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Self-determination in adolescent bilingualism.

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Abstract

This article describes a short-term immersion experience of an American teenager learning his heritage language (HL) in Japan. The learner's pre-test and post-test results indicated little linguistic gain in vocabulary and speaking from his 16-day experience. However, the post-test interview and journal report showed that the experience positively influenced the adolescent's determination for HL maintenance. This paper proposes a new approach to viewing adolescent bilingualism as the learner's self-regulated behavior in a natural setting.

Introduction

Heritage language (HL) refers to the ancestral or home language of an immigrant family, including indigenous languages, yet distinguished from a foreign language learned in school setting. Successful bilingualism is said to depend on societal attitudes toward the maintenance of HL and the degree of community and family support for it (Fillmore, 2000; Harding-Esch & Riley, 2003; Hinton, 1999; Kirkness, 2002; Portes & Hao, 2002; Walzer, 2004).

However, even in the most favorable environment, there seems to be a wide variation in children's ultimate attainment of their native languages. In spite of constant parental efforts or community resources, not all HL children become active bilinguals (Kondo, 2003; Yamamoto, 2001). 'One-parent, one-language,' a widely adopted method of bilingualism recommended for parents (e.g., Cunningham-Andersson & Andersson, 1999) may become ineffective beyond middle childhood (Kondo, 1998; Kondo-Brown, 2000). The mother's insistence on speaking the HL at home can be contributive of the HL children's adherence to both languages (Kondo, 1998). Yet, such parental influence falls short of the ultimate attainment of active bilingualism even in the multilingual, multi-ethnic society like Hawaii because HL maintenance depends on the individual's self-motivation for doing so (Kondo, 1999).

Bilingual children and adolescents benefit from the resources (e.g., HL schools, tutoring) and opportunities (e.g., presence of HL speaking residents) only if their positive attitude toward their ethnic heritage is well sustained (Kondo, 1998; Kondo, 2003; Shibata, 7000). The nurturing of their inner motivation to learn the HL is as important as community and school support (Shibata, 2000). To account for the wide variation in HL proficiency among them, we must investigate how they manage to foster their own motivation for HL maintenance during up until adulthood.

Self-Determination Theory (SDT), a theory on the variability of human behaviors in achieving goals, posits that our own motivation as well as self-regulation must closely interact with larger, social needs in order to produce desirable outcomes through long-term commitments (Ryan and Deci, 2000). Of most importance in SDT are three innate needs that propel our self-regulation in adhering to the act: competence, autonomy and relatedness. Adopting the SDT framework, I argue that the home and community environment may more effectively support adolescent bilingualism if these three fundamental psychological needs are fully satisfied. In other words, HL teens...

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