The attitudes at the heart of multilingual family language policies
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This study focuses on parental language beliefs, which we approach from an attitudes perspective. Language attitudes are at the heart of multilingual family language policies because they shape parents’ language practices and language management – and thereby, ultimately, children’s multilingual development. Based on French and English corpora (over 30,000 words in total) comprising 742 Quebec-based parents’ responses to an open-ended survey question, we present a corpus-assisted discourse study of parental attitudes towards childhood multilingualism. We analyse frequencies and collocations to attest statistically significant patterns, and we examine concordance lines and longer text segments to establish meaning in context. Our findings confirm the multidimensionality of parental attitudes towards childhood multilingualism, providing new insights into the nature of the three previously-established dimensions – status, solidarity, and cognitive development – as well as revealing a potential fourth dimension: personality development. The study thus makes a contribution to the family language policy framework and to language attitude theory more generally. Moreover, the findings show systematic differences between parents transmitting multiple societal languages versus parents transmitting heritage languages alongside one/more societal languages. The study thus also makes a practical contribution by facilitating the development of tailored support measures for different types of multilingual families.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".