Monolingual disobedience, multilingual guilt?: an autoethnographic exploration of heritage language maintenance during COVID-19 lockdowns

Abstract

Abstract In this study I indicate that lengthened family interaction time during pandemic lockdowns can afford children significantly more exposure and opportunities to enhance their heritage language, but that this does not diminish the constant dilemma between striving to balance English acquisition and heritage language maintenance. Using autoethnography, and as a first-generation immigrant mother of a preschool-age Chinese American child, I will demonstrate how our family language policy and languaging practices evolved during the COVID19 lockdowns, and indicate how, despite the growing development of my child’s heritage language skills, her multilingualism was achieved at the cost of my constant ideological struggles between disobeying rampant English-only ideologies in society and feeling guilty about decentering academic English in our family language policy. With this study, I call for future research to adopt a longitudinal lens to explore whether shifting family language policies and languaging practices during lockdowns may have long-term influences on children from multilingual households.

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