<abstract xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"><p>Bilingual partnerships (Piller &amp; Pavlenko, 2004) and transnational families (Hirsch &amp; Lee, 2018) are on the rise. With mothers spending more time with their children at home, even in dual career partnerships (Hochschild &amp; Machung, 1989), the labor of family language policy (FLP) implementation often falls on them. While increasingly more new hires in academia are women (Finkelstein, Seal, &amp; Schuster, 1998), only 31% of them are mothers (Perna, 2003). In this work, we examine the dominant discourses regarding bilingualism and FLP among academic mothers who find themselves at an intersection of multiple and often competing social positions. Data was collected from 46 academic mothers residing in linguistically-different host societies but all whom gather in an online community they have co-created. Data collection procedure included 22 open-ended questions exploring bilingualism and FLP orientations. Iterative and recursive content analysis was performed, yielding thematic patterns centering around language ideologies, practices, and bilinguality.</p></abstract>

Bilingual partnerships (Piller & Pavlenko, 2004) and transnational families (Hirsch & Lee, 2018) are on the rise. With mothers spending more time with their children at home, even in dual career partnerships (Hochschild & Machung, 1989), the labor of family language policy (FLP) implementation often falls on them. While increasingly more new hires in academia are women (Finkelstein, Seal, & Schuster, 1998), only 31% of them are mothers (Perna, 2003). In this work, we examine the dominant discourses regarding bilingualism and FLP among academic mothers who find themselves at an intersection of multiple and often competing social positions. Data was collected from 46 academic mothers residing in linguistically-different host societies but all whom gather in an online community they have co-created. Data collection procedure included 22 open-ended questions exploring bilingualism and FLP orientations. Iterative and recursive content analysis was performed, yielding thematic patterns centering around language ideologies, practices, and bilinguality.

Academic Mothers’ Definitions of Bilingualism, Bilinguality, and Family Language Policies

Psychology of Language and Communication

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 3.0 License.

Bilingual partnerships (Piller & Pavlenko, 2004) and transnational families (Hirsch & Lee, 2018) are on the rise. With mothers spending more time with their...

Academic Mothers’ Definitions of Bilingualism, Bilinguality, and Family Language Policies

Published Online: Apr 13, 2020

Page range: 22 - 43

DOI: https://doi.org/10.2478/plc-2020-0002

Keywords
bilingualism, academic mothers, family language policy, transnationalism

© 2020 Tijana Hirsch et al., published by Sciendo

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 3.0 License.

Academic Mothers’ Definitions of Bilingualism, Bilinguality, and Family Language Policies

Published Online: Apr 13, 2020

Page range: 22 - 43

DOI: https://doi.org/10.2478/plc-2020-0002

Keywordsbilingualism, academic mothers, family language policy, transnationalism

© 2020 Tijana Hirsch et al., published by Sciendo

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 3.0 License.

Keywords
bilingualism, academic mothers, family language policy, transnationalism