Transforming a cemetery into a garden of languages: A justice-oriented,family-centered framework for cultivating early bilingualism and emergent biliteracy

Participants and setting

This study aimed to interrogate and problematize dominant ideologies of parenting practices and immigrant family engagement by investigating the cross-contextual, multilingual, and multimodal strategies that Asian American families employed toward providing rich early language and literacy experiences for young DLLs, an underexamined group in early childhood and literacy research. This article primarily draws on the data I collected from 10 Chinese and Korean immigrant, multiracial, and multilingual families residing in a large metropolitan city in the north-western region of the USA. I employed a purposeful sampling strategy (Creswell, 2013) to select participants whose relevant experiences and expertise mapped onto the study's goals (Marshall, 1996), and to ensure a diverse range of early language experiences, family socio-economic status, and parent immigration generation. The specific criteria for recruitment included: (1) Chinese and Korean mothers who immigrated to (first generation and 1.5 generation) or were born and raised in the USA (second generation); (2) mothers of children aged two to six; (3) mothers of children who spoke both English and their heritage language at home. The 10 families who met the criteria (see Table 1) were initially recruited through invitations by the researcher at parenting classes offered by local ethnic community partners, heritage-language schools, and faith-based communities.

Sociodemographic and linguistic profiles of the focal families

All of the participating children between the ages of two and six were born in the USA. While most of the families identified as either Chinese or Korean, three families were multiracial and multilingual—Chinese/Korean and Chinese/white. Four out of the 10 families enrolled their children in formal heritage-language instruction (i.e. weekly Chinese or Korean language programs providing three to four hours of instruction) or extracurricular activities conducted entirely or partially in their heritage language (i.e. tae kwon do, piano lessons, art classes, Sunday school). Regardless of the family’s household income or occupational status, all of the parents had attained a college degree, and 12 out of the 20 parent participants had completed graduate studies (a Master's or doctoral degree) or a professional degree (i.e. Juris Doctor, Master of Business Administration, Doctor of Medicine). The parents’ occupations ranged from housewife to teacher, business owner, health professional, attorney, engineer, and corporate executive. All of the participating mothers were primary caregivers, having lived in the USA for between 5 and 40 years. Five of the mothers were first-generation or 1.5-generation immigrants who primarily used their heritage language at home. Three mothers were 1.5-generation bilingual speakers who immigrated to the USA at a young age and engaged in translanguaging practices. Two mothers were second-generation immigrants (born and raised in the USA), who spoke mainly English and their heritage language only occasionally with their child(ren). The parent participants exhibited a diverse range of family language policies: only two families exclusively used their heritage language and four families employed the “one parent, one language” approach (a bilingual parenting approach to heritage-language use in which each parent exclusively speaks one language), while the majority of the participants spoke both languages. I assigned pseudonyms to all of the participants to ensure the confidentiality of their responses.

Data collection

This study of 10 Chinese American and Korean American multilingual families with young DLLs used multiple data sources, including ethnographic fieldwork, semi-structured parent interviews, and participant observations. For a year, I visited the participating families in their homes and communities, which provided natural settings where the emergent bilingual children and their families engaged in an array of bilingual and biliteracy practices. During monthly visits, I conducted participant observations of the families in multiple sociolinguistic settings, including homes, neighborhoods, heritage-language schools, parks, play dates, family dinners, social gatherings, church events, cultural outings, and holiday celebrations. During these observations, I wrote descriptive field notes about the early home literacy environment and language socialization processes (the family’s use of the heritage language; parent–child language interactions; family literacy activities such as shared book reading and access to books and other literacy materials; and family language policy—i.e. how parents decided on and reinforced which language(s) to use and by which family members).

Further, I conducted semi-structured and informal interviews with the mothers in a setting of their choice (home, cafe, park). Each interview lasted between 60 and 90 minutes. I shared the interview protocol with the mothers prior to the meeting so that they could reflect on the topics and questions beforehand. During the interviews, the mothers used their multilingual skills, flexibly alternating between the two languages and translanguaging. The languages they used varied depending on their language proficiency and preference. Our dialogue positioned the mothers as experts, as I sought to learn from their storytelling, counterstories, critical reflection on their own beliefs, and revitalization of their roles as gardeners cultivating bilingualism and biliteracy. Through these interviews, I also gathered information about the parents’ educational and migration journeys, and their experiences and beliefs regarding bilingualism and biliteracy, as well as their linguistic investment strategies.

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Table 1.

Sociodemographic and linguistic profiles of participating children and parents.

Name of mother	Children: age and gender	Parents: race/ethnicity	Parents: educational attainment	Parents: occupation	Parents: generational status	Home language(s)	Language spoken to child(ren)	Enrollment in heritage-language program
Grace	4, boy	Mother: Korean Father: Korean	Mother: college Father: graduate	Mother: housewife Father: teacher	Mother: 1.5 generation Father: 1.5 generation	Korean English	Mother: heritage-language-dominant Father: bilingual	Yes
Minji	5, boy 3, girl	Mother: Korean Father: Chinese	Mother: college Father: college	Mother: cosmetician Father: sales associate	Mother: 1.5 generation Father: second generation	Korean (one parent, one language) English	Mother: heritage-language-dominant Father: English monolingual	No
Yoojin	6, boy	Mother: Korean Father: Korean	Mother: graduate Father: college	Mother: researcher Father: accountant	Mother: first generation Father: first generation	Korean	Mother: heritage-language-dominant Father: heritage-language-dominant	Yes
Haeun	6, girl 3, girl	Mother: Korean Father: Korean	Mother: graduate Father: college	Mother: nurse Father: business owner	Mother: 1.5 generation Father: second generation	Korean English	Mother: bilingual Father: bilingual	No
Janice	5, boy 2, boy	Mother: Korean Father: Korean	Mother: graduate Father: graduate	Mother: teacher Father: counselor	Mother: second generation Father: second generation	Korean English	Mother: English-dominant Father: English-dominant	No
Chanmi	5, boy 2, girl	Mother: Korean Father: Korean	Mother: graduate Father: graduate	Mother: housewife Father: surgeon	Mother: first generation Father: second generation	Korean (one parent, one language) English	Mother: heritage-language-dominant Father: English monolingual	Yes
Yebin	5, boy 2, boy	Mother: Korean Father: Korean	Mother: graduate Father: graduate	Mother: data scientist Father: Corporate Executive	Mother: 1.5 generation Father: second generation	Korean English	Mother: bilingual Father: bilingual	Yes
Mei	4, girl	Mother: Chinese Father: white	Mother: graduate Father: college	Mother: consultant Father: product designer	Mother: first generation Father: N/A	Mandarin (one parent, one language) English	Mother: heritage-language-dominant Father: English monolingual	No
Jiyoung	5, boy 2, girl	Mother: Korean Father: Chinese	Mother: college Father: college	Mother: housewife Father: engineer	Mother: 1.5 generation Father: 1.5 generation	Korean (one parent, one language) English	Mother: bilingual Father: English monolingual	No
Cathy	3, girl 2, girl	Mother: Taiwanese Father: Taiwanese	Mother: graduate Father: graduate	Mother: attorney Father: engineer	Mother: second generation Father: second generation	Mandarin	Mother: English-dominant Father: English-dominant	No

Data analysis

During the first phase of initial interpretation, I transcribed my observations and interviews and closely reviewed the sociodemographic and linguistic profiles of the participants. I uploaded the transcriptions to a secure drive and identified emergent codes while writing analytical memos. The hour-long semi-structured interviews with the mothers as the primary caregiving parents were digitally recorded and transcribed. On completing the data collection, I created a codebook of etic themes identified from the literature, as well as “coding categories” (Kwon, 2017) of the words, phrases, and events/routines that were repeatedly mentioned by the parents from the field notes. I then read and coded the transcribed data and created analytical memos using Dedoose, a cross-platform qualitative analysis software based on a codebook developed from my theoretical framework.

During the second phase, I analyzed the data using a comparative method in initial rounds of line-by-line coding using the codebook. I then used axial coding to inductively uncover emergent themes, refining the definitions of the etic themes as well as clarifying relations among the key concepts. In the next phase of coding, the framework method was used inductively and deductively to establish the key themes (Gale et al., 2013; Goldsmith, 2021). Initial inductive thematic coding helped to identify the emergent codes. The concept-mapping was then independently tested and refined to generate a working analytical framework. Analysis of the descriptive field notes on the settings, activities, and artifacts allowed me to identify patterns among the practices related to Asian American families’ instrumental support for cultivating early bilingualism and biliteracy.

Planting

As the first and primary context for children's language and literacy development, parents play a critical role in promoting or withholding language learning (Kang, 2013; Kwon, 2017, 2020; Li, 2007; Song, 2016). Parents act as engineers and managers of young children's early learning experiences and architects of their home language environments (Hammer et al., 2011; Hoff, 2006; Xu et al., 2017). In line with the extant literature, the families in this study engaged in a multifaceted approach to linguistic investment in their children's bilingual and biliteracy development. Planting, as multiple forms of future-oriented linguistic investment, included (1) seeding heritage-language practices through a family language policy; (2) providing frequent, high-quality parent–child literacy activities and meaningful family interactions while flexibly navigating both English and the heritage language; and (3) creating transnational educational opportunities and spaces of belonging. Haeun, a 1.5-generation Korean mother, explained that she made a conscious effort to increase her usage of Korean when speaking with her daughters:

Since I am bilingual myself, I can easily switch back and forth from English to Korean. It takes so much effort for me to make sure Korean is spoken in our home. When we are on an autopilot mode, just zooming through our day, English takes over and, when it does, I make sure I translate each sentence, so my kids hear the same message in both languages. It is more than double the work, but I have faith that one day all this hard work will pay off.

Similarly, Janice, a second-generation, English-dominant mother, often created opportunities for bilingual learning when she spoke to her sons first in English followed by direct translations in Korean to reinforce their listening comprehension in the heritage language. Cathy, a second-generation Taiwanese mother, echoed this sentiment in that while she and her husband had an “elementary knowledge of Mandarin” at best, they committed to speaking Chinese exclusively with their daughters “starting from birth or else they [her daughters] won’t get it anywhere else. We don’t have family nearby and all our friends and neighbors speak English.” Additionally, I observed in multiple accounts how Grace, a Korean mother, modeled translanguaging to teach new vocabulary when conversing with her son, such as “What did you play with chin-goos [friends] at hakgyo [school] today?” or “We are going over to Joon’s samchon's [uncle's] house to celebrate Seollal [New Year] and do saebae [New Year's bow to pay respects to elders] and have a mandoo [dumpling] party!” These mothers shared how their strong belief in the importance of heritage-language maintenance motivated their family language policy (i.e. who spoke which language(s) at home) to ensure their children's heritage-language exposure at home, with the hope that their language modeling might plant seeds of interest and desire to learn the heritage language in their children.

More interestingly, these mothers adaptively modified their family language policy by varying the frequency and amount of heritage-language use depending on the goals and content of a conversation. Chanmi and Yoojin, heritage-language-dominant mothers, quickly switched over from English to Korean when negotiating with their children required complex explanations and a rationale behind their decisions. As bilingual speakers, Haeun and Yebin, for example, used more Korean, their “heart language,” with their children when expressing affection, asserting parental authority, carrying out simple tasks and daily routines, and sharing stories from their childhood, but employed more English when discussing technical details (e.g. why hybrid cars are more fuel-efficient, terrestrial planets vs gas giants) and explaining cognitive concepts (e.g. the water cycle, metamorphosis, negative numbers, categorization by attributes, different forms of energy). Moreover, Cathy and Mei switched their language preference depending on the sociolinguistic context; while they used more Chinese with their daughters during play dates with other bilingual families, they mainly spoke in English while supervising their kids in playgrounds and parks (i.e. reminding and reinforcing etiquette and safety rules) as a way of implicitly communicating to other children and neighbors.

Other mothers further noted that enrolling their children in heritage-language schools was an enormous time investment, ranging from three to four hours of instruction every Saturday throughout the academic year. These mothers indicated that they also spent time helping with homework, which involved writing journal entries, reviewing literacy lessons from the previous week, vocabulary worksheets, and, at times, preparing for speech contests and oral storytelling about Korean history and traditions. When asked why they were committed to ensuring their children's access to heritage-language exposure, one mother explained: “Growing up, my parents forced us to speak English only. They also spoke only English with us to improve their broken English and fix their accents so they won’t face racial discrimination at work.” Janice remembered that her parents’ English-only language policy at home had

a huge impact on me and my brothers. We all grew up denying our identity and our language, but we still ate Korean food every day, we still took off our shoes at the door, our grandma had a garden full of Korean vegetables. We were told to grow up “American,” but our family still lived like Koreans. We spoke like native Americans but never went to summer camps like my white friends or celebrated holidays like what I saw on TV.

Grace, a Korean mother, mentioned:

our grandparents grew up speaking only Japanese during the colonization period. My grandpa's older brother was a teacher and one day he was caught teaching the Korean alphabet to his students, and he was executed. That generation was stripped of their name, culture, history.

Grace further recalled:

like the language vitalization movement that happened after Korea was liberated, I am doing the same thing on a much smaller scale! Although we are not colonized people living in America, and the suffering and fear of holding onto your own language don’t even compare, I am making tiny attempts to fight the system and restore Korean for my son.

Yoojin, whose son was expected to use only Korean at home, explained that planting the seeds of heritage-language learning would lay critical foundations for resisting linguistic erasure, “so that Korean doesn’t die in our household, that the Korean language will not fade away in the way my son thinks, learns, and operates in the world.” In support of these counterstories, Kang (2013) discovered that families resisted anglicization due to their deeply held beliefs in language as an identity marker. These counterstories of language reclamation and the pedagogy of communicative belonging (Souto-Manning et al., 2022) among second-generation parents highlight their agentic role in combatting the racial and cultural trauma experienced when growing up as bilinguals.

Interestingly, planting the seeds of the heritage language through a family language policy differed among the immigrant generations. For heritage-language-dominant immigrant parents, their language use was necessary because of their limited English proficiency, which is consistent with previous findings (Brown, 2011; Kang, 2013; Song, 2016). For bilingual-dominant parents, however, their use of the heritage language was a deliberate choice to plant their deeply held values and the desire for their children to grow up bilingual and embrace their roots. As their bilingual children transitioned into early learning programs, these parents conveyed a sense of urgency in contesting the dominance of English and resisting hegemonic paradigms of normalcy and school readiness. Second- and 1.5-generation bilingual parents of preschool children noted that they did not share their parents’ fears of sending their children into kindergarten without English proficiency, “since they are going to pick up English and become fluent anyway. It's just a matter of time.” For Cathy and Haeun, English-dominant parents, they observed their children's language shift as “English is taking over already,” and relied on grandparents’ care or a Chinese nanny, who “only speaks in Mandarin, watches Chinese media, sings lullabies in Chinese,” to increase the heritage-language learning opportunities for their children.

Furthermore, the parents’ goals for enrolling their children in heritage-language programs differed by generational status as well. For heritage-language-dominant immigrant parents, heritage-language programs provided continuity and the maintenance of their children's linguistic repertoires, which would support them in adjusting to and participating in summer programs in Korea or being “prepared when we move back to Korea.” For bilingual-dominant parents, heritage-language programs embodied a haven for affirming their children's bicultural identity, heritage, and linguistic dexterity. Yebin, a bilingual-dominant mother, shared that her primary goal for sending her son to a heritage-language school was not Korean language proficiency:

I don’t expect my son to read and write like a native speaker. My goal is for him to enjoy learning Korean where students and teachers look like us, talk like us, eat like us. This [Korean school] is the only place in his life where he gets to interact with Koreans.

However, Yebin further reported:

there's a lot of writing, spelling tests, reading, and listening comprehension and he says Saturday is the most boring day ever because there's no recess or opportunities for social interaction and building friendships. After a year, he barely knows the names of his classmates. Can you believe these kindergarteners sit at desks for three hours straight?

Her perspective unmasked that the goal of heritage-language learning is to build academic language proficiency in students’ heritage language, which often reproduces standard language ideologies and stigmatizes the fluid and dynamic linguistic repertoires of emergent bilinguals (Flores and Rosa, 2015).

Another example of planting was the frequency and quality of parent–child literacy activities, which was observed and mentioned by all of the participating mothers. One Chinese mother, who had a white, English, monolingual husband, described their bilingual bedtime routines: “we alternate Chinese and English books throughout the week. I read the Chinese books and my husband reads English books.” This expanded their family conversations from “Chinese classic poems and traditional folk tales” to “Mother Goose nursery rhymes and Dr Seuss.” Yebin, one of the Korean mothers, shared how her family interweaved multilingual practices to build her son's bilingual and biliteracy skills across multiple modalities:

He has played soccer for a while now, but his passion really grew while watching the World Cup together as a family. We would rise and cheer, jump and scream, chant and cry. I think these moments profoundly impacted him because he couldn’t stop talking about soccer at home and at school.

Furthermore, the parents drew on multilingual repertoires to build, expand, and mobilize their children's bilingual identities and linguistic and cultural knowledge in transnational spaces. Kang’s (2013) study shows that emergent bilinguals acquired Korean more rapidly by spending an entire summer in Korea compared to attending a heritage-language school in the USA. One mother's experience supported this finding. With her transnational ties to families and social networks back in Korea, Chanmi's family allocated a travel budget for their annual trip to Korea:

My husband comes back earlier because of work but I stay the whole summer with my kids at my parents’ home. By the time they return to the US, my kids use more Korean with me and with each other.

Pollinating

The pollinating practices of the study's parents entailed navigating local, virtual, and transnational spaces for the exchange and transfer of experiential knowledge and resources to cultivate bilingualism and biliteracy. The parents mobilized their community assets, ethnic social networks, and virtual communities to navigate various challenges. During the data collection period, I observed that Chanmi switched from language mixing to the “one parent, one language” approach in Korean when interacting with her children. When asked why she decided to make this switch, she explained that she had learned from other Korean mothers raising bilingual children at her church about the importance of providing rich language input using her dominant language:

They told me about research that showed how important it is for parents to introduce complex concepts and sophisticated vocabulary regardless of the language. When I use English, I can’t include all the extras. So, I realized that the best thing I could do for my kids was to communicate in the language I am most familiar with. This was a huge relief, since my English is limited and the English language cannot fully capture the meaning and nuance of my words.

Drawing on the collective wisdom and multilingual expertise of her friends in a local ethnic network, she came to decolonize her understanding of normalcy and resisted assimilationist ideologies. Chanmi's friends in her local mothers social group included a linguist studying second-language acquisition and a bilingual support specialist in a local school district. Key insights from ongoing conversations with her friends reaffirmed her commitment to reclaiming Korean as the primary home language. However, when Chanmi indicated on school enrollment forms that her son's primary home language was Korean, she discovered that he was automatically placed in a pull-out group for language intervention, despite his fluency in English. She then sought advice from her friends to advocate for her son: “I discussed with his teacher that I didn’t want him to be pulled out and miss the language arts and literacy lessons in class. She [the teacher] had no idea that he could speak English fluently!” When Chanmi communicated that her son was a simultaneous bilingual who would not benefit from the intervention service, the school assessed his English proficiency to make adjustments.

The cross-pollination of knowledge and pedagogies among mothers also shaped Grace's approach to family biliteracy practices. She mentioned that she learned and adapted literacy activities and resources from her “mama friends”:

I usually ask my friends with kids of similar age what books, toys, and materials they get for their kids and where they get them. I think I also learned from watching how my friends speak Korean with their kids when we have play dates.

Heritage-language schools also provided sites for the cross-pollination of experiential knowledge and resources. I attended a “Used Korean Book Sharing Exhibition,” where families donated and selected used children's books across multiple genres toward sustaining a community of literacy practices. During this event, I also noticed a flyer that read: “Parent Coffee Chat: Join us for casual conversation in English about raising confident Korean American kids and their identity.” Moreover, Grace navigated virtual platforms, such as a “Korean Mommies” group on Facebook and the Instagram accounts of Korean mothers who posted about bilingual teaching tips and resources. She mentioned that several mothers in the group were “elementary school teachers” who shared their professional knowledge and literacy teaching expertise when other members posted questions or concerns related to supporting their bilingual children. For the second-generation parents whose dominant language of preference was English, they encountered challenges and limitations in building and expanding their children's Korean vocabulary and literacy skills, word usage, grammatical idioms, and pronunciation due to a lack of fluent speakers in their community. Haeun echoed that she learned a lot just by reading posts on social media and regularly visited the online community for emotional support:

I usually don’t post my comments, but I so appreciate having this group of moms all over the US and other countries sharing what they are going through, what they learned, and what they are struggling with in a safe space. There's a lot of affirmation and encouragement. And I love that I can participate in my own time.

The parents’ voices in these examples highlight the agentic roles of the mothers in exchanging and transferring their multilingual expertise in marshalling cultural and linguistic resources. These mothers further noted that these interactions were not merely transactional but authentic, interdependent, and affirming. Central to the idea of pollination was the spirit of vulnerability, relationality, and solidarity that was shared among the mothers as they engaged in storytelling to reposition their ways of knowing, learning, and teaching as assets and pedagogical resources for learning (Souto-Manning et al., 2019). These accounts of fellowship are an embodiment of what sociologists would term Gemeinschaft (Tönnies, 1887) —that is, organically arising social relationships characterized by strong reciprocal bonds of sentiment and kinship among individuals sharing common beliefs.

The cross-pollination practices included communities of mothers sharing knowledge of and accessing resources locally and transnationally. When the mothers were asked to describe the different literacy resources they used and how they gained access to them, they talked of a rich variety of literacy materials and resources in both English and their heritage language. These materials included children's picture books and chapter books in multiple genres, workbooks (e.g. phonics, sight words, the Korean alphabet, Chinese characters, mathematics, science), hangul charts and vocabulary flash cards, a digital talking pen that reads children's books in multiple languages, educational mobile applications (e.g. Khan Academy Kids, digital Korean books), and government-certified primary-grade textbooks used in Korea. This finding is consistent with previous studies showing that Asian immigrant parents demonstrated their love for their children through instrumental support, locating and providing materials and resources (Chua, 2011; Li, 2007; Mak et al., 2023), which may differ from other racial multilingual families, for example. This form of instrumental support was clearly observed in many of the families’ home literacy environment as well. For instance, Yebin had purchased several Korean picture-book series, typically costing hundreds of dollars, which her children could easily access in their family recreation room. These book series ranged from Bible stories to comic books on science and history, biographies, non-fiction texts, folk tales, fables, and picture books detailing children's lives in Korea. However, other Korean mothers mentioned the challenges in accessing a wide variety of books, including the high cost and lack of accessibility in libraries and bookstores. Minji shared: “We can’t afford to buy them new from online vendors. I got those books when my mom's friends or church members want to pass down their books to other Korean families with younger kids.” Furthermore, Yebin described how helpful the search menu tools on a Korean online bookseller website had been:

I can search for individual books or bulk sets by age, genre, or publisher. The product page for every book set has a detailed description of the content and displays images with book titles. I found picture books that are aligned with the Korean early learning curriculum or books that map onto different developmental goals … They even have Korean translations of award-winning books from the US and Europe, such as Magic School Bus or National Geographic Kids for science, or Mr Men and Little Miss for social-emotional skills.

Pruning

The final theme of cultivating practices—pruning—involved how Asian multilingual parents strategically negotiated tensions and choices, and costs and sacrifices, to establish space and time for the growth of their children’s bilingualism and biliteracy. All of the mothers shared multiple accounts of critically reflecting on and reassessing their linguistic investment choices (e.g. allocation of time, economic resources, prioritization of learning goals, academic support) to refine their families’ language and literacy practices. Cathy, for example, shared her dilemma when her parents frequently visited to provide care for her daughters: “I keep asking my parents to speak Chinese even if my kids don’t fully comprehend but they reply back in English to better communicate with them.” Minji also noted that her parents-in-law had “quit using Chinese” while raising her husband and had also done so now with her children. She explained: “they want to be understood and have back-and-forth conversations with my kids and the only way to do that is English. So, do I keep requesting them to speak Chinese or use broken English with heavy accents?” Both mothers felt that by choosing to communicate in English, the grandparents were sacrificing opportunities to authentically share themselves—their affection, hopes, life histories, values, and rich knowledge—with their children. Instead, the grandparents employed a language that was foreign and less familiar to them to better connect and relate to their grandchildren. Additionally, while some of the mothers were comfortable with sending their children “unprepared for kindergarten” by solely focusing on heritage-language development and fluency, Cathy and her husband constantly fluctuated in their commitment to using Chinese exclusively at home as they noticed that their younger daughter, who had started daycare, got “lost and stay[ed] too quiet in class even when she need[ed] to go [on the] potty.” Furthermore, pruning captured the challenges of balancing between a heritage language and English, as found in Kwon's (2017) study—making decisions on which language to focus on and how to allocate limited time and resources to cultivate biliteracy practices was a daily reality for these families.

This future-oriented perspective on cultivating bilingualism and biliteracy was fraught with an unending juggle between choices that “sacrificed [their] identity.” Many mothers elaborated on the difficulty of prioritizing what mattered more for their children:

Do I choose to enroll him in baseball or Korean school on Saturdays? If I choose baseball, his Korean will suffer. If I choose Korean school, he will miss out on the season and probably get cut from the try-out [for a youth league]. Or we have 30 minutes a day for workbooks before dinner and bedtime. Do I focus on phonics or hangul characters? Do I show Korean or American kids’ TV shows? Do I emphasize Korean or American traditions and holidays? We can’t do them all. All these choices have consequences because they shape my kids’ personalities, interests, conversations, and hobbies, which also affect their friendships—who they get along with, how they relate to others, who they make deeper connections with, how they are seen by their teachers, coaches, and other parents.

Pruning was closely connected to the planting and cross-pollinating practices for providing a more targeted, goal-oriented home language environment and multilingual literacy experiences to direct the growth of children's bilingualism and biliteracy. Another example of pruning was observed among children as they navigated home and school contexts. Jiyoung noticed that, during pick-up, her son greeted her by exclaiming “Mommy!” in front of his friends, but “he never calls me that. He calls me umma everywhere else. Umma was the first word he learned to say, yet here he is calling me mommy.” She reflected on her son's perspective that the word umma in Korean “must sound unfamiliar and strange to the other kids” or “perhaps he was feeling embarrassed and wanted to fit in.” Over the course of a few months, she recalled that “umma became known as my name. Other kids started calling me umma like they called other parents by their first name.” During one of the home visits, I observed Jiyoung looking up a class list and writing down the names of all the children in English and Korean on index cards. She then made two additional name cards—“Umma (Mommy)” and “Abba (Daddy)”—to share with her son's classroom teacher. Later, Jiyoung shared that her son's preschool teacher incorporated these name cards as a center activity for emergent writing and sent her photographs of children in the class excitedly learning to write their names in both languages. In response to her son pruning away the most familiar term in his mother tongue to choose what he perceived to be more desirable in a school setting, Jiyoung modeled resistance to exclusionary practices in schools that reinforce the hegemony of English, and partnered with a teacher to validate her son's linguistic assets.

Pruning practices also differed according to parents’ racial and ethnic backgrounds and family socio-economic status. Minji and Jiyoung, Korean mothers who had married English-dominant, second-generation Chinese husbands, shared that in an effort to optimize HL exposure in one language, they had to prune away Chinese language input while prioritizing their children's exposure to Korean. When asked how they decided which language(s) to focus on, Minji commented:

Trying to communicate and teach Chinese, English, and Korean all at the same time was not working for us. Since I stay home with my kids and I speak Korean fluently while my husband doesn’t speak much Chinese, we decided that we will teach Chinese later if they want to, but, for now, we are only going to focus on English and Korean.

However, Jiyoung noted:

When I speak Korean to my parents and my kids, I am always conscious of leaving my husband out. He has no clue what we are talking about. He might recognize a few words here and there, and mostly makes best guesses based on our facial expression and tone.

Additionally, the family’s socio-economic status played a role in how they navigated the tensions and choices of providing literacy materials and multilingual experiences. Grace noted: “with a single-parent income, I am always thinking: What expenses do we cut out so we can provide more for our son? What can I borrow or buy used instead?” Grace allocated time to secure Korean books on an app-based mobile marketplace or ethnic newspaper online bulletins. Additionally, to save on registration costs and gas expenses, she enrolled her son in a local church-based heritage-language program that offered informal, play-based activities, instead of a more expensive program offering a language arts and literacy curriculum, trained teachers, ongoing assessments to differentiate instruction within each grade, government-certified textbooks published by Korean research and education institutes, and cultural events and parent seminars funded by the Korean consulate general.

The pruning process entailed the optimization of linguistic investment—that is, selectively removing less desirable or less relevant options to direct language growth. The mothers constantly encountered forks in the road and, as portrayed here, these decisive moments required them to choose, either intentionally or subconsciously, the language hierarchies that positioned English as superior or not—an agonizing and complex choice that, once made, could not be reversed. For these families, language acquisition was not the goal in and of itself, but a means to ensure that their children belonged and participated in families and communities, bridge and navigate intergenerational relationships and transnational borders, and cultivate roots that would sustain their children in flourishing as their fullest selves, even from the margins of society.

Directions for future research

This study of ethnically, linguistically, and socio-economically diverse Asian multilingual families presents a justice-centered framework that conceptualizes three linguistic cultivating practices across diverse spaces, borders, and time. This gardening framework interrogates the unidimensional, deficit paradigms that racialize Asian American parents as achievement-oriented, controlling, and harsh (Chua, 2011; Kim et al., 2013). The counterstories of planting, pollinating, and pruning position Asian immigrant parents as agentic gardeners of bilingualism and biliteracy, and challenge the narrow, monocultural, and monolingual definitions of school readiness and evidence-based practice. Additionally, the study's findings build on extant literature on the role of the home language environment in heritage-language maintenance by expanding how parents flexibly and strategically enact multiple knowledges, beliefs, and pedagogies for cultivating both English and their heritage language. The decolonial lens employed in the study centered the voices, repertoires, and expertise of Asian American multilingual families, understanding that Anglocentric ways of knowing, learning, and teaching are not the only answer. The families of the young DLLs in this study creatively sought out opportunities to build and expand notions of literacy and language learning for their bilingual children in an era of highly prescriptive programming and standardization of early childhood. This study further signifies the need for future research on immigrant family literacy practices and multilingual literacies in early childhood across non-schooling contexts as sites for developing and sustaining children's early bilingualism and emergent biliteracy. While this study positions US early childhood education as a point of entry, these counterstories of linguistic cultivation transcend borders and necessitate a cross-societal, cross-institutional dialogue with scholars whose work is situated in various contexts to collectively examine the often-silenced voices and invisible sacrifices of immigrant families with young emergent bilingual learners.

Progress in understanding this growing demographic group of young Asian American DLLs has remained historically limited. To better support the increasingly diverse needs and lived experiences of young bilingual leaners, a growing body of work has sought to deconstruct and resist the centrality of Eurocentric and positivist traditions in early childhood research (Boutte and Compton-Lilly, 2022; Gutiérrez et al., 2011; Reyes and Torres, 2007; Souto-Manning, 2016; Souto-Manning et al., 2018, 2019, 2022; Souto-Manning and Yoon, 2018). Reyes and Torres (2007) decolonized family literacy through co-constructing culture circles with families. Culture circles are aimed at building solidarity based on people's shared concerns to collectively transform conditions through symmetrical relations of power. Through dialogical understanding of their situations, the parent participants in a family literacy culture circle critiqued and reshaped family literacy curricula and practices that were relevant to the experiences, interests, needs, and possibilities of the families and their communities (Reyes and Torres, 2007). These scholarly works disrupt the dominant discourses on racial, cultural, and linguistic homogeneity that frame emergent bilinguals as incomplete and deficient (Pacini-Ketchabaw and Armstrong de Almeida, 2006). In line with such scholarly perspectives, this study puts forward a conceptual model of cultivating practices that may serve as a generative framework for future research and the development of culturally sustaining family biliteracy programs for Asian immigrant and multilingual families.

We must continue to challenge and disrupt universality and normative assumptions about bilingualism and biliteracy by foregrounding educational practices that privilege and build on multiple forms of knowledge and cultural assets Asian emergent bilingual children bring from their homes and communities. Additionally, the role of different models of early language exposure, as well as the quantity, quality, and sources of adult language input (e.g. language immersion, translanguaging and code-switching, mixing vs exclusive usage), in children's bilingual and biliteracy development is much less understood. Exploring these questions necessitates research methodologies that allow for questioning what counts as knowledge, what knowledge is valued, and whose interests are being served by such knowledge. First, decolonizing methods empower families to co-design research goals and methodologies that reflect their world views, beliefs, and lived experiences. Three of the major methodologies in decolonial education are counterstorytelling, healing, and reclaiming (Zavala, 2016). Counterstories relate the dialogue and reflection in naming and remembering the social worlds of colonized people. The collective practice of naming enables colonized people to understand their present situation as encircled by colonialism, and challenges the master storylines of exclusionary and oppressive ideologies. The field of critical race theory has employed testimonio and collective voicing as counterstorytelling methodologies (Zavala, 2016). Second, future research can draw on justice-centered frameworks and methodologies (Souto-Manning and Rabadi-Raol, 2018) that reclaim the central agentic role of immigrant families of color in transforming early childhood research, policy, and practice. Another promising approach to conducting research with families begins with building capacity for collective “social dreaming” through the co-design of participatory methods (Ishimaru et al., 2018), interrogating conventional notions of school–family partnerships across early childhood settings while creating expansive spaces of shared learning and synergistic collaboration.

Implications for justice-oriented early childhood practice and policy

Increasing diversity and the shifting demographics in early childhood programs and services have called into question the universalist assumptions about teaching and learning that are reflected in much of the public discourse and contemporary policies that align with Eurocentric, middle-class orientations to early learning and development. Problematizing the status quo has created unprecedented spaces for scholars, practitioners, and policymakers to reimagine pedagogical potentialities that disrupt and resist the dominant ideologies, which position multilingual children and families through narrow, deterministic, and decontextualized views. Within these spaces, we must sustain critical vigilance to interrogate the hegemonies of normalcy, colonization, power, and deficiency. Experiences of exclusion and fractures, often racialized, classed, and cultured, alienate children's learning experiences at the margins of schooling spaces (Li, 2016). In fact, in the past, some states enacted legislation that banned bilingual programs in public schools. To reimagine a more equitable and justice-centered early childhood education, practitioners must interrogate assimilationist and colonialist policies and institutional practices that have historically upheld interests and norms in favor of English monolingualism, and instead enact a culturally sustaining pedagogy (Paris and Alim, 2014) by partnering with families to expand multilingual learning and teaching practices from the earliest years. The study's key findings call for educators to pay careful attention to young emergent bilinguals’ out-of-school experiences across multiple contexts that position these children and their families as multilingual experts. One of the ways that early childhood educators can transform current practice as curriculum engineers (Souto-Manning, 2016) is by envisioning, planning, and building bridges between children's interests, experiences, curricular goals, and standards. To position children front and center as co-constructors of knowledge, teachers can incorporate artifactual literacies such as culturally relevant and multilingual literature written by and about Asian American families that expand space for students’ bilingual ways of knowing. Seeking family input in identifying books and literacy resources in their heritage language is another step toward creating an expansive space for multilingual learning. Most picture books in Asian languages do not offer English translations and may not be easily accessible to teachers. Even if educators cannot read the text, positioning these books as assets in the classroom is an act of resistance against erasure and an additional approach that valorizes students’ dynamic and fluid linguistic repertoires. Incorporating family photographs and video clips can create expansive spaces for children's storytelling, remembering, and code-switching across languages. The findings from this study highlight the importance of teaching and learning with Asian American emergent bilingual children to explore, honor, extend, and problematize their heritage and community practices (Paris and Alim, 2014).

Another way to alleviate educational injustice in early childhood classrooms is by valuing families’ funds of knowledge and linguistic expertise. The findings from this study call for educators to reimagine the expansive roles of multilingual and/or immigrant parents in the classroom toward building equitable school–family partnerships. Families can be invited to volunteer in class and encouraged to incorporate heritage-language usage when interacting with children speaking the same heritage language. Through such everyday meaningful interactions, multilingual parents can demonstrate how they use their languages flexibly and strategically to create and negotiate meaning, and that these skills are embraced within schools. Another way to expand the roles and responsibilities of parent volunteers beyond menial, routinized tasks (e.g. photocopying, putting up decorations, arranging student work displays, cleaning) and event organizing (classroom parties, parent meet-ups, field trip chaperones) is by centering the voices, lived experiences, and multilingual expertise of families at the heart of teaching. Teachers can create transformative spaces to co-cultivate bilingualism and biliteracy by partnering with parents to engage in interactive shared reading or support literacy activities in small groups. This concept of a collective “third space” (Gutiérrez, 2008; Gutiérrez et al., 1999) is where (1) traditional notions of academic literacy and instruction for bilingual students of color are contested; (2) literacy practices from both home and school are legitimized; and (3) multilingual forms of literacy are reframed as powerful tools for developing children's sociocritical literacy. Moreover, teachers can approach translanguaging as a pedagogy (Institute of Education Sciences, 2021) that mobilizes all of students’ linguistic skills. Inviting families to teach mini-lessons or activities involving bilingual labels and vocabulary is another way to position them as pedagogical experts and honor bilingual learners’ rich and sophisticated literacy practices. As more schools move toward dual language immersion or bilingual early childhood education, it is imperative that educators examine language ideologies with a critical consciousness in bilingual education spaces (Cervantes-Soon et al., 2017). When teachers connect with families prior to kindergarten entry, they can inquire about the family language policy (who speaks which language(s) at home), what the parents’ goals are for their child's bilingualism and biliteracy, the migration journeys and language background of the parents and other adults in the home, and the history and hope embedded in their children's names. Furthermore, linguistically diverse families can provide valuable insights into their children's language development for teachers to meaningfully interpret formal and informal assessment data and create linguistically appropriate support for DLLs.

The counterstories of Asian American families with young DLL children further highlight the need for early learning leaders and policymakers to expand the capacity of early childhood programs and educators to support underserved Asian American emergent bilinguals. Building on the counterstories of the families in this study, how might early childhood policymakers (re)consider equity, inclusion, and belonging in early childhood education? First, national studies have provided strong evidence for the positive impact of dual language programs on emergent bilingual students’ achievement (Umansky et al., 2016). Many state education policies in the recent years have prioritized the needs and experiences of DLLs. As such, the number of dual language programs in recent years has grown to reflect the increased enrollment of the young DLL population across states. However, young DLLs, mainly coming from families of color in low-income communities, consistently lack equitable access to both high-quality early learning and dual language immersion programs, even though they stand to benefit most from such services. Ensuring that these young multilingual learners have an equitable opportunity to learn and thrive in justice-centered environments requires strategic policies that reduce the barriers to accessing high-quality early learning programs for DLLs and their families (Park and McHugh, 2023). Moreover, data on DLL enrollment in early childhood education programs and their language backgrounds should be collected at the state level and be made available across systems to inform program and policy improvement efforts (Park et al., 2018). Finally, most early childhood bilingual educators experience inequitable access to professional learning opportunities, resources, and materials, which subsequently hinders access, equity, and the quality of early learning experiences for young DLLs. State policymakers must respond to an urgent need to build a larger bilingual educator workforce to teach in dual language programs from the earliest years. In order to better serve this increasingly diverse population entering early childhood education, many programs are experiencing a pressing demand for effective instructional approaches with little or no guidance (Park et al., 2018). In meeting the dire shortage of early childhood bilingual educators, state policymakers can further allocate resources for dual language program development (curricula and training, bilingual coaches, professional development) and prioritize the recruitment, hiring, and training of early childhood bilingual educators in partnership with teacher education institutions and community organizations. Transformative state legislative mandates, early learning standards, and program regulations that center the linguistic and cultural knowledge of DLLs and their families are concrete steps toward ensuring justice-centered early childhood teaching practices.