and below average Vietnamese language proficiency (as rated by their parents).

With regard to spoken language proficiency, the best predictor was child language use. Maybe unsurprisingly, the more likely a child was to use Vietnamese, the higher their ability to speak the language.

This finding points to the existence of vicious and virtuous cycles in language learning. A vicious language learning cycle is one where there are few opportunities to speak, resulting in fewer practice opportunities, resulting in deteriorating language proficiency, resulting in reduced likelihood to speak. By contrast, a virtuous language learning cycle works in the opposite direction: many and varied practice opportunities lead to proficiency gains which in turn further increase the likelihood of language use.

This means that the ability to establish virtuous language learning cycles is one of the secrets of success in bilingual parenting.

With regard to written proficiency, the researcher identified a correlation with children’s age: obviously, a child has to be old enough to learn how to write. Literacy is tied to schooling. Therefore, children who had only recently arrived in Australia and had experienced some schooling in Vietnam had an advantage when it came to Vietnamese literacy.

In Australia, community language schools are supposed to teach literacy in the home language. However, the VietSpeech team has found that it makes no difference for a child’s Vietnamese proficiency whether a child attends a community school or not. However, it would be wrong to conclude that language education in school is pointless and that all that matters is parental effort.

Parental attitudes and efforts matter most in the early years. During the early years, the focus is necessarily on developing oral proficiency and on getting those virtuous language cycles going. However, the control parents have over a child’s linguistic environment decreases rapidly as they get older.

Starting school is usually a turning point and virtuous language learning cycles can all too easily collapse into vicious cycles at that point.

The challenge of maintaining the LOTE as the habitual language spoken in the home in the early primary years is magnified by the fact that, at this point, literacy comes into play. To continue developing the LOTE towards the full range of linguistic proficiencies, including academic proficiencies that will last into adulthood, it is essential for children to learn how to read and write in the LOTE. And learning to read and write does not only mean learning one’s ABC but being able to draw knowledge from increasingly complex texts.

Achieving biliteracy on parental effort alone, without school support, is extremely difficult. Some families adopt a “one child, two curricula” approach (Chao and Ma, 2019). In this approach, which is also employed by some of the participants in our team member’s Yining Wang’s research with Chinese parents in Australia, parents coach their children outside school hours in the curriculum of the home country. In Chao and Ma’s study, this included Chinese and maths; for one of Yining’s participants, coaching was even more extensive and also included history and social studies.

Adopting a “one child, two curricula” approach is only feasible for a small minority of families. The capacity constraints on the part of both children and parents are obvious. Therefore, for biliteracy to ever be a feasible option for all families who want it, school support is essential.

In Australia, only a very small number of schools offer bilingual curricula. Bilingual schools such as the German International School Sydney, are not a wide option, either. They are few and far between and almost always expensive private schools.

This leaves community language schools as the main option to develop and support children’s written home language proficiency. Unfortunately, Dr Tran’s finding that Vietnamese community schools do not seem to be particularly effective is not unusual. With so many other things competing for precious time, most community schools find that attendance starts to plummet by the mid-primary years.

Australia is not unusual in its neglect of community schools, as Martha Sif Karrebæk recently reported in her account of heritage language education in Denmark.

However, it does not have to be that way, as an initiative in the German state of North-Rhine Westphalia shows. There schools are required to provide home language teaching if requested by a minimum of 15 parents. Currently, schools in the city of Dortmund (ca. 586,000 inhabitants), for instance, teach 14 different home languages as part of their regular curriculum.

So proud is the city of its achievement in bilingual education that they’ve produced a video about it. Entitled “Every language is a treasure”, the heart-warming video [in German, Arabic, Bosnian, Polish, Russian, Spanish, and Turkish] features the voices of parents, children, teachers, and policy makers, and shows the real secret of successful bilingual parenting: communities and schools that value languages.

Next Lecture in Linguistic Diversity

Learn more about bilingual education and home language maintenance in Australia at next week’s lecture by Dr Kerry Taylor-Leech about “Translanguaging and identity: Creating safe space for Samoan language and culture in an Australian a’oga amata”

References

Chao, X., & Ma, X. Transnational habitus: Educational, bilingual and biliteracy practices of Chinese sojourner families in the U.S. Journal of Early Childhood Literacy, 0(0), 1468798417729551. doi:10.1177/1468798417729551

Piller, I., & Gerber, L. (2018). Family language policy between the bilingual advantage and the monolingual mindset. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, 1-14. doi:10.1080/13670050.2018.1503227 [available open access] ]]> https://languageonthemove.com/secrets-of-bilingual-parenting-success/feed/ 50 21699 https://languageonthemove.com/creating-a-multilingual-library/ https://languageonthemove.com/creating-a-multilingual-library/#comments Tue, 06 Nov 2018 23:56:21 +0000 http://www.languageonthemove.com/?p=21158 In my work with multilingual families, reading in the home language raises its head on so many levels. It is viewed as a shared family activity in a way that playing games, apps, or watching television are not. For example, parents look  forward to passing on the books of their childhood to their own children.

Reading is emotive, linked to storytelling and interaction, to intergenerational communication, and identity development. While not all reading is related to books, books do indeed feature in a significant number of stories families tell me about their reading.

But how do you get hold of the books you know and cherish when you live in a country where your language is not widely spoken? How do you maintain some sort of equilibrium in the availability of reading resources, and how do you take the step from “reading together” to “child learning to read (and enjoying to do so!) in the home language”, when formal schooling is stacked against that goal?

The answers are, of course, different for different families, depending on many factors, such as availability of heritage language schools, script and syntax of the home language, etc. But there is one thing that helps all families – the availability of reading material. And while reading material goes beyond books, they remain the one resource parents are most likely to turn to, with 64% of families using them on a daily or near-daily basis.

How can we access books for our children, books which are interesting, motivating, and relevant? Not all languages have equally vibrant publishing industries, of course: in some languages, there is virtually no track record of children’s publishing, for reasons of financial viability, a lack of children’s authors, or lack of infrastructure.

If families are locally connected, books may be swapped and borrowed, increasing access, but let’s face it – keeping your multilingual child in books corresponding to all their languages is a complicated, and potentially expensive, business.

When, as part of a recent research project funded by the UK Literacy Association, I began working with families to explore how children engaged in multilingual reading over extended periods of time, the status of the language became a topic of discussion. English books are written into the school’s “read at home” diary, English books can be found in the library, English books can be discussed with friends, teachers, etc., and English literature and story-telling events are accessible to the public. The tide, as is so often the case, is relentlessly anglophone.

The families’ experiences sparked a series of public engagement events around multilingual storytelling – the first with PhD students from the University of Sheffield, the follow-ups with participation from Sheffield’s heritage language schools, and, increasingly, volunteering parents. A loose schedule would allow for a new language every half hour or so, with impromptu readings taking place in-between. The last event, held in March in Sheffield Children’s Library, was so well-attended that the library was at full capacity.

Families of different language backgrounds stayed well beyond “their own language time”, listening to stories in Lithuanian, Arabic, Chinese, Spanish, and many more. A monolingual English-speaking father stated: “I’d never heard Punjabi before – it’s a beautiful language”, while one mother exclaimed “this is the first time my daughter has heard her language in a public context, outside the immediate family”.

After the event, the library’s bilingual picture book shelf was decimated. There was clearly a need for more books, more stories, in more languages – what to do?

When I asked whether the library would be willing to open a multilingual section in the children’s library, the answer was an immediate yes. Funding, however, was a problem: in the UK, libraries have been under immense financial pressure, many have closed.

What the library could do was to host a pilot of 500 multilingual books, providing space, staffing, cataloguing, etc. The books themselves had to be provided. We put out calls to the community, asking for book donations. Through Twitter and email, I approached authors and publishers, asking them for “spare” translated copies – when a publisher sells translation rights, they (and the author) typically receive a number of translated copies. We offered to give these copies a new home, and a number of wonderful publishers and authors agreed, giving the library boxes and boxes of brand-new editions. Heritage language schools organised book collections among parents. Over the summer holidays, a #bringabookhome hashtag on Twitter encouraged people to buy a children’s book from the country they were on holiday in and then to donate it to the library after their return.

The result, as one can imagine, is not a perfectly balanced library. Certain books are more easily to get hold of than others, picture books have a higher representation than chapter books, and certain languages are disproportionately represented. Nevertheless, the side effect of a “community-built” library is that it gathers momentum along the way – if you have worked to help make something happen, you have a vested interest in its survival. And so, Sheffield’s multilingual library is very much a community effort, a fitting tribute to the “City of Sanctuary”.

The multilingual library has received further support from the Arts and Humanities Research Council: as part of the Open Worlds Research Initiative’s Cross-Language Dynamics strand. The funding enables a research strand alongside the pilot, facilitating both qualitative and quantitative data collection on how families engage with the library, and an accompanying reward scheme. One of the project outcomes will be a clear set of guidelines, hints and tips for other libraries seeking to run similar projects – these should be available in the first half of 2019.

Related content

• In search of myself
• Are we killing the joy of reading?
• Multiculturalism alive and well in Austria

References

Little, S. (2018, Online First) ‘”Is there an app for that?” Exploring games and apps among heritage language families’. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, DOI: 10.1080/01434632.2018.1502776 (Gold Open Access)

Little, S. (2017, Online First) ‘Whose heritage? What inheritance?: Conceptualising Family Language Identities’. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, DOI:10.1080/13670050.2017.1348463 (Gold Open Access)

New Zealand’s PM wants to raise her newborn daughter bilingually (Source: radionz)

New Zealand’s Prime Minister, Jacinda Ardern, plans to raise her newborn daughter bilingually in Māori and English. Her desire for her child – and all New Zealand children – to grow up proficient in more than one language is not unusual in today’s world and echoes the desires of many Australian parents, too. A recent study of young Australian mothers found high levels of support for bilingual child rearing.

Mothers wanted to give their children “the gift of bilingualism” and spoke glowingly about the many advantages and benefits they hoped bilingualism would bestow on their children. They felt that proficiency in another language in addition to English would enrich their children’s future, that it would give them a career edge, and that it would allow them to travel overseas but also connect with diverse communities in Australia. Many also believed that bilingualism would give their children a cognitive advantage and they were aware of health benefits of bilingualism such as delayed onset of dementia.

In short, like New Zealand’s PM, the mothers in the study aspired to raise their children with English and another language for many good reasons. There was another similarity: while they knew what they wanted, they did not quite know how to achieve their goal. Like Ardern they confided that, while they were sure they wanted their children to learn English and another language, they found it difficult to figure out “how that will happen.”

The main difficulties with raising bilingual children in Australia – as in any English-dominant society – can be traced back to the overbearing role of English. The dominance of English makes bilingual parenting extra hard for a number of reasons.

To begin with, Australians often have relatively low levels of proficiency in another language and this can lead to deep insecurities. How do you do “being a competent parent” while fighting insecurities whether your pronunciation is good enough or struggling to find the right word?

Second, you may want bilingualism for your child. But you also want your child to be well adjusted, to make friends easily and to do well in school. English is the indispensable means to achieve these goals. So, you may suffer from a niggling doubt that the other language may detract from your child’s English.

By focusing on the other language in the home, do you inadvertently jeopardize your child’s academic success or their friendship groups? Research shows that this is not true but it can certainly seem that way when your child throws a tantrum in the supermarket and everyone stares at you as you try to calm her down in another language.

Third, contemporary parenting is difficult and fraught with anxieties at the best of times. Bottle or breast? Disposable or cloth nappy? Soccer or cricket? The number of decisions we have to make seems endless and each decision seems to index whether we are a good parent or a parenting fail.

Questions of language choice and language practices add a whole other dimension to the complexities of modern parenting: When should you start which language? Who should speak which language to the child? Is it ok to mix languages? The list goes on and on. Parents not only need to figure out answers to these questions, they also need to live their answers out on a daily basis.

Furthermore, parenting is not something that we do in isolation. Mums and dads may not arrive at the same answers. When one partner is deeply committed to bilingual parenting and the other is not, that can easily put a strain on the relationship. Many couples know that mundane questions like whose turn it is to do the dishes can easily escalate into a fight when everyone is tired and juggling too many responsibilities. Now imagine such daily problems amplified by debates over whose turn it is to read the bedtime story in the other language or whose fault it is that the bedtime story in the other language is always the same because there are only two books in that language in the local library.

The parents of New Zealand’s “First Baby” want to raise their daughter bilingually because they recognize that bilingualism is important in today’s world – just like Australian parents. They do not quite know how to do it and they will undoubtedly struggle turning their aspiration into a reality as their daughter grows up and starts to have her own ideas about bilingualism. Having to make language decisions part and parcel of all the mundane parenting and family decisions that we all make all the time will be a challenge – just as it is for Australian parents.

But that is where the similarity ends.

New Zealand parents do not have to face the challenges of raising their children bilingually alone – in contrast to Australian parents. We all know that it takes a village to raise a child. Parents need the support of the wider community. This holds even more so when it comes to bilingual parenting. Specifically, bilingual families need institutional support, particularly from schools, in order to thrive.

New Zealand’s te kōhanga reo or “language nests” are preschools that operate through the medium of Māori and have been highly successful in supporting bilingual proficiencies in Māori and English. Additionally, there are now plans to make bilingual education in Māori and English universally available in all public schools by 2025.

In Australia, our policy makers have so far ignored the aspirations of an ever-growing number of families for meaningful language education that fosters high levels of linguistic proficiency in English and another language. In fact, the overbearing role of English in academic achievement often means that schools actively conspire against the wishes of families. As a result, those best able to raise bilingual children in Australia are those who have the means to afford specialized private schools, extended overseas holidays or bilingual nannies.

When will our leaders end the disconnect between families’ linguistic aspirations and the education system? When will we see an all-of-society effort to help put the bilingual proficiencies needed to thrive in the 21^st century within the reach of all?

Reference

Piller, I., & Gerber, L. (2018). Family language policy between the bilingual advantage and the monolingual mindset. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, 1-14. doi:10.1080/13670050.2018.1503227 [if you do not have institutional access, you may download an open access version here. The number of OA downloads is limited, so, institutional users, make sure to leave this link for readers without institutional access … An OA pre-publication version is available here].

Dr Fadila Boutouchent during her guest lecture at Macquarie University

When she was in kindergarten, my oldest daughter came home one day talking about “our soldiers” who “went to war for us“. It was the Anzac Day history lesson, a day which commemorates Australia’s involvement in World War 1 and the loss of life which resulted. However, just who was that “us” supposed to be?

My daughter has past and present relatives from the (former) Austro-Hungarian, British and Ottoman empires. As is true of most Australians, during WW1 my daughter’s ancestors would have actually been on both sides of the battle. This made me particularly uncomfortable with the idea of pitching a unified “us” against “them”.

As a parent, I expect my school to utilize a curriculum which is inclusive, not exclusionary and divisive. In fact, most of the time, they do. This was the only time I could recall that our school had tapped into this way of thinking about culture and belonging.

Educational curricula are powerful sites for the construction of national identity.

How does that work in a diverse society? What happens to newcomers who may not fit the dominant imagined identity? How can schools fullfil their obligation to meet the needs of students of diverse backgrounds while still attempting to instill a shared sense of identity and belonging?

The research of Dr. Fadila Boutouchent (University of Regina, Canada) addresses these important and fascinating questions and asks how immigrant parents perceive their children’s education, particularly in Francophone schools, which have as a central role the maintenance and construction of a Canadian Francophone identity. As part of the Lectures in Linguistic Diversity series at Macquarie University, Dr. Boutouchent presented her research on these schools in the small city of Moncton in New Brunswick, Canada.

New Brunswick is a province with a bilingual language policy, which means that citizens have the right to access services in either French or English. In addition, New Brunswick prioritizes French-speaking immigrants, in order to maintain its Francophone community.

In the Canadian context, research into immigrant students has tended to focus on Anglophone schools which are in the majority, have more experience with and are better resourced to manage the needs of diverse students. In contrast, little is known about the experience of migrant children in Francophone educational contexts, which are managed by the Francophone community.

Bilingual welcome sign at the entrance to Moncton city (Source: Wikipedia)

So how do recent migrant families fit into this picture? Dr. Boutouchent and her team sought to understand how immigrant families perceive their children’s education before and after their arrival in Moncton, and how they are involved in their social and educational integration.

The researchers interviewed 14 parents of families who had migrated from Africa or the Caribbean between 3-10 years prior and whose children were enrolled in Francophone schools. They found that there were some key issues for immigrant parents across the group.

The first was that immigrant parents felt they were not informed about the school system before arriving in Moncton. In particular, they did not know about the existence of Francophone schools. This group of parents was mostly highly educated and had very high expectations of their children’s educational success. Although they had trusted that the school would be good quality because it was in a developed country, some were disappointed, and one mother even said she would have liked to teach her daughter at home if she had been able to.

These issues of quality were at times compounded by language. The local variety of French is quite distinct. The Acadian French identity is historically very strong, and is marked by an accent which may be difficult for newcomers. This is similar to my own research on adult migrants in linguistic intermarriage who reported that they had unexpected problems with the Australian English accent on arrival.

The Chiac slogan “Right Fiers!” (“Right proud!”) has caused controversy (Source: cbc.ca)

We know from the previous lectures in the series that children’s willingness to speak different languages changes over time and that schooling is a key time for the formation of language habits. A particular challenge for immigrant children in Moncton is constituted by the fact that local youths speak a variety called Chiac, a mixture of French and English. Francophone migrants raised with standard French found Chiac incomprehensible and alienating.

One participant reported that her son began to stay inside during break times because he could not understand or speak to his fellow students.

If you can’t speak to other kids, how can you feel like you belong?

Parents also reported that their children experienced bullying and racism, and that the schools were not always well-equipped to manage the needs of refugee children who were not at the same educational level as their peers. They also regarded the lack of inclusive, multi-ethnic content in the curriculum as a problem.

There are no easy answers as to how to balance the educational and linguistic needs of newcomers with those of old-timers, but a good first step is to listen to the voices of those who are living the encounter. Small cities, like small schools, have the advantage that the distances between people and institutions are smaller, making both problems and solutions more visible. This also means that change is potentially easier to implement.

Dr. Boutouchent finished her lecture by making the case that Moncton is a site where Francophone schools could become “spaces for intercultural communication and nourish a culture of understanding and acceptance”. That sounds like a goal which all schools and parents could agree on.

Reference:

Benimmas, A., Boutouchent, F., & Kamano, L. (2017). Relationship Between School and Immigrant Families in French-Language Minority Communities in Moncton, New Brunswick: Parents’ Perceptions of Their Children’s Integration. In G. Tibe Bonifacio & J. L. Drolet (Eds.), Canadian Perspectives on Immigration in Small Cities (pp. 235-253). Cham: Springer International Publishing.