Between Implementing and Creating: Mothers of Children with Plurilingual Family Background and the Czech Republic's Language Acquisition Policy
Abstract
The paper examines the language acquisition management cycle perpetuated by the state language acquisition policy in the Czech Republic and how it is dealt with in thematically oriented biographical interviews conducted with Czech mothers rearing children in families where multiple languages are used and trasmitted. It analyses the discursive resources and narrative strategies used to construct biographical accounts in order to investigate the emic perspective on the micro-macro interplay of the language acquisition management cycle.
Although the analysed narratives deal with experiences involving children with plurilingual family backgrounds, they seem to reproduce the discursive resources underpinned by the monolingual self-perception of Czech society. The analysis suggests that this is a result of comprehensive sense-making processes.
On the one hand, mothers construct accounts of some of their activites in therms of the adjustment designs formulated on the macro level. On the other hand, some of them challenge the role of mere "implementers", assigned to them within the language acquisition management cycle, through their narratives.