Agency in home language maintenance: Children co-constructing family language policies
Piotr Romanowski discusses the concept of child agency in home language maintenance in the context of mixed Polish-British families.
Agency in home language maintenance: Children co-constructing family language policies
05 Mar 2025, 16:00 – 17:30
Smith-Christmas’ (2022) model has been applied as a vantage point to present how the four intersecting dimensions of compliance regimes, linguistic competence, linguistic norms and generational positioning illustrate the dynamics of interactional practices in a family.
To exemplify how complex and multi-layered child agency is, three conversational excerpts have been selected. While addressing the aforementioned dimensions, it occurred that children exerted agency through certain acts to shape language practices in the family. They became active agents in their families as well as important actors in co-constructing family language policies. Very often, they subverted the roles causing tensions or frictions between family members.
Ultimately, the four interrelated dimensions either unfolded individually to prove the children’s agentive use of language being a testimony to the fact that children are already fully-fledged actors in the family. On other occasions, the said dimensions transpired in the form of exhaustive model, with all of them evolving in parallel, thereby compliance regimes, linguistic norms, linguistic competence and generational positioning showcased the multidimensional character of child agency.
This event will be particularly useful for researchers.
Related links
- Centre for Applied Linguistics Research Seminars Series
- Centre for Applied Linguistics
- Culture, Communication and Media
Image
Paul Bradbury via Caia Image.
Dr Piotr Romanowski
Associate Professor
Faculty of Applied Linguistics, University of Warsaw, Poland
His academic interests sit at the intersection of sociolinguistics and educational linguistics, with a particular focus on multilingual education and language policy.
Further information
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