4 - Speaking the School Language

Summary

Chapter 4 depicts a US elementary school that a second-generation Chinese immigrant child attends. It explores the school’s multicultural ideology and monolingual ethos from the child’s kindergarten teacher’s viewpoint. It further explores how this child’s family language ideology and policy are shaped by his first-generation immigrant parents’ own language limitations in the U.S. and their comparative views on Chinese versus American communicative styles. Through observation and narrated stories, this chapter brings the reader to the child’s elementary-school classroom, his school’s field day and international day, and his parents’ workplaces. It presents a case where not only do the parents fully support the English-only policy and practice at school, but they also are ready and willing to deliberately shift to greater use of English at home, based on their careful cost–benefit assessment of the consequences of the language shift for their family.