Building on Bronfenbrenner’s Ecological Framework, this research has generated some interesting findings. For example, our participants argued that their parents and people who come from Chinese heritage language communities are important interlocutors for their Chinese maintenance. This is because they need to use Chinese to communicate with their parents and people who are from Chinese heritage language communities. Furthermore, our findings also indicated that Chinese heritage language children use different languages to communicate with different interlocutors. Our participants pointed out that they used Chinese to communicate with their parents, wider Chinese families and Chinese heritage language communities. In contrast, they adopted English to communicate with their younger siblings, classmates and teachers. It is clear that these findings will be important for heritage language families, to further understand their children’s language development and use, contributing to future family language policy design. 

Written by Tianzhe Chen