Research Report

Mothers and
mother tongues
Mobilizing family-generated knowledge
for heritage language development
Immigrant parents know the drill: talk to your schoolaged
kid in your native language, and chances are the
child will reply in English. Repeatedly. Despite gentle
encouragement or heartfelt pleas. Raising a multilingual
child—and keeping a heritage language alive at
home—is not an easy task. That is true of families
where both parents share a mother tongue, but even
more so for mixed, interlingual couples, a category
that has been steadily on the rise in Canada according
to census data. Yet, not much is known about the
unique challenges faced by this type of family.
“Families of mixed linguistic backgrounds are minimally
represented in the literature,” says Martin Guardado,
academic director of Extension’s English Language
School. Along with Rika Tsushima (a PhD candidate at
McGill University), Guardado is currently wrapping up
a study funded by a SSHRC grant, Allophone Mothers:
Japanese Female Immigrants’ Perspectives on Heritage
Language, a project based on the experience of
Japanese-descent mothers living in Montreal.
“Trying to ensure that your child will grow up fluent
in your heritage language is often an emotionally
demanding and labour-intensive task,” explains
Guardado. For the Japanese mothers in the study,
the daunting task at hand is to keep the little ones
fluent in Japanese while the children are also
expected to learn English, do their schooling in
French, and—in many cases—speak their father’s
language.
Why do these mothers want their children to speak
Japanese? Passing on a cultural legacy is one of the
reasons. Socializing the child with the extended family
back home is another. But maybe the most compelling
force powering their efforts is the bond they’ll be able
to establish with their sons and daughters, one that’s
filtered by the very notion of identity that is conferred
by language. One of the participants in the study
gives an eloquent example of this issue when she says:
“Well, it’s my language, isn’t it? My words. Japanese is
not just a tool, but myself. Myself. So, if it’s rejected, it
would shock me as if I were rejected by [my children].”
Providing expert advice
Knowledge mobilization is a crucial component of this
project, which was conceived not only as a means to
learn along with the mothers, but also to develop
information-sharing opportunities and provide researchbased
advice for the target population. With this goal
in mind, booklets and workshops with the mothers
were designed as one of the study’s phases, providing
participants with much-needed guidance on how to
navigate the everyday Babel of interlingual families.
“Participants were very vocal about their unsuccessful
efforts to access good expert advice,” says Guardado.
“Perhaps the most powerful research implication
emerging from this study concerns the need for
researchers to build appropriate knowledge translation
and mobilization components into their study designs.”
Among other things, the workshops served to debunk
a few multilingual education myths that are a source
of great anxiety for many families. One such myth,
sometimes passed along by concerned friends and
school teachers, is that speaking different languages
at home will have negative consequences in the child’s
performance at school. “In fact, multilingual children
are nearly always better than their monolingual friends
at reading and writing,” says Guardado.
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