Today was Van Tran's PhD endorsement at Charles Sturt University; an important milestone in every PhD student's journey. Van is a PhD scholar on our ARC Discovery grant, VietSpeech. Her proposed PhD title is "Promoting home language maintenance among Vietnamese-Australian children". Van's proud supervisors are Dr Sarah Verdon, Dr Cen (Audrey) Wang and myself. The session went extremely well and she was cheered on by members of the SLM team. Congratulations Van.
Here is the abstract of her endorsement.
Australia is a country of multiculturalism with nearly a half of the population being first- or second-generation migrants in Australia and one fifth of Australians speaking a language other than English (LOTE) at home. With more than 400 languages spoken, Australia is one of the most culturally and linguistically diverse (CALD) countries in the world. While multilingualism is well-practiced in Australian society, there is an increasing risk of home languages becoming lost among speakers of later generations of migrants.
With nearly 300,000 speakers, Vietnamese is in the top four most spoken languages other than English in Australia (after Mandarin, Arabic, and Cantonese). Like other ethnic groups, Vietnamese-Australian parents are concerned about their children not speaking Vietnamese and gradually losing their home language. The loss of home languages is not only the loss of opportunities to become multilingual, which has been proved to be highly beneficial to individuals as well as the community, but also the loss of cultural identity and relationships with relatives, who find language barriers one of the biggest challenges to build bonds with their children.
This PhD adopts the theoretical frameworks of Spolsky (2004)’s Language Policy Theory and Fishman (1972)’s Domains Conceptualisation and explores Vietnamese-Australian families’ language practices, language ideologies and language management. Specifically, this PhD draws on survey, interview and focus group data to map Vietnamese-Australian families’ language exposure, use and proficiency in different communicative situations and on different topics (language practices), examine parents’ attitudes towards and perceptions of home language maintenance (language ideologies), explore Vietnamese-Australian family language policies and rules and investigate the role of Vietnamese community language school in supporting home language maintenance (language management), as well as identify factors affecting home language maintenance.
The utmost aim of the study is to investigate the best ways to support Vietnamese-Australian families to maintain Vietnamese as their home language. The findings of this research will provide parents, educators, education consultants, speech pathologists as well as professionals working with Vietnamese children with knowledge of Vietnamese children’s language use and proficiency, their parents’ perceptions of and attitudes towards language learning and home language maintenance as well as the factors associated with home language maintenance. The results from this research will also contribute to informing policy and constructing programs promoting home language maintenance.
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| Van Tran, Sarah Verdon (online), Audrey Wang, Sharynne McLeod, Rebecca McCauley |
