There are few situations in which parents face pedagogic challenges on the scale presented by this pandemic. Parents are having to step into supplementing the education of their children, attempting to home school them in areas where they often feel they lack competence.

However, the pandemic has its affordances. It has inadvertently given parents of heritage language children the opportunity to operate within their area of expertise and the time to put into motion or reactivate theirwish to pass on their heritage language (HL) to their children.The current situation can be used to great advantage in employing powerful strategic means to nurture mastery and enrich productive use of the heritage language.

It is precisely the current relative isolation from speakers of the dominant language (English) and the chance for children to repeatedly hear everyday needs and thoughts expressed in the heritage language that can work toward re-invigorating HL children’s productive use of the L1/HL to express themselves.Many parents are caught unaware by the erosion of their children’s HL expressive ability, as it happens almost imperceptibly as the dominant language expands its territory (Nyikos, 2014).

As the child of refugees – the first of my family to be born in the United States—I learned many strategies from my parents as they raised my siblings. My heritage language is not even distantly related to English and has a grammatical structure and vocabulary vastly different from the Germanic, Romance and Slavic languages. We lived in total isolation from a speech community, so I learned my HL solely from my parents and spoke it with my five siblings without the support of a school program or speech community.

Like the successful parents of other bilingual children (King, et al., 2008; Schecter & Bayley, 1997), my parents devised simple rules, short- and long-term goals, rewards, and creative engagement, while consistently providing abundant guidance and support. My parents raised six bilingual children under linguistically isolated circumstances, yet they were successful. What were the key elements that made this possible?

This question was the impetus to my ongoing inquiry with HL parents and their school-aged children who were either born in the United States or who came here as young children with their parents from various countries. The greatest factor working in favor of those who have been successful in HL maintenance and development was a deep understanding of the overpowering impact of English and the need for a family policy for language use in the home—a finding echoed in Guardado (2002) and by King et al. (2008).Moreover, successful parent participants in my study were very realistic regarding the commitment of time and care it would require of both parents to guide and support their children as their cognitive growth and communicative needs expanded.

Many had seen the example of other immigrants/visiting scholars with older children whose HL had greatly eroded and realized that keeping the heritage language alive required not only vigilance but the need to awaken in their children a level of commitment which could evolve into ever greater agency. Potowski (2004) found that teenagers’ HL use with siblings and friends was negatively correlated with the length of time children had been in the U.S.

In parent-child interviews, children described erosion and loss of much of their HL expressive capabilities. Parents expressed dismay at having greatly underestimated the important role of specific language planning for maintenance and development of the HL.

It takes much more than just speaking to and around children for them to “pick up” new vocabulary and remain proficient in a language. It takes a concerted effort and at least the general outline of a philosophy, policy or plan for children to continue to speak a language when the dominant language is everywhere, diminishing the power and especially the active use of the HL for self-expression. Because many parents do comparably more speaking and accept short responses from their children, they may be the last to notice language loss in their children until it is almost too late. The most surprising outcome is that the loss of expressive capability was noted and reported by school-aged children well before their parents took note or realized the level of productive language loss (Nyikos, 2014).

Families in my study who were successful in fostering good bilingual proficiency in their children reported many of the ten strategies listed below. These same strategies can be instituted by HL parents during this time of concentrated family togetherness.

1. Co-planning. Regardless of age, children’s input into the family plan for L1 use was elicited. Their agency (and buy-in/commitment) was central to success.
2. Rules. Rules for language use were kept simple and children’s voices were included in what would work for the family. These rules were re-visited and re-calibrated as need arose.
3. Rationale. “Do we have to?” Quality time was given to explain and elicit the compelling reasons for keeping, growing and cherishing the heritage language. (e.g. practical and emotional reasons – relatives, intimacy of communication, ability to communicate unfettered by language challenges, value of knowing a world language at a high level).
4. Literacy time. Time was devoted in manageable increments to teaching literacy in the HL. This is not as daunting as one might believe. Most writing systems have a much closer phoneme-grapheme ratio than English (e.g. Spanish has a nearly 1-1 sound-symbol correspondence).
5. Gamifying. Parents used creative resources to elevate the use of the HL through gamification. Linguistic challenges were strategically devised to be both fun and pedagogically productive and rewarding (e.g. cooking/baking favorite foods, read-aloud of a great story at the end of a literacy lesson, playing the Kim memory game where children took turns in selecting the 10-20 objects to be named and remembered).
6. Each can lead. Parents were enthusiastic in leading and participating in making language learning fun. Where feasible, parents gave authority and teacher roles to older siblings. This spread the responsibility to lead and participate in teaching or games. Furthermore, it strengthened the skills and knowledge of the older siblings, who learned even as they taught.
7. Incentivizing/social rewards. Use of the HL in productive ways was rewarded through praise, stickers, privileges and family entertainment. Both parents used their interests and hobbies to engage their children in learning and conversation, and encouraged their older children to do the same. Many relied on their older children to guide younger siblings in using social media to view great YouTube videos, listen to songs, find books, stories, movies, and organize family and peer activities.
8. Expanding the territory. Parents realized the need for a minimal level of productive use of the HL by all members of the family on a daily basis. While they acknowledged the reality and need for code switching and translanguaging, parents realized the value and need for expanding the semantic territory of the HL to cover their children’s growing cognitive and experiential needs.
9. With a little help from my friends. Parents enlisted the help of relatives, friends, and their children’s HL peers to speak the HL with their children. A strong motivator for teens were peers with HL mastery greater than their own with whom they could communicate and share over social media. Additionally, parents wove their rich culture into their everyday lives, and searched relentlessly for materials that would resonate with their children.
10. Consequences/Accountability. Parents attempted to be as consistent as possible re: HL use in the household, and tended to cajole, praise and reward rather than withdraw privileges or scold, and sought the continued commitment by their children to their HL and their bilingual identity.

The strategies that each family used varied, depending on familial and economic circumstances (King et al., 2008; Nyikos, 2014). For each HL family, some of the considerations included the ages and relationships among siblings (older children tending to speak more fluent HL) and the level of HL mastery (receptive and productive) of each child.

While each successful family did not use all of the strategies listed above, a strategy common to all of them was a planful, considered, deliberate approach to cultivating the heritage language. This included two key factors: children’s stated commitment to using the family language coupled with parents’ commitment to nurturing a minimal level of daily HL productive speaking by their children in more than one-word responses and short phrases.

As formal schooling commences online, live and/or in hybrid form, nurturing a growth mindset regarding the HL and critical bilingual reasoning powers will enhance linguistic skills in school-related work. Adherence to the family commitment to the HL will also elevate children’s belief in themselves and their grit and persistence in forming their multilingual identities.

Many schools encourage attention to students’ linguistic and cultural background knowledge (funds of knowledge) as a base for further learning. This offers students further ways of sharing the many insights developed through speaking and engaging with their HL with peers, virtually or in person. As they discover and further develop their multilingual unique identities in the home, teens are in teachable zones as chores and anecdotes of linguistic and cultural history and intercultural encounters are shared which have shaped their family story. On a cautionary note, Potowski (2004) found that HL use with siblings and friends was negatively correlated with the length of time children had been in the U.S., warning parents that although their children may speak the home language to them, they may well not be using it actively with their peers and siblings.

My own breakthrough moment as a resistant teen came when my father gently acknowledged the teen pressure to be accepted and to blend, explaining thatit didn’t have to mean hiding my unique linguistic and cultural background. I distinctly remember the terms of endearment he used while talking to me, which added an immeasurable emotional potency to his words. Many HL teens interviewed in my study acknowledged the disarming and warming effect of caring and comforting words in the HL which encouraged them to persevere, often simply and significantly because of their love and respect for their parents.

This time of sheltering at home and the supportive routines of daily family life offer the opportunity for building productive linguistic interactions around caring conversations to shore up, enhance, and/or reset the linguistic trajectory for the minority HL, which is in need of protection and nurturing. This is indeed a critical moment to change the direction of erosion to enhancement of bilingual capability for HL families.

References

Garbati, J.F. & Mady, C. J. (2015). Oral skill development in second languages: A review in search of best practices. Theory and Practice in Language Studies, 5(9), 1763-1770.

Guardado, M. (2002). Loss and maintenance of first language skills: Case studies of Hispanic families in Vancouver. Canadian Modern Language Review, 5(3), 341-363.

King, K.A., Fogle, L. & Logan-Terry, A. (2008). Family language policy. Language and Linguistics Compass, 2(5), 907–922.

Nyikos, M. (2014). Bilingualism and family: Parental beliefs; child agency. Sustainable Multilingualism, 5(1),18-40.

Potowski, K. (2004). Spanish language shift in Chicago. Southwest Journal of Linguistics, 23(1), 87- 116.

Schecter, S. R., & Bayley, R. (1997). Language socialization practices and cultural identity: Case studies of Mexican-descent families in California and Texas. TESOL Quarterly, 31(3), 513-541.