Investment and sustainability in heritage language education: Insights from a community-based Cantonese school

Abstract

Scholarship on heritage language (HL) education and heritage language learners (HLLs) have recently gained an immense and increasing amount of recognition in research while still being a relatively new field. This uptick is largely due to the increasing immigration in the United States and, with that, a steady increase of people speaking languages other than English. Chinese is currently the second most populous community language in the United States, with approximately 5.4 million identifying as Chinese American, according to Pew Research Center. As this migrant population continues to grow, along with the rise of China (Duff et al., 2015; Zhou, 2019) as a global power, Chinese as a HL (CHL) is becoming an increasingly important topic of research and practice, particularly in the context of where and how CHL is learned. One educational setting where CHL children can learn and participate in their heritage culture and language is community-based HL (CBHL) programs. However, these schools have historically encountered numerous challenges when working with second+ generation CHL children. In recent decades, there has been a notable shift in the Chinese diasporic communities impacting language patterns of Chinese-speaking diasporas in the United States. This shift has led to reported evidence of denigration and stigmatization of CHL learners who do not speak the hegemonic variety—Mandarin Chinese, or Putonghua (‘the common language’). Furthermore, prior studies have reported negative learning experiences in CHL classrooms due to pedagogical issues based on Confucian values or social/cultural mismatch between teachers, who may come from and may have schooling experiences from China, and Chinese/Taiwanese/Hongkonger American students born or raised in the United States. Research to explore and inform solutions to these challenges is sparse but necessary. Some scholars have called for research and evaluation studies that seek to understand key stakeholders of programs, how programs work, and what impacts programs may have on the HL communities. Conducting a research-practice partnership (RPP) as a collaborative effort between researchers and practitioners could provide detailed insight into what issues and needs exist and how to develop a sustainable path toward mitigating these challenges and providing opportunities for HL investment. Despite numerous sociopolitical and pedagogical problems, these programs are vitally important to the sustainability of Chinese cultures and languages. Nonetheless, these programs must be scrutinized to reveal how to better support investment and sustainability in CHL education for HL learners and their families. This papers-based dissertation stems from a larger ethnographic case study of a Cantonese CBHL school that will be divided into three papers: 1) a research synthesis of Chinese CBHL schools; 2) a family language policy (FLP) study that examines HL family’s investment in a local Cantonese CBHL school; and 3) a conceptual piece that proposes the implementation of RPP in conjunction with CBHL schools, as well as a reflective demonstration of how a doctoral researcher collaborated with practice partner organization to work toward sustainability of the school and the target heritage language using an RPP framework.