Efforts and Dilemmas: Chinese Immigrant Parents' Perspectives on Maintaining Heritage Language in the Southern United States

• In Event: What Is the "Truth" About Asian Americans? Interrogating Representations of Asian Americans in Literacies Research

Abstract

Objectives
The hegemony of English has created an expectation of linguistic assimilation into English throughout U.S. history (Wiley, 2014), and immigrant students often face challenges in maintaining their heritage language (HL) as they acquire English language proficiency (Fillmore, 2000). Among all the language minoritized groups, Asian Americans are especially vulnerable to HL loss (Pew Research Center, 2012). To counter the HL erasure, families are serving the most important role (Curdt-Christiansen & Lanza, 2018) by implementing family language policy (FLP), which includes parents’ language ideologies, practices, and management (Curdt-Christiansen, 2018). This study focuses on exploring first-generation Chinese immigrant parents’ perspectives on heritage language preservation as they are shaped by their racialized experiences living in the Southeastern United States.

Perspectives
The analysis draws on AsianCrit (Museus, 2013) and raciolinguistic perspectives (Flores & Rosa, 2015) to unpack how Chinese immigrant parents’ racialized experiences shape their FLP in general, and their language ideologies in particular. Extending from the CRT scholarship, AsianCrit identifies interconnected tenets that center on how Asian American experiences in the context of White supremacy (Museus, 2013). This study also draws from a raciolinguistic perspective, which critiques the “white gaze” that makes dominating White perspectives on the language and cultural practices of racialized communities normalized and privileged (Flores & Rosa, 2015, p. 150).

Methods and Data
Data of this study are from a larger sequential explanatory mixed-methods study (Creswell & Clark, 2018), which includes a survey regarding Chinese immigrant parents’ FLP collected from more than three hundred parents, and in-depth interviews with a sample of six survey participants. For this particular study, I focused on the interview data from six first-generation Chinese immigrant parents with different demographic backgrounds who are living in the Southern US, with the survey data providing contextual information to triangulate with my qualitative data analysis.


Results and Significance
Overall, the discourse of parents reveals that all the participating parents have positive views regarding their children’s HL maintenance. However, their racialized experience as first-generation Asian immigrants living in the Southeast and the English hegemony perpetuated in schools and society have both shaped their language ideologies that devalue their HL. Specifically, one of the most predominant findings shows that parents have strong beliefs in the Chinese language as an important part of their and their children’s identity. Besides heritage reasons, all the participants mentioned more practical rationales for implementing FLP that promotes Chinese at home, representing their language ideologies that emphasize the instrumental value of languages. Despite parents’ strong beliefs in maintaining their children’s HL, they are inevitably influenced by the raciolinguistic ideologies and racism that impact their language ideologies. Parents shared that they experienced various forms of linguicism (Phillipson, 1988; Skutnabb-Kangas, 1990). Additionally, schools are perpetuating the hegemony of English that promotes parents’ language ideologies that consider HL as a problem. These findings reveal the necessity for parents, educators and policymakers to problematize the power relations in language education, critically examine the linguicism and racism towards Asian immigrant families, and further promote critical consciousness in schools and society.

Author

• Wenyang Sun, University of Utah
  Presenting Author