Volume 43, Issue 2 - Special Issue: Learning, re-learning, and un-learning language(s) in the multilingual family during the COVID-19 lockdown; Guest Editors: Fatma F.S. Said and Kristin Vold Lexander

The first lockdown of the Covid-19 pandemic resulted in school closures and homeschooling for families across the world. This provided a unique scenario to investigate multilingual family language interaction, and specifically, challenges and opportunities for home language (HL) use. This study is rooted in Family Language Policy (FLP) research, building on previous models of language policy as language beliefs, practices and management, as it addresses the effects of the lockdown on the use of, and exposure to, HLs. An online survey was used to assess the language beliefs, practices and management in a sample of families in Norway, a country with a significant and complex linguistic diversity. Our results indicate overall positive attitudes towards multilingualism in Norway, which are associated with an increased use of, and exposure to, Norwegian and HLs during the lockdown. Furthermore, we find a unique presence of English in multilingual families in Norway, especially across online spaces. Lastly, our study shows that the perception of multilingualism as a source of well-being is associated with positive effects of the lockdown in the use of HLs during the pandemic. We contend that this result can be taken as an example that, even in dire times of despair, families can find opportunities to promote multilingualism and language maintenance.

Early in the COVID-19 pandemic, extensive lockdowns interrupted daily routines, including childcare. We asked whether these interruptions, and the inevitable changes in the people with whom children spent their waking hours, caused changes in the languages that children heard. We retrospectively queried parents of young children (0–4 years) in the US about childcare arrangements and exposure to English and non-English languages at four timepoints from February 2020 to September 2021. Despite discontinuity in childcare arrangements, we found that children’s exposure to English versus other languages remained relatively stable. We also identified demographic variables (child age at pandemic onset, parental proficiency in a non-English language) that consistently predicted exposure to non-English languages. Thus, multilingually-exposed children in this population did not appear to significantly gain or lose the opportunity to hear non-English languages overall. These results provide insight into the experiences of this unique cohort and inform our understanding of how language development can be shaped by complex environmental systems.

In this study, we analyze interview data from 17 mothers of Arabic-English multilingual families to examine their experiences of maintaining their children’s Arabic language development during the COVID-19 pandemic. We were interested in exploring the challenges they faced during the pandemic and their responses to those challenges with the resources available. Following a constant comparative method, our data analysis demonstrated that four main factors have impacted Arabic-English multilingual Muslim families’ language policies during the pandemic, i.e. (1) inner-family dynamics, (2) school closures, (3) children’s agency, and (4) family safety and wellbeing. Responding to those factors, participants’ family language policies were guided by their commitment to Arabic as the language of Islam (i.e. performing religious practices and maintaining connection with the written Islamic heritage) and as an indispensable component of their children’s ethno-religious identities. During the lockdown, when their children could not attend Arabic tutoring, mothers developed new strategies to support their children’s language socialization (e.g., Halaka, more frequent family visit, online tutoring). When schools switched to online learning, their children had more time to spend at home, which most mothers used as an opportunity to have their children practice Arabic more and, in some cases, conduct daily Arabic literacy tutoring at home. All those mothers’ creative responses to COVID-19 challenges were complexified by children’s agency and concerns about family safety and wellbeing.

This paper reports on a study of Chinese parents’ involvement in their children’s heritage language (HL) development during the COVID-19 lockdowns in the UK. Involving seven transnational families, we examined the roles parents played during the online learning sessions and the factors shaping their involvement. Employing a netnographic approach, this study incorporates online classroom observations, semi-structured and focus group interviews with parents, and analysis of their Instagram posts. The study underscores the critical role of parental involvement (PI) in enhancing children’s HL education, offering insights into distinct parental roles, including as emotional supporters, co-educators, teaching assistants, and technical supporters. The study introduces a three-dimensional PI model within the framework of family language policy (FLP), enhancing our understanding of FLP by concretely manifesting what, how and why parents get involved in their children’s HL development. This study contributes to the discourse on PI and FLP, shedding light on the evolving roles of parents and the complexity of their involvement during the unique circumstances of the pandemic.

In this study I indicate that lengthened family interaction time during pandemic lockdowns can afford children significantly more exposure and opportunities to enhance their heritage language, but that this does not diminish the constant dilemma between striving to balance English acquisition and heritage language maintenance. Using autoethnography, and as a first-generation immigrant mother of a preschool-age Chinese American child, I will demonstrate how our family language policy and languaging practices evolved during the COVID19 lockdowns, and indicate how, despite the growing development of my child’s heritage language skills, her multilingualism was achieved at the cost of my constant ideological struggles between disobeying rampant English-only ideologies in society and feeling guilty about decentering academic English in our family language policy. With this study, I call for future research to adopt a longitudinal lens to explore whether shifting family language policies and languaging practices during lockdowns may have long-term influences on children from multilingual households.