Genevieve Leung

Relationships Among Language Ideologies, Family Language Policies, and Children's Language Achievement: A Look at Cantonese-English Bilinguals in the U.S

This article examines the reported language ideologies and family language policies of the parents of Cantonese-English bilinguals in the U.S. in relation to their childrens achievement scores in Cantonese and English. We explore the relationships first by language of instruction. Results show children in bilingual classrooms scored higher than those in mainstream (English-only) classrooms on the Cantonese tasks, but significantly more children in bilingual programs had Cantonese as a home language than children in mainstream classrooms. Parents from mainstream classrooms were significantly more satisfied with their childrens English-language attainment than parents from bilingual classrooms. Using cluster analysis, we then identify four new groups of children based on their language proficiency: (a) English-dominant, (b) Cantonese-dominant, (c) “balanced bilingual,” and (d) “ideal bilingual.” Results show all children scored at or above the monolingual English mean on English decoding, but the ideal bilingual cluster had the largest Cantonese vocabulary. The English-dominant group heard significantly less Cantonese in the home, while all children in the ideal bilingual and Cantonese-dominant clusters heard only Cantonese. Findings point to the integral component of the family unit in childrens bilingual development and bring up timely issues relating to family language planning and policy.

Heritage language education and investment among Asian American middle schoolers: insights from a charter school

This paper investigates Mandarin learning experiences of Chinese American teenagers from working-class families. Drawing on a subset of data from a larger ethnographic study, we focus on 14 middle schoolers who studied Mandarin as a heritage language at a socially engaging school with Mandarin as part of its official curriculum. The data highlight a mismatch between students’ true heritage language and the institutionalized surrogate heritage language, which created unwanted implications for students’ investment and identities in the presence of Mandarin hegemony. In a time when the teaching of Mandarin receives unprecedented educational support, this study calls for more educational efforts that attend to the large population of heritage language learners from non-Mandarin language backgrounds. We suggest that Mandarin educators have critical language awareness so they can address Chinese American students’ multilingual backgrounds in ways that can value their home languages and support their investment in Mandarin.

Contemporary "Hoisan-wa" Language Maintenance in Northern California: Evidence from Fourteen Frog Story Narratives.

This article explores uninvestigated issues in Cantonese and Hoisan-wa language maintenance from an ethnic Chinese diaspora point of view. Data come from a larger study looking at Frog Story narratives from 140 Cantonese–English bilingual children in California. Fourteen of these children were found to display uniquely Hoisan-wa phonology and lexicon in their narratives. Focusing on these 14 children, this article attempts to answer the following questions: Due to low prestige factors and lack of support for the maintenance of Hoisan-wa, have these speakers assimilated to the standard Cantonese-speaking community? Are there any signs that Hoisan-wa language backgrounds are still reflected in elementary school students attending schools with a relatively high Cantonese-speaking enrollment? If yes, what are these signs? Because nearly nothing is known about Hoisan-wa maintenance in the United States, the author documents markedly Hoisan-wa lexicon and phonology, and offers evidence of intergenerational language transmission.

Disambiguating the Term “Chinese”: An Analysis of Chinese American Surname Naming Practices

Abstract The term “Chinese” can refer to an ethnicity, a group of people, or language(s). This conflation makes disentanglement especially difficult, yet not disambiguating perpetuates an oversimplification of a nation, languages, peoples, and cultures. While this blanket term collapses plurality into a monolithic entity, the converse seems to hold when looking at Romanized naming practices of Chinese Americans. The alphabetic rendition of Chinese American names draws relatively clear boundaries of country of origin and general time of arrival to the United States. This paper problematizes the term “Chinese” and looks at the Chineses like Cantonese and Hoisan-wa, which have long overlooked histories in the United States and hold critical clues to disambiguating the cultural and linguistic pluralities of what many would lump together as an immutable term. These findings have implications for using this naming phenomenon to raise linguistic awareness and for the teaching of Chinese American history.

Role of Oral Proficiency on Reading Comprehension: Within-Language and Cross-Language Relationships.

This longitudinal study examined the role of oral proficiency on English reading comprehension, as measured with elicited narratives using a wordless picture book, Frog Where are You?. The sample consisted 102 English language learners, including both Spanish and Cantonese speakers. Narrative samples were collected in the winter of first grade and reading skills were assessed on the same children one year later in second grade. Children were enrolled in either bilingual programs or mainstream programs. Multiple regression results show it was not the quantity and variety of words used in the narratives that predicted English reading comprehension one year later. Instead, the ability to produce a coherent oral narrative, in either the home language or English, explained a small variance in English reading comprehension for both English learner groups. These findings highlight the importance of examining narrative skills, especially as measured by narrative structure. Implications for parents and educators are discussed.

Hoisan-wa in Jest: Humor, Laughter, and the Construction of Counter-Hegemonic Affect in Contemporary Chinese American Language Maintenance

Abstract This research examines the language and cultural maintenance of Chinese Americans of a specific heritage: Hoisan-wa people. Hoisan-wa is one of the languages linking nearly all early Chinese immigrants in the U.S., but this language background has been pushed aside by the presence of other Chinese languages in America, such as Standard Cantonese and Mandarin. It has also been perpetually omitted from research for the last 150 years. Drawing from 93 sociolinguistic interviews with Hoisan-wa heritage people, I explore instances of humor and laughter as these participants talk about their cultural and linguistic heritage. Home and family remain two of the few domains that are consistently available to heritage language speakers, making them key foci in studying heritage language development. Unsurprisingly then, many of the humorous ways in which respondents engaged with – and commented metalinguistically about – Hoisan-wa had to do with words and phrases related to the home and family. I contend that these humorous moments serve to construct a counter-hegemonic affective stance that pushes back against established negative ideologies about Hoisan-wa, thereby creating a space to reflect and comment on language ideologies and enable speakers to adopt a language-as-resource view towards their heritage language.

“Learning Cantonese will help us”: Elementary school students’ perceptions of dual language education

ABSTRACT Though Cantonese has been spoken in the United States since the 1880s, very little is known about the attitudes of younger Cantonese speakers and learners and their ideas about their bi/multilingual identities. We fill this gap by reporting findings from focus group interviews with 14 fourth and fifth graders attending a Cantonese-English DLI school. We asked participants to discuss their beliefs about bi/multilingualism, their experiences with the DLI program, and their future aspirations using Cantonese. Three main themes resulted from the focus groups: utilitarian and intrinsic ideologies, the need for contextualizing language learning, and their general perceptions about their schooling experiences and building communicative repertoires. Specifically, findings show that students were expressive in discussing languages as a resource, the role of Cantonese in Chinese American immigration history, and the tensions between Cantonese and other more “economically useful” languages like Mandarin. Our data call for heightened attention to young learners’ language ideologies and the need to better understand the complex ways learners see themselves as bi/multilingual individuals and their various intrinsic and instrumental perceptions of language learning and use.

Translingual practice in L2 Japanese: workplace narratives

ABSTRACT Translingual practice is an emergent theoretical perspective which emphasizes the capacity and disposition for meaning-making across linguistic boundaries. Following on studies of globalized workplaces that have focused on lingua franca English, this article explores translingual practice as represented in interview and blog narratives recounted by multilingual, multiethnic young adults hired by Japanese schools and companies for their English proficiency. In these metapragmatic narratives of interactions with supervisors and coworkers, participants portray themselves surmounting communicative challenges through investment in L2 Japanese, and especially through pragmatic accommodation to local norms. In this way, they avoid maintaining widespread ideologies that delegitimize Japanese L2 speakers.