This study investigates the experiences of Australian Taiwanese-background parents and children, who sojourn to the parents’ homeland during school holidays to improve their linguistic and cultural skills. We explore outcomes of this language management activity, focusing on the mothers’ aims and children’s linguistic development and their identity formation.
This study investigates the experiences of Australian Taiwanese-background parents and children, who sojourn to their parents' homeland during school holidays to improve their linguistic and cultural skills. This language management strategy, initiated at the family level, engages the target community overseas to offset local environmental impediments to home language maintenance in a country that not only withholds institutional support for home languages, but also actively attempts to discourage their use in the private domain. Although this appears to be an organised management practice frequently implemented in the Asia-Pacific region, there is still little research on its impact on the children and their families.
In our study, we explore linguistic, social, and affective factors related to the sojourn experience. Data were obtained through online questionnaires and semi-structured interviews with mothers and children who engaged in this practice, to gather demographic information on participants' backgrounds, family language policies and practices, linguistic attitudes and expectations, and their perceptions of children's experiences and challenges. A thematic analysis was used to identify emergent recurrent themes across the interviews.
The data showed that for mothers who actively enrolled the children into schools in Taiwan during Australian holidays, the professed aim of enhancing linguistic competence in the home language takes second place to the mothers' affective and emotional needs and nostalgic desires, providing a crucial link to their identities as "good Taiwanese-Australian mothers" who see themselves as "returning", no matter which direction they travel between Taiwan and Australia. The sojourning experience may well help to create a joint sense of dual identity between mothers and children, or at least ensure that the Taiwanese element of their identity is not lost. Children, however, take an agentive role with regard to identity choices, and thus parents' aims are not always fulfilled as they expected.
