Discourse strategies in multilingual families: A qualitative analysis of interviews with parents in the Netherlands

Abstract

Background: Earlier studies have shown that parents may adopt various discourse strategies in response to children’s language mixing, which vary in the extent to which they encourage their child to speak a certain language. Specifically, when the child switches to another language during a conversation, parents may pretend not to understand the child, encourage the child to speak the original language of the conversation, or codeswitch to the other language. Existing work has typically studied the use of such discourse strategies through observations in case studies and focused mostly on child language outcomes. Aims: The aims of the current study are to examine (1) what discourse strategies parents use, (2) why they use them, and (3) how their use of these strategies relates to beliefs about child-rearing and attitudes towards multilingualism. Method and results: Qualitative data were collected through interviews with eight parents of multilingual children in the Netherlands. The results show that parents largely used strategies that encourage children to maintain the language of conversation, without putting too much pressure on the child. Parents’ reasons for using each of the strategies were diverse and related to, among others, parents’ ideologies about multilingual parenting and impact belief, children’s age, and the circumstances of the situation, such as the presence of other people and the child’s physical or emotional state. Conclusion: Taken together, these findings indicate that parents’ choice of strategies depends on a variety of psychological and contextual factors. As such, the findings provide a starting point for future more in-depth studies on how parents socialize their children to become multilingual language users.