This essay is a critical review of Sarah Surrain (2021)'s article, ‘Spanish at home, English at school’: how perceptions of bilingualism shape family language policies among Spanish-speaking parents of pre-schoolers, International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, vol 24:8, pp ....
Review of: Sarah Surrain (2021) ‘Spanish at home, English at school’:
how perceptions of bilingualism shape family language policies among
Spanish-speaking parents of pre-schoolers, International Journal of
Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, vol 24:8, pp 1163-1177.
This article, which was found in the International Journal of Bilingual Education
and Bilingualism, examines how the perception of bilingualism affects the
beliefs, practices, and maintenance of fourteen lower-income Spanish-speaking
parents of preschool aged children.
Undoubtedly, many language minority children who live in homes where a
language other than English is spoken tend to experience language shift and
become monolingual in English once starting preschool. This can be due to a
number of factors, including but not limited to; sociolinguistic and socio-political
factors, social pressure from peers at school or the language policies used by
parents. Evidently parents respond to these shifts in language dominance and so
use different approaches to encourage the minority language, whether this be in
the home or at school. Thus, Surrain investigates the ways in which participating
parents value bilingualism for their children through an analysis of transcripts
from semi-structured interviews. She also uses the developing field of Family
Language Policy, which is defined as “explicit and overt planning in relation to
language use within the home among family members” (FLP; King, Fogle, and
Logan-Terry 2008) to reveal how Spanish is maintained in conjunction with the
attainment of English in school.
Surrain was sensitive to the fact that although she learned Spanish from a young
age, has a lot of experience with travelling to Spanish speaking countries and
working with Latino children and families, she is not able to understand the
struggles surrounding immigration in the same way as the respondents. She
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