Abstract

Few studies have investigated the discourses and ideologies around parents’ enrollment decisions in Chinese-English immersion contexts, and how these discourses and ideologies affect their involvement with their children’ bi/multilingual development. Conducted in a K-5 50/50 one-way Mandarin immersion school, this paper focuses on ethnographic interviews with parents that represent different social and cultural backgrounds. Findings demonstrate multiple ways that parents support and invest in their children’s bi/multilingual development. Findings also reveal that the ideology of neoliberal multilingualism and multiculturalism permeates parents’ decision-making, expectations, and investment. This ideology motivates parents to actively advocate for this school’s survival and combat with the local discourse of monolingualism, which creates a space with a humanitarian emphasis with multiculturalism but also shapes the school space in a certain way. Meanwhile, tensions exist among different parent groups in terms of their perceptions toward the ultimate benefits of this immersion school and the unbalanced parental influence on local language policymaking. This case study aims to investigate the discourses and parents’ ideologies in Chinese immersion education, and to offer some implications for language planning in one-way foreign language immersion contexts.

抽象的

很少有研究调查中英文浸入情境中有关父母入学决定的话语和意识形态，以及这些话语和意识形态如何影响他们对孩子的双语/多语种发展的参与。本文是在一所K-5 50/50单向普通话沉浸式学校中进行的，着重于与代表不同社会和文化背景的父母进行的人种志访谈。研究结果表明了父母支持和投资于孩子的双语/多语言发展的多种方式。研究结果还表明，新自由主义的多语言主义和多元文化主义意识形态渗透到父母的决策，期望和投资中。这种意识形态激发了父母们以当地一语种话语积极倡导该学校的生存和斗争，它创造了一个以多元文化主义强调人道主义的空间，同时也以某种方式塑造了学校的空间。同时，在不同的家长群体之间，他们对这种沉浸式学校的最终利益的理解以及父母对当地语言政策制定的不平衡影响方面存在着紧张关系。本案例研究旨在研究汉语浸入式教育中的话语和父母的意识形态，并为单向外语浸入式语境中的语言规划提供一些启示。