User:Wx27/Family language policy

Family language policy is the practice and research of language use among family members. It involves explicit and overt planning that family members may engage in to determine or attempt to shape the language use of their family. There are various forms of language planning and language ideology that may be considered factors of family language policy, including decisions about what languages parents will speak, schooling decisions, or explicit teaching of languages, all of which influence the language use of a family.

Background
The field of family language policy was developed to create a bridge between the fields of language policy and child language acquisition. Both fields are broadly concerned with language learning and use, but are frequently categorized as parts of different academic fields. Child language acquisition is generally categorized as a subfield of psychology while language policy is generally categorized as a field of sociology or sociolinguistics. In the late 2000s linguists began to develop the field of family language policy.

Implementation
Often, family language policy centers on bilingual or multilingual parenting: parents who want to teach their children two different languages. But it can also relate to any other choices parents may make about language use within their family. In the context of bilingual parenting, research often centers on the best way to ensure children acquire two languages. A common strand of family language policy research involves research of discourse strategies: how parents talk to their children. Some discourse strategies of note include the following, with the target language being the language the parents want to allow the children to retain, and the other language being the language a child is inclined to speak:


 * Minimal Grasp Strategy: Parents use the target language to ask children to clarify their utterances with phrases like "what did you say?" Parents expect their children to respond with clarification in the target language.
 * Expressed Guess Strategy
 * Parents form a question in the target language that guesses what the child meant. It frequently takes the form of a yes-no-question. This prompts a response from the child in the target language.


 * Adult Repetition
 * Parents simply repeat the child's utterance in the target language with no question.


 * Move on Strategy
 * Parents simply continue talking in the target language without asking the child for clarification.


 * Language Switching
 * Parents simply switch to the other language without an attempt to encourage the child to speak the target language.

These strategies are arranged from most bilingual to most monolingual. The more bilingual strategies are more likely to allow a child to retain both languages, while the more monolingual strategies are less likely to do so.