Promoting Trilingual Development: An Examination of Family Support in a Child’s Multilingual Trajectory

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Thursday 7:45 am
  In Roundtable Session: Curriculum in collaboration: Exploring multilingual family and community literacy practices as resources for curriculum development

Abstract

1. Objectives
Multilingualism is a global phenomenon (Aronin, 2019), playing a vital role in shaping and advancing modern civilization (Aronin & Singleton, 2008). It transcends social classes, ages, and geographic boundaries (Heller & McElhinny, 2017) with multilinguals representing the global majority (Grosjean, 2013; Skutnabb-Kangas, 1989).

This study explores how one U.S. based immigrant family navigates multilingualism in everyday life, focusing on a trilingual child who speaks Romanian, Turkish, and English. The objectives are to investigate how language is used, negotiated, and supported at home, understand the role of context and emotion in shaping multilingual practices, and contribute to broader discussions of family language policy and the lived realities of raising multilingual children in transnational contexts.

2. Theoretical Framework
The study draws on two complementary frameworks: language socialization and translanguaging. Language socialization (Ochs & Schieffelin, 1986) emphasizes how children acquire language and cultural norms through participation in routine social interactions. Translanguaging (García & Wei, 2014) offers a lens to examine how multilingual speakers fluidly draw from their full linguistic repertoires to make meaning, rather than adhering to “separate” languages. These frameworks allow for a nuanced understanding of how language, identity, and emotion are co-constructed in a multilingual family setting.

3. Methods
This qualitative case study employs an ethnographic approach to capture in-depth insights into one family’s multilingual life.

4. Data sources and analysis
Primary data sources include audio-recorded family conversations during routine activities, semi-structured interviews with the 7-year-old child and her parents, and field notes from travels and extracurricular activities. Iterative coding and thematic analysis attends to home language practices, affective expressions, and metalinguistic reflections across family interactions.

5. Results
Findings demonstrate that family language use is highly fluid and context-dependent, shifting based on topic, interlocutor, emotional intensity, and setting. For example, Romanian was often associated with emotional intimacy, Turkish with music, travelling, and play, and English with U.S.-based school-related activities. The child engaged in translanguaging not only to communicate effectively but also to express affect, manage relationships, and assert agency. Importantly, parents’ emotionally charged narratives around language loss and maintenance shaped the home linguistic environment in meaningful ways. These findings underscore the emotional labor of multilingual parenting in a predominantly English environment and the ways in which affect is woven into everyday language use.

6. Significance of the study
This study contributes to a new vision for education research by foregrounding the lived experiences of a multilingual transnational family and highlighting the emotional and relational dimensions of language socialization. It supports the conference theme by unforgetting the linguistic and emotional histories of immigrant families and imagining more inclusive educational futures. By documenting how a trilingual child and her parents navigate Romanian, Turkish, and English, the study challenges deficit views of multilingualism. It highlights how home languages carry emotional and cultural weight and calls for pedagogies that honor these complexities. Centering the lived experiences of multilingual families, the research contributes to a vision of education that values linguistic diversity and the dynamic ways children use language to learn, connect, and belong.

Author

• Mihaela Gazioglu, Westfield State University