This study investigates how migrant South Asian mothers and children in Hong Kong strategize to achieve class mobility through constructing new class identities and practicing linguistic and cultural repertoires, and how they practice language policy in the multiple contexts of home, school, community and society, and explore the underlying reasons.
This study, employing social class as a theoretical lens and seeing social divisions of migrants as multiple constitutive positionalities that are context specific (Fresnoza-Flot and Shinozaki 2017; Rother 2017; Shinozaki 2012), aims to investigate how migrant South Asian mothers and children in Hong Kong strategize to achieve class mobility through constructing new class identities and practicing linguistic and cultural repertoires, and how they practice language policy in the multiple contexts of home, school, community and society, and explore the underlying reasons. It is found that while the mothers actively drew on their resources (e.g., social-networking, knowledge of governmental policy and languages) from emigrational experiences in achieving class mobilization, a bounded view towards cultures may influence the family language policy, which in turn constrains children’s acculturation and socialization into the mainstream society and leads to class stabilization. The mothers were found to adopt a restrictive family language policy to functionalize contexts of household, school, community and society, and to set up the family language policy to a large extent drawing on their own migrant and social experiences. It is therefore argued that that ideological spaces (Hornberger, 2006) should be opened up for the linguistic and cultural resources of the migrant mothers to be valued and for them to develop a more fluid family language policy to prepare the children with better educational success and acculturation. Future research could explore the underlying reasons that restrict the development of a more fluid and dynamic language policy and how the children’s experiences in schools and could be utilized as resources for family language policy implementation. This points to more school-parents collaboration and information exchange, and the necessity of providing more space for the children to play their own agency and contribute their own ideologies.
