“It would be nice if someone took the load off you”: New Australian mothers of Arabic-speaking background on the challenges of maintaining their heritage language with their children

December 4, 2017 2 Comments

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“It would be nice if someone took the load off you”: New Australian mothers of Arabic-speaking background on the challenges of maintaining their heritage language with their children

Areej Yousef and Kerry Taylor-Leech, Griffith University

ccCC BY 4.0

Cite as: Yousef, A. & Taylor-Leech, K. (2017, December). “It would be nice if someone took the load off you”: New Australian mothers of Arabic-speaking background on the challenges of maintaining their heritage language with their children. Paper presented at the Third UC Intergenerational Transmission of Minority Languages Symposium: Challenges and Benefits. https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.5620567

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Despite a general expectation for immigrants to Australia to shift quickly to the use of English, many new-Australian families maintain strong affiliations with their heritage languages. However, there is little research that has explored how families of Arabic-speaking background preserve their heritage language while simultaneously becoming proficient in English. In this presentation we report on a study that explored the linguistic perceptions and practices of four new-Australian mothers of Arabic-speaking background in Queensland. Focus groups and semi-structured interviews revealed that the mothers considered it vitally important for their children to be proficient in both English and Arabic. However, they consistently referred to the difficulties of maintaining Arabic. In this presentation we report on these difficulties and how the mothers negotiated them. Based on our findings, we also briefly discuss some recommendations for how mothers and immigrant families more broadly can be supported in maintaining their heritage languages in Australia.

 

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COMMENTS (2)

Amy Budrikis 6 years ago

Hi Areej and Kerry,

This is such great research. I was wondering about what you said about mothers feeling responsible for transmitting Arabic and wanting institutional support but also being expressing criticism of what is available. It seems from what you said that there is a focus on formal teaching – did you get a sense in this research of whether mothers are making a conscious distinction between informal transmission at home and formal (institutionalised) teaching, and if so, do mothers value formal teaching over informal transmission? Is there a feeling/belief that if children’s only exposure to language is everyday language use in the home, that this will be insufficient?

(On another note I was not aware that women were the main targets of abuse/violence against Muslims in Australia – as another Australian, I’m so ashamed of this. Thank you for sharing.)

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Kerry Taylor-Leech 6 years ago

Hello Amy and thanks so much for your comments. Sorry to be so slow to respond but the Christmas break came up fast. To answer your question, the mothers did place great value on formal education for their children and saw a difference between formal language education in school and informal language education at home. At the same time, they were critical of the teaching styles and the strictness in the Arabic weekend schools and they wished there were better trained teachers in these schools who could teach their children Arabic. We sensed that there was tension between the religious function of the weekend schools, which focused on the teaching of Islam and the Koran, and our participants’ desire for a more secular form of Arabic-language education for their children. We would like to explore this aspect more deeply to understand it better

It also shocked and saddened us to learn that Muslim women were such targets of hostility. Even though the rate of anti-Islamic attacks are low in Australia compared to other countries like the USA, it is still a sad indication of the consequences of stereotyping. Best regards, Kerry

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