Centre for Resilience and Socio-emotional Health
Parent’s Arrangements of Language Acquisition in Migrant Families
Yasemin Uçan
University of Paderborn, Germany
Friday 27 April 2018 | 11:00
Psychology Lab, Old Humanities Building
In Germany, every third child grows up in a family with a migrant background and is therefore potentially multilingual. The “monolingual habitus” influences the way how migrants are judged according to their language competence by the majority society: they have to prove their German language competence without being recognized for existing competence in their heritage language(s). Migrant parents face the task to arrange the child’s environment between their heritage language(s) and the language of the majority society
At the same time, they see themselves confronted by deficit-oriented socio-political debates about migrant families. The way how parents raise their multilingual child depends on their beliefs about language acquisition in early childhood and on their own language biography.
On the basis of qualitative interviews with mothers and fathers of pre-school aged children, the researcher will discuss how parents in migrant families think about language acquisition in a multilingual setting and how their beliefs and attitudes interact with contextual factors in shaping educational decisions.
Yasemin Uçan is a researcher at the University of Paderborn and she is doing her Ph.D. on multilingual childrearing in migrant families in Germany.
