Language Socialization Of The Children In The Chinese-American Intermarried Family—Case Study

With the development of globalization, international relationships in economy and culture have been strengthened more and more tightly. Inter-national marriage, a special type of marriages, has developed at an increasing rate, which has drawn social scholars’ attention. They have explored the issues around the reasons behind fast increasing intermarriage, the romance and conflicts involved; however, less attention is paid to language development and social development of the children born in the intermarried family. Under the paradigm of language socialization, the researcher has conducted one and a half years’field work on the language and social development of the children born in a Chinese-American intermarried family. Based on the data collected through interviews, recordings of dinner table conversation, participant observation and measurements, the researcher is able to evaluate the child’s language proficiency, discover parent’s attitude towards culture and understand their role in socializing their children and reshape child’s social identity.Results have shown that the child’s bilingual language ability has outperformed her peers but not well enough in the Chinese character spelling by analyzing the English and Chinese test results. This outcome results from parental bilingual proficiency as well as their attitudes towards spelling and modern technology. In terms of language use in the intermarried family, English dominates most conversations with frequent code-switching and code-mixing between Chinese and English partly due to parents’efforts in insisting using English in the family language policy and partly because of the deficit of the children’s language ability. With respect to children’s language use, there are frequent use of logical words and pronoun "I" as the sentence subject, both of which reflects the influence of English and western culture on Chinese and Chinese culture. On the other hand, parents play a vital role in the process of child’s language socialization. Parents’ bilingual ability directly helps and stimulates children’s bilingual development. In the interaction with their children, they play the roles of coanimator/author and animator/author to help them finish the language socialization process. Furthermore, parents have expressed their attitude towards Chinese language learning and Chinese culture, their expectation of their children and their difficulties in life. Meanwhile, children have voiced out their confusions and struggle towards their social identity as well. They have suffered identity crisis and successfully overcome it by accepting their co-nationality as Chinese and American depending on different environment they live in.This thesis not only reveals the mystery of intermarried family, but also shed some light on children’s language development and social development. Various factors contribute to children’s language socialization, including parental language proficiency and their attitude toward culture learning and language learning, children’s own self cognitive and social development and interactions between parents and children. As to children’s confusion about social identity, parents need to take great care rather than ignore or take them for granted.