Introduction

In the era of globalisation, the inevitable emergence of a broad range of fluid multilingual and multicultural contexts that occur across borders requires renewed perspectives on multi/bilingual language users. There are permanent immigrants who are positioned in a context that requires the restructuring of their relations of power in order to fit in with the cultural and occupational norms of the host country (Norton Peirce, 1995). There is another increasingly large group which include short-term residents or sojourners whose attachment to the home community differentiates them from any other immigrant groups (Chao & Ma, 2019). As they are not destined to mingle with the host culture for good or at least their future trajectories are “transitory in nature”, the way in which their linguistic behaviour is influenced by it does not necessarily replicate what immigrants experience (Song, 2012, p. 508).

Along with the waves of transnational travellers, Vietnamese citizens work and study all over the world, with Australia being one of the favoured destinations. According to the Australian Department of Education, Skills and Employment (2021), in the financial year of 2020–2021, more than 300 child dependants accompanied their parents to Australia during their parents’ pursuit of higher and/or further education opportunities. Nearly one-third of this number attended primary schools Australia-wide. Departing from their home country where English is now considered “as a symbol of quality education and as a mechanism for fuller participation in national and international opportunities” (Bui & Nguyen, 2016, p. 367), these sojourner children have been given a once-in-a-lifetime chance towards an imagined successful future. This early opportunity enables the children to be fully immersed in an English-speaking environment, yet at the same time accentuates the role of families in general and parents in particular in sustaining their first language.

Although there have been numerous research projects on the way multi/bilingual families use and learn their languages in home settings and the immediate and long-term effects of these practices on children’s language use and development, most of these studies have centred on long-term or permanent immigrant families and the language practices performed in the second or third generation. Among the few existing studies accommodating family language practices in short-term residents, the authors tend to focus on family contexts from East Asian backgrounds (e.g., Chao & Ma, 2019; Kanno, 2003a; Song, 2012). There seems to be no substantial study into Vietnamese sojourner families the world over in general, and in Australia in particular.

My research project, which aims to investigate family language policy and practices in Vietnamese sojourner families in Australia, may be considered basis for researchers of other less dominant ethnicities (in terms of worldwide population distribution) to develop their interest in this subject matter. This research project also hopes to serve as an evidence-based reference for relevant stakeholders (families, schools, and policy makers) in similar contexts to make decisions related to language education and language support programmes for the increasing population of school-aged sojourners. This overarching research purpose is specified in the following three research questions.

  1. a.

    How are family language policy and practices performed at sojourners’ home?

  2. b.

    What reasons do the sojourner parents give for their family language practices?

  3. c.

    How do parents’ beliefs and the future socio-cultural contexts impact on sojourners’ family language practices?

Family Language Policy (FLP) and Key Concepts

Family Language Policy

The broad field of language policy, according to Spolsky (2012), constitutes three elements—the actual language practices of a speech community, the values assigned to each language variety and the beliefs of those values, and the efforts by the authority to influence the language practices of the community members. In line with that definition, FLP focuses on what families believe about language and language use; what they do with language in everyday interactions; and what efforts they make to achieve outcomes related to language use and language learning (King et al., 2008). The authority in the case of FLP as a bounded community on its own is generally understood as parents and/or caregivers. Language planning within the context of family is often “not consciously planned” and prone to external conditions “beyond the family’s control” (Caldas, 2012, p. 351).

Research on bilingual families and their language policy and practices showcases three major themes: the role of parents and other family members in the language development of the children (King, 2013); the influence of the surrounding communities on the implementation of individual family language policy (Oriyama, 2016); and the connection between past experiences and future projections each family imagines for themselves and the way FLP is practised (e.g., Chao & Ma, 2019; Song, 2012). Among these factors, future projections appear to trigger the greatest divergence between the way that permanent and temporary immigrant families treat bilingualism and biliteracy in their home language practices (Refer to Dam, 2021 for a more detailed review). Generally, permanent immigrant families tend to treat the majority language as a resource for survival and pay particular attention to the minority language mostly as an emblem of ethnicity (Chao & Ma, 2019). In contrast, sojourner families try to take advantage of their stay to master the majority language of that community for the imagined economic and educational benefits it might bring upon their return (Song, 2012).

FLP research has recently underlined child agency in the communicative practices of mixed-language families. This body of research pinpoints the agentive and creative role of children in influencing how languages are used and learnt in family contexts (for a detailed review, refer to Smith-Christmas, 2020). For example, Said and Zhu (2019) found that school-aged children in an Arabic family in the UK actively took up a multilingual agentive position in their mixing of English and Arabic in family conversations as they were fully cognizant of their parents’ flexible FLP; there seemed to be a correlation between an open FLP and the children’s positive experiences with both languages. Crump (2017) also concluded in her project with three multilingual families in Canada that the participating pre-schoolers’ language practices are reflective of both their understanding of parents’ language planning and their own agencies and individualities. The hierarchical order for their language of preference was negotiated according to with whom, where and when they could do so, representing their ability to position themselves as confident multilingual speakers in broader social contexts. These studies suggest the importance of taking child agency in FLP into consideration and extending the concept of authority in FLP to include children as equally powerful agents.

Translanguaging in Home Settings

Since its original definition by Cen Williams in 1994, translanguaging has been conceptualised and applied in an extensive body of research on language use and language learning by multi/bilingual speakers (for a detailed review, refer to Xin, Ping & Qin, 2021). As the focus of this project is on the use of two named languages (English and Vietnamese) in family contexts, Otheguy et al.’s (2015) definition of translanguaging is highly relevant: “the deployment of a speaker’s full linguistic repertoire without regard for watchful adherence to the socially and politically defined boundaries of named (and usually national and state) languages” (p. 281). This conceptualisation highlights the contrast between an outsider’s view of a bilingual’s linguistic repertoire as a sum of two named languages and an insider’s (or the speaker’s own) view of his/her own linguistic repertoire as the one and only entity. It also challenges the social and political constraints put on named languages, especially minoritized ones, and therefore helps dismantle the “socially constructed language hierarchies” (p. 283). Such a postulate is extremely meaningful to research on multi/bilingualism in general, and research on FLP in multi/bilingual home contexts in particular, during this era of transnational travel and immigration.

With regard to family language policy and practices, translanguaging has been extensively researched in various family-related contexts. It was reported as an effective method used by young multi/bilinguals to showcase their linguistic ideologies and cultural identities which diverge from their parents (Zhu, 2014), and their metalinguistic awareness and mobilisation of available linguistic resources depending on interlocutors and places (Paulsrud & Straszer, 2018). It has also been successfully employed to improve children’s multi/biliteracy by parents (Song, 2016) or on a larger scale, by the collaboration between family, school and community (Kim et al., 2021). When combined with support materials/devices, translanguaging proves a powerful tool to transfer cultural heritage from parents to children when learning about the home country’s culture and history (Kwon, 2022).

Despite being advocated by researchers in the discipline, translanguaging still provokes mixed reactions from parents, which results in incongruences among families in their FLP and the actual approaches to children’s language development. For example, many multi/bilingual parents choose to follow the One Parent—One Language (OPOL) as they believe that language separation ensures a “balanced and fluent” acquisition of the two languages by avoiding as much confusion as possible from “mixed language use” (Park, 2008, p. 636). Even those who claim to be supportive of a language mixing perspective actually perform language separation with their children at home, suggesting that translanguaging or language separation is not necessarily done on the basis of parents’ heteroglossic versus monoglossic language ideologies (Wilson, 2021). These findings call for a more holistic consideration of parents’ beliefs in their FLP practices.

Investment and Imagined Communities

In order to understand the effect of FLP on children’s use of languages, it is necessary to mention the concept of investment (Norton, 2013) which initially highlights “the connections between a learner’s desire and commitment to learn a language, and their complex and changing identity” (p. 6). As language learners’ desires to learn a language fluctuate, depending on their perceptions of the social interactions and the classroom settings that they are situated in, learners’ sense of themselves and their desires for future attainments also vary considerably by context. Fielding (2015) emphasises that investment should come from both language learners and the community in order for the individuals to develop language proficiency and the desired cultural identity.

Inspired by Anderson’s (1983) original notion of “imagined communities”, Norton (2001) developed her conceptualisation of imagined comminities which refers to language learners and their desire to integrate with the target language community. In her wake, there has been a great deal of research exploiting these two notions to account for a variety of phenomena in Second Language Acquisition and education (e.g., Norton & Kamal, 2003). I would argue that imagined communities are not only formed by the language learners themselves, but that the communities and all other stakeholders are in turn able to form an imagined image of the language learners. Therefore, there is a likelihood that the imagined vision formed by different groups about one single language learner or one particular community might not match or may even contradict each other, which consequently influences the practice of FLP. Thus, I intend to also explore the parents’ imagined community before they depart Australia.

In Kanno’s (2003a) project which was conducted over seven years with four Japanese adolescents from when they attended secondary schools in America until they returned to Japan for tertiary education, she discovered that while one of her participants had formed an idealised imagination about his home country before his return, it turned out to be so far removed from his imagination that he did not want to identify as Japanese anymore. Kanno (2003b) also comments that the two institutional settings (America and Japan) did not provide sufficient support and acknowledgement for these students to develop their bilingual and bicultural identities. Although Kanno (2003a) did not utilise Norton’s notions of investment and imagined identity and community in her original research, she did later use them to explain part of her research results in their co-authored article (Kanno & Norton, 2003), suggesting the possibility of looking at stakeholders’ expectations from the perspective of imagined identity and community.

Methodology

As the current study aims to investigate how FLP is practised in home settings and what reasons parents give for such practices, semi-structured interviews were conducted with the parents individually. The data collected were then analysed and thematised based on the recurring concepts in the dataset.

The Participants

The parent participants were chosen based on a screening questionnaire delivered on Qualtrics. Those who were willing to be interviewed filled in the form with their contact details for further communication. Among the parents who agreed to follow-up interviews after answering the questionnaires, twelve parents were invited for interviews. At the time of interview, the participants were either reaching the end of their sojourn in Australia or had recently returned to Vietnam within six months and had one child or more who had been/were going to primary schools for at least two years. The description of the family backgrounds in this section is based on the parents’ questionnaires and interviews. All participants are given pseudonyms to ensure confidentiality. Although the twelve families were located in different states of Australia, they shared several defining characteristics that differentiate them from other groups of immigrants. First, all the parents were currently or had been a PhD candidate at an Australian university. Second, the twelve parents were sponsored by the Vietnamese government for their PhD study, which mandated their commitment to return and work in Vietnam upon the completion of their course. Third, they were all living in Australia with their child(ren) (with or without spouse accompanying). The educational qualifications of the spouses ranged from Bachelor to PhD degrees. One last feature that most of these families had in common was the family structure which included both parents and one or two children (only one out of twelve interviewed parents did not live with their spouse during the sojourn).

Data Collection and Analysis

Data Collection

Parents voluntarily completed the survey on Qualtrics. The researcher screened through their responses to select cases for the research project. There were thirty-three questionnaire responses from parents. Among them, twelve parents agreed to proceed with interviews. All interviews were done in Vietnamese—the parents’ mother tongue—to ensure they were able to fully express their thoughts.

Data Analysis

The extracts presented below were first translated by the researcher and cross-checked afterwards by a colleague who holds a Master’s degree in Interpreting and Translation to ensure accuracy. The interpreted meanings behind each story told were then classified by theme as in the “analysis of themes” that occurs across interviewed cases (Creswell, 2007, p. 75). According to Creswell (2007), thematic analysis is not for the purpose of generalising the results to a broader context, but for “understanding the complexity of the cases.”

The coding process followed what is proposed by the grounded theory approach in which coding is divided into stages in order to “illuminate the logic that underline analysis” (Benaquisto, 2012, p. 87). The coding process therefore took place in three steps: open coding, axial coding, and selective coding (Strauss & Corbin, 1998). In the first step of open coding, transcripts were initially reviewed to identify as many ideas and concepts as possible even if they were not directly related to the aspects set in the interview questions. In the second step of axial coding, specific ideas and concepts identified in the open coding step were reassembled and related to each other. The last step of selective coding was done through a process of re-reading and re-examining the dataset (with translated extracts used as examples) from the very start of the data analysis until categories were merged into umbrella themes which offered a systematic presentation of research findings. The selective coding step yielded five major themes, including: translanguaging as a common practice; children as English-speaking role models; Vietnamese language learning; concerns about Vietnamese community language schools; and the overall influences of parents’ ideologies and imagined communities on their family language policies and practices.

Findings and Discussion

There are five outstanding themes that recur in the data regarding how the parents perceive and practise language use at home. First, translanguaging is considered a norm in communication among family members with constant switching between the two languages. Second, the fact that the children are proficient in English is taken advantage of by their parents, turning the young English speakers into role models for their parents’ language learning. Third, an opposite scenario is witnessed when it comes to the children’s Vietnamese learning, where a lack of investment and enthusiasm is evident from both parents’ and children’s sides. Fourth, the parents show hesitation in sending their children to Vietnamese community language schools in Australia and instead opted to teach their children themselves even though the results do not reach their expectations. These practices are significantly influenced by parents’ ideologies and the imagined communities they plan to be part of upon return to their home country of Vietnam.

Translanguaging as a Common Practice

Interactions among family members created a “translanguaging space” (Wei, 2011), where family language practices are negotiated over time according to the children’s language development. Language use at home between adult family members and children seem to depend on the children’s language of preference. While parents still maintain communication amongst themselves in Vietnamese, they tend to switch the language to fit the children’s preferred language when talking to them. In the following extract, one mother acknowledged the gradual switch in language use at home due to her child’s increased proficiency in English.

When we first came here, our family still talked in Vietnamese. But after that, Helen (the daughter) went to school and brought home new concepts she learnt from school. And her communication with us gradually changed. Her English concepts increased and there were no Vietnamese equivalents. That’s why we gradually turned to English. (Hanh)

The extract suggests that it is more convenient for family members to use English with the child because the girl could not find words with similar meanings in Vietnamese. On one hand, this indicates the child’s improvement in English, thanks to schooling in the host country of Australia and the levelling-off or even worsening of their Vietnamese proficiency due to lack of formal education in the Vietnamese language. This is in line with the findings in Lee et al.’s (2021) project where the author followed three Korean sojourner families in the U.S. and found that the child participant’s use of English at home increased over time thanks to his involvement in the outside environment. On the other hand, the situation points to a scenario where the children exercise their agency in deciding which language to use in the home settings. Though the power they have over in-home language practices is not overtly renounced, their parents seem to easily compromise with a view to facilitating communication with the children.

In tune with this practice, another mother confessed:

His father had to teach at the university, so he wanted to practise English with him. That’s why he spoke English with his father at first and I tried to continue using Vietnamese with him. But now that we have to explain too much when speaking Vietnamese with him, it’s too tiring that most of the time we use English. (Nhan)

The starting point of this family is different from the first one in that the parents actively encouraged their son to use English with the father and Vietnamese with the mother (as an example of the One Parent One Language - OPOL approach). Although this OPOL practice is not totally for the child’s benefit but partly for the father’s teaching, it does reflect the parents’ awareness of the necessity and the initial intention to support their son’s maintenance of Vietnamese. However, like the first family, together with the child’s improved English and the comparably less used Vietnamese, English has become the dominant language of parent–child communication in the interest of convenience.

Parents’ intended FLP seems open for negotiation because of the children’s actual choice of languages. Even in cases where parents aim to maintain family interactions in Vietnamese, their goals are hindered by the children’s inability to perform up to their expectations. A mother of a seven-year-old girl stated:

We wanted to use Vietnamese only. But she couldn’t. So we have to mix [in original] because it’s too time-consuming. Anyway, it’s better than finishing in Vietnamese and then explaining all again in English. (Ngan)

Once again, the children’s role in deciding their family language policy and practices might not be active in its real sense. Yet, the fact that they cannot fully understand and maintain the conversations in Vietnamese is a determining factor in their parents’ switch to English. In this case, the ones who are more bilingually flexible (the parents) tend to be the ones who accommodate to the less flexible ones’ language needs (the children).

While the prevalence of English over Vietnamese in parent–child communication in home settings is obviously represented through the parents’ interviews, they also acknowledge that there are constant switches between the two languages, with English used for more sophisticated topics and Vietnamese for more casual ones:

When I ask him to talk about a book he’s reading, he uses English. But when I ask him if something is delicious or not, he uses Vietnamese. (Lan)

Such situations can be justified by the frequency of contact that the children have with the two languages. While Vietnamese tends to be used only within family settings, the children have significantly more contact with English, especially through their schooling which is exclusively done in this language. Accordingly, they would gradually find it challenging to find the Vietnamese equivalents for the concepts they have internalised in English. It would be a hasty conclusion that their Vietnamese has waned; yet, it is obvious that English has gradually taken over Vietnamese to function as the children’s preferred language. A case in point can be seen in the following excerpt:

She learns English concepts from school and there are no equivalents in Vietnamese. (Hanh)

Translanguaging is performed in different contexts among family members. The switch between languages is not always as impulsive as commented but sometimes is done strategically. For instance, one mother revealed that:

When the whole family’s together, we encourage him to speak Vietnamese. But when we go out and there’re people around, we switch to English for politeness. (Sinh)

In this case, translanguaging appears to be a powerful tool for bilingual speakers to take on different social roles to fit in with different social settings. In more detail, in order to be considered legitimate and polite social actors in an English-speaking country, the mother switches to English to talk to her son; and in order to maintain their first language in home settings, she creates opportunities for her son to practise Vietnamese. She further explained the technique she uses with her son:

I often ask him like, “what does it mean in Vietnamese?” or “please explain it to your Dad in Vietnamese”. (Sinh)

As the father’s English is not very good, the child is placed in a situation where he has no other choice other than to try to use his own Vietnamese to explain things to his father. Interestingly, the mother commented that this method did not work for her because her son knew that she understood English. This also suggests the child’s consciousness of with whom and when he needs to adjust his language use and his dynamic role in creating FLP through his resistance to using Vietnamese with a competent user of English. This is in line with Miller’s (2017) findings about children’s awareness of others’ language preferences and the need to adjust their language use accordingly, or Crump’s (2017) conclusion about children’s self-positioning as “confident multilinguals” who language flexibly with different interlocutors in different places (p. 172).

Language selection is not only seen between father-child or mother–child interactions but also between siblings and grandparent-grandchild, further substantiating child agency in determining family language resources by considering “people, space, and purpose” (Paulsrud & Straszer, 2018, p. 64). While the choice of languages between parents and children can be reasoned by either parents’ proficiency in English or communication purposes, language choice in siblings’ or grandparent-grandchild communication is solely accounted for by the competence of the other interlocutors in English and Vietnamese. It is typical for the children to converse with their brothers or sisters in English as they feel more comfortable talking to each other in this language. However, in situations where they need to talk to their grandparents, Vietnamese appears to be the only means of communication as they are aware that it is the only language their grandparents can understand and use. A mother elaborates on this point:

When our parents visited us, I could see that his Vietnamese improved a lot because he had to use Vietnamese to talk to them. But after they came back to Vietnam, his Vietnamese deteriorated very quickly. (Nhan)

In these parents’ view, grandparents play a significant role in preserving not only the Vietnamese language but the traditional culture among their grandchildren as well. This is in keeping with Fielding (2015) who investigated English-French bilingual children’s identity. These children also commented on how their grandparents helped them connect with the more distant language and culture of France while the seniors were visiting their families in Australia.

Children as English-Speaking Role Models

Another prominent theme in the interviews is that the parents have taken advantage of their children’s proficient English in different ways. It is commonly believed that these bilingual children would help their parents best in in social interactions where they become the main language brokers on behalf of their parents (Bauer, 2016). In this study, they are also considered language teachers or experts who provide language examples for their parents to follow, which resembles what Lee et al. (2021) found where parents assumed the role of language learners in discussions with their children about the meaning of the expression “what the?”.

The less proficient parent in the family may learn how to speak English with the child not only for general communicative exchanges or “to practise pronunciation” but also for academic and professional purposes as presented in the following example:

His Dad has to teach at the university. So he [the Dad] wants to practise English with him. Then it turns into a habit. (Nhan)

Interestingly, if the parents are engaged in finding a way to encourage the children, the young ones can become unofficial teachers of English in the family in language skills other than just oral communication. One such parent shared:

I often tell him to teach his Dad English at certain times. Like he asks his Dad to read something and then he asks his Dad about that. At that time, he is allowed to speak English. My husband’s English is at basic level. So, he likes to teach his Dad English very much. (Sinh)

In this case, the child was motivated to teach his father how to read and understand English because he was given a more powerful position over his parents where he was the one to instruct and tell his student father what to do with his English.

Vietnamese Language Learning

As opposed to their confidence and proficiency in English, the children were said to feel much less motivated to learn Vietnamese, which might be due to the limited investment and rather traditional teaching methods that their parents use in teaching them this language.

Almost all parents said that they did spend time teaching their children at home with materials and coursebooks brought from Vietnam. However, when asked about the effectiveness of these home-schooling practices, they accepted that the children often showed limited enthusiasm. For example, one mother confessed:

Sometimes we teach her Vietnamese with the books we brought from Vietnam. But she has no interest in learning Vietnamese. All lessons are like a battle. She cries, and I’m tired. So we don’t teach much. And she understands nothing. She can spell and write some words but doesn’t understand. She doesn’t know what she has been reading or writing out. (Mai)

The unexpectedly negative reactions from the children can be attributed to the traditional teaching approach as the parents said they all taught by using Vietnamese textbooks and followed the lessons in the books. It might also be due to the difficult phonemic and tonal system of the language that discouraged the children from learning this language as commented by another mother:

And a, ă, â, o, ô, ơ, u, ư all mixed up. She can spell very simple words and simple math questions but she just can’t understand the meaning. (Ngan)

In the above extract, the girl confused similar vowels in Vietnamese which are not available in English (for example, /a/-/ă/-/â/ or /o/-/ô/-/ơ/). Not only did the children meet with difficulty in differentiating between similar vowels, they also struggled with the five tone marks when learning writing skills. Even children who had gone to school in Vietnam before their sojourn in Australia quickly forgot the Vietnamese writing rules. One father talked about his daughter who had nearly finished grade one in Vietnam and had been able to read and write well in Vietnamese before departing for Australia:

She can’t remember the / ~ / symbol. She calls it the “wave” [original in English]. (Tuan).

Apart from teaching the children by themselves, these parents also sought support from other sources to help their children develop Vietnamese literacy skills. They might send the children to private tutoring sessions in which a native Vietnamese teacher taught the students literacy skills or arts lessons. One mother who sent her daughter to a tutoring group said that it would be nice if the girl could learn something before the departure:

It’s good for her to know something to go back rather than know nothing. If so, then she’s completely done for. (Ngan)

In an exceptional case, one mother applied almost every available method in her attempt to maintain her daughter’s Vietnamese. Following are her comments on why she hired a Vietnamese piano teacher for her daughter:

When we first came here (Australia), I hired an Australian teacher. But after a year, I have been hiring a Vietnamese one so that she can learn more Vietnamese and to diversify her Vietnamese learning channels, not only from my accent but from others too. (Anh)

The mother tried to adjust her daughter’s contact with English and Vietnamese at different points in time during their sojourn in Australia. At first, in order to improve the girl’s English, she hired an English-speaking piano teacher. When she felt that it was the right time to maintain her daughter’s Vietnamese, she switched to a Vietnamese teacher. By increasing the girl’s contact time and diversifying the content and speakers’ accents the girl  was  exposed to, the mother hoped to achieve better results from her investment in her daughter’s Vietnamese learning. She was also the only parent who registered her daughter for online Vietnamese courses. The daughter started her online courses after the community language school in the neighbourhood closed due to the COVID-19 outbreak in Australia. Although this study does not aim to investigate the connection between the parents’ investment and their children’s level of proficiency in Vietnamese, it is worth highlighting this particular case as this girl was the only child participant who filled in a journal with Vietnamese handwriting (as part of a larger project).

As can be seen, all parents were highly conscious of the importance of providing the children with some Vietnamese literacy skills to work as a buffer against the shock they might encounter when going to school in Vietnam. However, except for the case above, due to the limited success of their teaching and the children’s resistance to the learning, the parents’ common reaction was reduced investment or even discontinued teaching.

Concerns About Vietnamese Community Language Schools

Although the parents placed great emphasis on their children’s learning Vietnamese, they showed hesitation in seeking help from community language schools (CLS)—an official destination where Vietnamese immigrants send their children for Vietnamese language learning. It is this reluctance that differentiates sojourners, or short-term Vietnamese immigrants from permanent Vietnamese immigrants in Australia.

Most of the parents shared that they could not send their children to CLS because they were too far from their places of residency. Even the one mother who sent her daughter to the school for one term talked about the distance:

The school is about four kilometres from my house. I booked Uber for her. It cost about twenty dollars for a return trip. (Anh)

Apart from the distance, the parents expressed more concerns over the content of the lessons taught at CLS. Firstly, their concerns went to the language itself. They commented that the language at those schools did not conform with modern Vietnamese used domestically and that people in Vietnam “no longer use those archaic words.” They also noticed that CLS often teach only the Southern Vietnamese dialect. As the Vietnamese language has three distinct dialects (Northern, Central and Southern Vietnamese), people from different geographical regions might have difficulties in understanding people from other areas. Such differences discouraged parents from North and Central Vietnam from sending their children to CLS in Australia. One mother shared:

I saw their books. They (CLS) only teach the Southern dialect. She can’t use it when we get back. I think it doesn’t help. (Ngan)

Besides, the parents expressed concerns about the possible religious and political content of the lessons taught at CLS. In some states, community language classes are organised by the regional churches. One of the mothers who knew about such classes cited religious connections as the major reason why she refused to send her child to those classes even though the price, in her opinion, was “very cheap.” She said:

If we lived here, we might choose a religion. But we’ll come back. I want our mind to be free. (Ha)

This mother distanced herself and kept her daughter separate from any religion because the family planned to return to Vietnam. Bearing in mind that up to 86% of the population in Vietnam follow no religion and only 6% consider themselves Catholic and 1% Protestant (General Statistics Office of Vietnam, 2019), it is understandable that the mother did not see a necessity to be affiliated to any particular religion.

To Vietnamese sojourners, the political content of the lessons taught at CLS was also one of their major concerns. The history of the Vietnamese community in Australia dates back to the Vietnamese refugee waves after the Vietnam War in 1975 (National Museum Australia, 2021). The content of what is taught at CLS might to some extent have been influenced by this historical moment. Thus, these Vietnamese sojourner parents, all of whom were sent to Australia by the Vietnamese government offices and institutions, have a critical evaluation of what is offered at CLS. One mother mentioned this as one of the reasons for not sending her daughter to a CLS after one term:

They (CLS) bring bits related to pre- and post-1975 into the lessons. I don’t like it. (Anh)

Together with the lesson content, CLS teacher qualifications were also what the parents cared about. Ten out of twelve parents in this project worked as university lecturers before pursuing their PhD in Australia, which might account for the high expectations they set for the teachers at CLS. One mother revealed that she would rather teach her son herself than send him to CLS because she knew that “many of the teachers there are volunteers” and they do not possess the right qualifications for teaching languages to children.

Those concerns have discouraged sojourner parents from using CLS as an official channel of Vietnamese language maintenance for their children, which in turn contributes to the unsystematic and impulsive learning and teaching of this language within the home settings and partly results in the counter-effectiveness of the process. What the parents have done with in-home translanguaging, with their children’s Vietnamese learning, and with the concerns over CLS can be attributed to what they believe about language and language learning and also their ideologies related to cultural and familial values and the imagined communities (IC) that they have sketched out for their children upon return.

From the perspective of IC, the parents’ opposition to sending their children to CLS can be considered an indication of their insistence on excluding these language programmes from the imagined community of Australia which they hope to be part of when residing in the country. Even the mother who reached out for a CLS programme later found out that it should not be part of her and her daughter’s desired target community due to conflicting ideologies. As can be seen, the act of envisioning and getting immersed in an imagined community appears to be a selective process in which its members/members-to-be can actively include a particular group of the target community in or exclude it from their IC. They may accept or refuse membership of that group, depending on their ideologies and beliefs and their future ICs, too.

Parent’s Ideologies and Imagined Communities

What the parents do with their children’s use of languages at home vividly reflects the beliefs they hold about different fields of life.

For those who put a great effort to maintain Vietnamese among their children, they attach familial and traditional values to this language—a cultural function that many parents in multilingual families assign to their mother tongue (Curdt-Christiansen, 2016). They believe that Vietnamese can serve as a bridge that connects their children with family members back in Vietnam and narrows down the generation gap between themselves and the children when the young ones grow up. In the following example, one mother has employed a variety of methods to help her daughter improve her Vietnamese so that the familial connection with her extended family is sustained:

She must understand her family members in Vietnamese. And when she grows up, there are things she needs to confide in me like women’s stuff, love, etc. I don’t want to see a big generation gap. (Anh)

For those parents who did not show great investment in teaching their children Vietnamese and let the children use their preferred language of English, they believed in a more flexible approach to language use. Interestingly, nine out of twelve parents have a professional background in English language teaching. However, their family language practices are mostly based on their observations, subjective beliefs or personal exchanges with other Vietnamese sojourner parents rather than the language teaching and learning theories in their field of expertise. One of them shared in the interview:

She refuses to learn Vietnamese at home. But I’m not worried. Anyway, we are going back soon and she did learn a little bit at school in Vietnam. And she has an aptitude for languages, so she can catch up with others quickly. (Tuan)

As the father believed that his daughter had an aptitude for languages, he thought she would not have many difficulties in learning Vietnamese once she returned to school in Vietnam.

Apart from the cultural and language ideologies, these parents also transferred their political and religious beliefs into family language practices. As discussed in the previous section, they explicitly expressed their concerns over community language schools due to the possible religious and political content of the lessons provided there. Considering their future reintegration in Vietnam, they were not willing to have their children get involved in what they saw as sensitive topics. This reluctance contradicts the positive link found between religious factors and the maintenance of heritage languages among immigrants (Revis, 2017), suggesting the need for a multidimensional research lens on this topic among various groups of immigrants.

Parents’ imagined future also has an enormous influence on their family language practices in Australia. The fact that many parents have a flexible approach to their children’s language use can be attributed to their plan for the young ones’ future schooling and reintegration in Vietnam. For example, a mother intended to send her son to a private bilingual school upon return, which lessened the pressure placed upon the child to improve his Vietnamese before going back because the school programme would allow a great deal of content to be taught in English. She said:

When we go back, I will hire a tutor to teach him Vietnamese. We’ll send him to a bilingual school, so I think he won’t have much problem re-integrating in Vietnam. (Hang)

Together with choosing a bilingual school for her son, the mother planned to hire a tutor for him on their return so that the boy could feel more prepared for school. This, however, created a more relaxing family atmosphere in Australia as the preparations were delayed until their return to Vietnam.

In contrast, for another family who do not live in a big city in Vietnam, there were limited choices of school for their son upon return. The mother confessed that international schools in her province are expensive but the quality might not be as good as state schools. They were therefore more serious about the maintenance of Vietnamese for the boy so that he would be able to attend a state school later. His mother stated:

Teaching him Vietnamese now is influenced a lot by our decision to go back. We have to teach him how to read and write, and to communicate so that he can talk in Vietnamese. If he can’t, how can he survive upon return? (Sinh)

These competing beliefs coincide with what the literature about ICs among sojourners suggest (Chao & Ma, 2019; Song, 2012). Parents’ ICs depend on the coming societal conditions in which the families decide to settle down. If their ICs appear to facilitate the children’s continued use of English, the parents seem to feel less pressured about the children’s Vietnamese learning while in Australia. While the parents’ ICs still function as an influencing factor on their family language policies and practices in general and their children’s learning in the host country in particular, the stress among the parents with more schooling choices for their children upon return seem to diverge from that among those with fewer choices.

Implications

Employing the conceptual framework from the perspective of family language policies (King et al., 2008) and the notion of investment and imagined communities (Norton, 2001, 2013), this study has both aligned itself with the body of research on what immigrant families do with their home language use and learning and provided an insightful explanation for the distinctive language practices that short-term immigrants might perform differently from permanent immigrants. Several essential implications have emerged from the analysis, which might be helpful for relevant stakeholders to provide adequate support for language maintenance and development among sojourner families.

First, although all parents are well aware of the importance of the maintenance of Vietnamese for their children, their language use is often negotiated to match the children’s preferred language, which is in line with existing research. Even with parents’ occasional interventions, children have apparently become an active agent in moderating the language practices at home with or without their own noticing. Thus, while research often highlights the role of adult family members in family language policy and practices (King, 2013), it is suggested from these observations that child agency in FLP should be more carefully attended to so that efforts in language maintenance and development pay off. Boosting up children’s motivation, therefore, appears to be the key to home language maintenance. As traditional teaching seems less effective, incorporating web-based courses and age-appropriate entertainment and media content in the children’s learning experiences should be encouraged. Media consumption has been proved effective in enhancing heritage language learners’ proficiency (Ardakani & Moloney, 2017). As there is a strong correlation between home language maintenance and ethnic identity (Tran et al., 2021), regular practices of traditional customs within family settings and active participation in Vietnamese community events would also provide opportunities for the children to cherish the Vietnamese culture and appreciate both the language and cultural value.

Second, translanguaging is a common practice among all the families, reflecting parents’ tolerant attitudes towards translanguaging (Wilson, 2021). However, it is often viewed as instances of code-switching or code-mixing, which to some extent suggests a conventionally perpetuated monoglossic perspective when dealing with this phenomenon in bilingual speakers (García & Lin, 2016). In order to understand these sojourner children’s bilingual and bicultural identity negotiation in transnational settings, it is advisable to use a translanguaging mindset to look at bilinguals’ language use. A translanguaging mindset contends that children are able to mobilise their one integrated linguistic repertoire to accommodate their communicative needs in myriad situations with a variety of interlocutors, instead of thinking about them as having “two separate linguistic systems” which are switched on and off continuously (Otheguy et al., 2015, p. 282). In fact, the ability to flexibly perform translanguaging practices in their language learning process is said to be useful for the construction of positive bilingual identities (Rabbidge, 2019). Flexible language use and meaningful transition between the two languages in family conversations might facilitate the development of both English and Vietnamese. Given that children are active agents in home language maintenance, open discussion with them on how, when and with whom which language (or a combination of them) to be used would increase their cooperation in following family language policies. This can also be done with home literacy activities such as bedtime reading where translanguaging is employed to promote Vietnamese language learning while still allowing space for the use of English.

Third, family language policy and practices are shaped by parents’ ideologies and imagined communities, which resonates with the extensive research on ICs. This finding also expands on existing literature on FLP at sojourners’ homes, especially at the end of their short stay in the host country, which varies according to the parents’ imagination of their future communities, societal conditions and the children’s schooling environment. This will in turn influence the amount of investment they make in maintaining and developing their children’s Vietnamese language. While it is acknowledged that parents might not provide sustained support for home language maintenance due to their specific relational or educational goals (Park et al., 2012), short-term immigrant children should be well-prepared for the future transition to their home country when the sojourn ends. Raising parental awareness of the importance of maintaining home language and promoting positive bilingual identity for their children is essential to a successful journey home.

Fourth, the Vietnamese community language programmes seem to have not fully accommodated the needs of short-term immigrants. Home/heritage language maintenance is said to be best achieved through linguistic exposure in both informal (i.e. home environment) and formal educational contexts (Chik et al., 2017). However, some geographical, administrative, cultural and political issues have prevented sojourner parents from sending their children to community language schools. This might require stakeholders to reflect on the implementation of community language education. Such programmes should not only address the needs of second or third generation long-term immigrants as has traditionally been the case, but also attend to the complex backgrounds of short-term immigrants and skilled immigrants who have recently arrived in Australia. Updating teaching materials, providing additional specialised professional training for teachers in the areas seen to be lacking, and ensuring appropriate distribution of classes among residential areas might be some possible considerations as a first step to make community language programmes more accessible to immigrants of varied backgrounds. The involvement of more public schools in delivering community language courses as part of formal education would also make the goal of home language maintenance more achievable to various groups of immigrants.

Finally, support should be offered by the home country’s government as well. The State Committee for Overseas Vietnamese —Vietnam Ministry of Foreign Affairs has also provided regular training courses (both online and offline) for those who want to teach Vietnamese to the Vietnamese community and interested individuals worldwide. However, this initiative has not been widely known to its intended beneficiaries. Such initiatives should be further promoted to attract a larger number of Vietnamese language teachers and learners overseas. The Vietnamese embassy in the host country could also assist home language maintenance by coordinating and facilitating accredited learning groups and cultural events where children are given the opportunities to develop their mother tongue and sense of cultural identity.

Conclusion

Responding to the call for a qualitative study into parents’ attitudes towards home language maintenance and associated factors by Tran et al. (2021) and extending to an under-researched population of temporary immigrants, this chapter has provided an insightful analysis of the family language practices of Vietnamese short-term residents in Australia. The current research, however, is limited in some aspects, given the fact that it is conducted on a small population of Vietnamese sojourner parents at a certain point of time during their stay in Australia. Further studies on sojourner children’s attitudes towards their parents’ FLP should be encouraged so that the picture could be fully captured. Longitudinal research is also recommended to investigate how home language policies and practices are adapted by families in pre-, while- and post-sojourn stages.

Despite these limitations, the study has contributed to a further understanding of family language policies and practices in an increasingly large group of short-term immigrants. It has revealed that parents’ ideologies and imagined communities are closely related to the way they provide scaffolding for their children’s home language maintenance and preparation for future return. As such, family engagement (through direct language support and informal learning experiences), pedagogical and curriculum innovation, and top-down involvement from both the home and host governments (in the form of language education policies and support initiatives) are necessary for promoting a favourable environment to nurture multi/bilingualism among children with immigrant backgrounds in general and sojourner children in particular.