Family Language Policies of Saudi Student Families in the UK: the importance of the home environment

This short talk highlights the family language policies of sojourning or student families in the UK from Saudi Arabia. Based on a current PhD project, it describes the dynamic and ever-changing policies these families implement during their tenure in the UK. In addition to the initial culture shock and push for the learning of English, families who are close to the end of their study seem to favour the learning and use of Arabic more than that of English. This is different to their initial preference of English and their language management (Spolsky, 2012) of ensuring their children have a 'chance' to master English. In all 8 families took part in the project, all of whom were sojourning PhD students in the UK and were residing with their children. Once all consent and ethics had been met, parents completed a linguistic and demographic background questionnaire. Data was collected over a period of 8 months with monthly submissions of audio recorded interactions, activity forms (that details who was present, which languages were used, what time the recording took place) and finally interviews. The paper highlights the importance of such a family type in the study of family language policy because diverse contexts and family constellations uncover for the researcher the central issues in family bilingualism and family language policies.