Abstract :
The increased numbers of Chinese immigrants in North America mean a higher population with Chinese as their mother tongue. As the Statistics Canada 2016 Census reports, the population who spoke Chinese at home rose 16.8% from 2011 to 2016 to almost 1.23 million individuals, which made Chinese the leading mother tongue after English and French (Statistics Canada, 2017). However, just as “Chinese immigrants” are often considered as an undifferentiated group, “Chinese language” is also viewed as just a single language, namely, Mandarin. This assumption has made the Chinese language programs problematic for Chinese heritage learners (hereafter CHLs) from families that speak other varieties of Chinese (Wiley, 2008; Wong & Xiao, 2010). There are increasing scholarly and societal efforts to show the linguistic diversity within the “Chinese language” (Ramsey, 1987; Chao, 1997; Wiley, 2008), however, the existing research tends to generalize CHLs as Mandarin-speaking CHLs, regardless of what varieties of Chinese they use at home.
This study will ask the question that "how do the motivations, attitudes and sociolinguistic practices in a class of non-Mandarin-speaking Chinese heritage learners reflect on their diverse linguistic backgrounds, as well as identity and language acquisition trajectories? For this study, to investigate the complexity of "Chinese languages" and "mother tongues", I will adopt a case study of a Mandarin class in Canada and apply the sociocultural theories (Vygotsky, 1978; Lantolf, 2000) in the arena of heritage language education.
