Family Language Policy Leading to Multilingual Home Literacy Environment.

Abstract

Introduction With the first language(s) a child gains a whole cultural heritage that influences his/her way of thinking, feelings, identity and attitudes (Mwaniki 2014). Children are provided with opportunities and experiences through direct and indirect conditions of the home literacy environment (HLE) (Burgess et al. 2002; Burgess 2011). HLE includes various oral and written family interaction experiences of children and parents (Leseman & de Jong 1998; Aram & Levin 2002). It affects reading and writing development (Senechal & LeFevre 2002) via informal and formal literacy experiences. HLE is the totality of communicative conditions surrounding a child, which are in dynamic interaction with each other. Creating a specific balance of multilingual practices, families strive to shape the multilingual HLE so as to maximise the chances of social success for their children, whose linguistic behaviour might be more or less stable, or who, on the contrary, might follow conflicting practices. This paper investigates family language policies which lead to multilingual HLEs, based on the example of Russianand majority-languagespeaking families in Cyprus, Estonia and Sweden. The main aim of the investigation is to determine differences and similarities, and whether, most importantly, translanguaging and various extralinguistic and sociolinguistic factors, such as heritage language use, maintenance and transmission, linguistic and cultural identities, heritage language attitudes, heritage language status, and quality and quantity of input, affect the development of home language literacies among children in immigrant and minority settings. These families provide a very interesting setting for investigating the relevance of language attitudes and ideologies. In Sweden and Cyprus, Russian is used in immigrant communities (in Cyprus, Russian is the largest