This study emerged from the abrupt shift to online distance teaching due to the Covid-19 pandemic and reports of "Mother Tongue Instruction" (MTI) in Sweden, where online distance teaching was initially introduced in MTI only. In Sweden, MTI is offered to students whose parents/caregivers speak languages other than Swedish on a daily…

Drawing on the concept of family language policy (FLP), this paper reports on how four Chinese-English interlingual families maintain the minority language of Chinese with their preteenager children in Australia. The study takes an integrative approach to explore both parents' and children's perspectives on language development. While highlighting…

Theoretical models have posited that social contexts influence parental attitudes, which in turn modulate parental behaviors. The current study asks whether parental attitudes on bilingualism differ by local language context and whether parents who perceive bilingualism as more valuable are more likely to engage in activities with their child in…

This qualitative, exploratory research study is positioned within the field of Family Language Policy (FLP). Contextualised in bilingual Malta, where Maltese is the majority language, the study inquires into the effects of a plurilingual family language programme on the language ideologies within English-speaking Maltese families. The programme…

The study presented here is the first empirical investigation of the patterns and predictors of the intergenerational transmission of French in Quebec. An online questionnaire was used to gather data from 274 parents from different mother tongue (L1) groups: L1 French, L1 English, L1 French and English, and L1 Other. The results show that L1…

The current paper describes a study that sought to determine the beliefs, practices, and needs of parents living in Montreal, Quebec, who were raising their children bi/multilingually. The parents (N = 27) participated in a total of nine focus group and individual interviews in which they discussed their family language policies (language…

This study adopts a conversation analytic approach to present a close analysis of the sequential organisation of a parent-child homework activity in a Swedish-English bi-national family. Families formed within migration contexts are increasingly common in an ever-globalised world, but current research has not fully investigated how parent-child…

Recent developments in multilingualism research urge us to move beyond seeing bilingualism as 'double monolingualism' and towards "translanguaging," which conceptualises language as a bundle of socially constructed linguistic resources that individuals can deploy to make sense of their multilingual world. Despite this theoretical…

In this paper, we investigate the effect that parents' language use (English, Spanish-English or Spanish) had on self-perceived proficiency, frequency of use, language anxiety, code-switching and cultural orientation of 206 Spanish-English bilinguals and multilinguals who were students in Texas where there is a strong presence of Spanish, the…

This article presents the findings of an online survey conducted amongst bi- (English, Italian) and trilingual (English, Italian and dialect) Italo-Australian youth, exploring self-assessed language competence, self-reported language choice in various communicative situations, and attitudes towards heritage languages. These young people appear…

By adopting a tripartite FLP framework, this study aims to explore the agentive role of Polish-speaking fathers in heritage language maintenance. At the outset, it should be noted that as the theme of paternal agency has not been given much prominence in research, this paper delves into how Polish fathers of heteronormative families endeavour to…

The authors investigate the sociolinguistic dynamics in multilingual families from the point of view of speakers' linguistic trajectories, ideologies, and repertoires. Drawing on interview data from intermarried couples of different generational and linguistic profiles of two families in Sweden, the authors examine how speakers' lived experience…

This paper examines how caregivers in a bilingual family discursively link Gaelic to a school context when interacting with Maggie, an eight year-old who is currently enrolled in Gaelic Medium Education on the Isle of Skye, Scotland. The paper argues that the caregivers achieve this discursive framing primarily through treating Gaelic as a…

Children today are growing up in a digital world that is changing and advancing at an unprecedented rate. While some adults may struggle to keep up with new technological gadgets, we find our very young may be quite at ease with the use of digital technologies, even before learning to speak. This study builds on a foundation of family literacy…

The present study analyses bilingual conversations taking place in binational families living in the UK. The focus is on two Polish/English stepfamilies, where the Polish mothers' concern with preserving and developing their children's linguistic and cultural identity collides with the English partner's limited knowledge of Polish. While the paper…