Language Policy, Ideology, and Identity: A Qualitative Study of University-Level Chinese Heritage Language Learners

• In Event: Roundtable Session 23
  In Roundtable Session: Race and Racialized Experiences in the Context of Multiple Languages and Literacies

Abstract

The study seeks to explore the relationship between heritage language learners’ de facto language policy-making and their language identity in their efforts toward heritage language maintenance. Through examining the experiences of Chinese heritage language learners (CHLLs) in a federally funded program of Teaching Chinese as a Foreign Language in the United States, this study applies an ethnographically-informed qualitative approach to understanding how CHLLs develop and exercise implicit language policies—taken-for-granted norms about language that guide their language choices and practices—their language ideologies that undergird these policies and the relationship of these informal policies to these learners’ language identities.

Author

• Ran Chen, Arizona State University