Due to the dramatic increase in the immigration of speakers of other languages to Ireland, schools are faced with the linguistic challenges of adapting their curricula to meet this new trend. As experience in other countries has shown, the development of school programmes to serve the children of immigrants has often been slow and sometimes did not serve the best interest of immigrant children (Glenn & de Jong, 1996: 404–503). The situation is similar in Ireland. Although Ireland officially adopted an intercultural education policy in 2005 and developed a new language curriculum in 2017, it has paid little attention to children’s multilingualism and multiliteracy development. This situation often leaves children and their families without much guidance and support necessary for their multilingual development. Thus, families often develop their own ideas and ways of language maintenance and language learning. Informal family language policies differ among families as they make certain choices when it comes to the multilingual development of their children. For these reasons, this study is about four Polish families, specifically four adolescents: Kasia, Wiktoria, Janek and Marcin.
Educational environments can be developed either as places where everyone can grow and become aware of their emerging linguistic repertoire and its value, or as places offering limited choices, often perceiving one linguistic competence as more favorable and ignoring the other. Not speaking a majority language is considered problematic and children continue to be seen as having some sort of ‘deficit’. Anecdotal evidence suggests that there is a discrepancy in the ways that immigrant children’s languages are seen by their educators depending on the languages they speak. If their mother tongue belongs to the group of modern European languages, the children are more likely to be offered explicit recognition and overt support toward the maintenance of their language. Over the last 30 years, language educators, applied linguists and sociolinguists have documented and discussed various monolingual practices worldwide (May, 2014; Meier & Conteh, 2014), which have been referred to as ‘damaging deficit approaches’ (Ortega, 2014: 32). This has led to a call for collective research action (Ortega, 2014) and for greater teacher guidance (Weber, 2014) to question monolingual thinking/norms worldwide.
Researchers such as Devine (2005), Darmody (2011), McGillicuddy and Devine (2018) and McDaid (2011) have observed and identified these same practices in Ireland. McDaid (2011: 20) goes even further by saying that children are given a clear message that their first language (L1) is a barrier to succeeding in the Irish education system; therefore, ‘the issue of minority language recognition is fundamentally an issue of inequality’ within the Irish education system (2011: 20). Teachers’ misrecognition of children’s linguistic capabilities is articulated through a pedagogical commitment to the acquisition of English based on an approach rooted in the time-on-task argument (Imhoff, 1990). Other studies in Ireland discuss similar problems (see McGorman & Sugrue, 2007; Nowlan, 2008; Wallen & Kelly-Holmes, 2006). Devine (2005) argues that this perspective originates in the construction of children in deficit terms, and asserts that it is underpinned by a concern that children cannot integrate socially without the requisite proficiency in English. It presents English language speakers as normative and minority language speakers as deficient or inferior. Proficiency in L1s is ‘devalued and condemned’ (Lynch & Baker, 2005). Many of the children experience the message that the solution to these ‘failings’ lies in the successful acquisition of English.
One might believe that the situation has changed since 2011; however, McGillicuddy and Devine’s (2018: 90) study on ability grouping practices in Ireland shows that many schools still ‘funnel and filter’ children into differentiated ability groups with learners assigned to the ‘weaker’ groups, mostly composed of boys and minority ethnic/migrant children. These children are often described as ‘turned off’ because of their ‘language problems’ or among learning difficulties, whereas other children are ‘ready to fly’ through the education system (McGillicuddy & Devine, 2018: 93). This is alarming and exposes ‘the process of legitimation underpinning this symbolically violent act is shaped by a system which maintains social order by defining boundaries of difference in the classroom’ (Devine & McGillicuddy, 2016).
Taking on a multilingual framework instead, one sees great value and potential in ‘all languages a person can use in society and learns inside and outside of educational environments, including language varieties, dialects, signed languages and partial languages’ (Busch, 2012). This framework is based on the idea of plurilingualism, which indicates personal bi/multilingual language competences as defined by the Common European Framework of Reference (Council of Europe, 2001). This theoretical framework is embedded in the concept of critical multiculturalism/interculturalism, as Antonsich (2016) argues that integration of immigrants is ‘the right to have one’s difference recognized and supported in both the public and private spheres’ which is central to equal citizenship and uniform membership of all members of society. Education systems are, however, slow in adapting to these changes and conceptual frameworks. Their reluctance is rooted in more systemic struggles to develop policies and curriculum guidelines based on equity and informed by the newest research advancements. In Ireland, there is still no provision for home languages for children who speak other languages than English. Multilingual children are often perceived from ‘deficit’ perspectives. Many studies report that there is very little awareness of ‘multiliteracy’ and pedagogies recognizing children’s linguistic potential except for Kirwan (2019) or very recent initiatives such as an organization called ‘Mother Tongues’.
This book not only documents how four multilingual children and their families navigate through these complex and often ‘pervasive’ monolingual and monocultural norms but it also illustrates fascinating ways in which they exercise their own agency, the choices they make and the plans they have for their future. These families, the children in particular, develop unique strategies to cope with the challenges of migration. I take a multilingual turn (Meier & Conteh, 2014; May, 2014), specifically I critique the monolingual norms that have become pervasive worldwide, including in Irish schools, and that have indirectly/implicitly influenced many of the strategies and practices of the families that took part in this study. Based on this, I see the participating families, their multilingual socialization and their practices and strategies as a driving force for change, in the form of an alternative structure for holistic reflection and potential transformation in Irish society. While the recent immigration of Poles to Ireland has inspired several studies, none has so far provided the kind of close up, intimate and detailed view of the experience of adolescent children and their parents that I have attempted in this book. I followed four Polish families, specifically teenagers as they expressed in their own words their feelings as they grappled with issues of conflicting identities and the accommodation of competing goals of language learning (English) and language maintenance (Polish). All the children participating in this research achieved B2+ language proficiency according to their schools and were not availing of any support programmes. The data collected provide a snapshot of their lives, illuminating the complexities of the process of growing up in a new place, a new country and a new society. This book contributes to our understanding of how older learners negotiate family internal and family external socialization processes and how parents’ ideologies and practices, peer socialization, language status and societal demands come together in adolescents’ lives. The book integrates the socio-historical context and adolescents’ attitudes with parents’ roles.
The rich data provided by the participants of this study were subjected to a rigorous analysis of interview transcripts and field notes collected over a period of one academic year per family, informed by current theories of language socialization (LS), discourse analysis, positioning and stance-taking, which will be discussed in the following sections of this chapter.
This book presents a thorough examination of the relationships of language, power and identity, exposing that, even for the youngest speakers, such associations are always indexed in talk and social behavior. There