A Mother's Tongue

Abstract

* This commentary significantly departs from the standard written form for contributions to The Forum over the years (i.e., 1992-1999). While commenting on one aspect of TESOL that is of particular professional and personal interest to me-the development and maintenance of minority Lls during childhood second language acquisition (e.g., Kouritzin, 1999, in press)-I present an argument for the importance of continued use of the familial heritage language by referring to documented accounts of my own experiences as the (White) mother of (biracial) Japanese-speaking children. I hope to augment the academic arguments in favour of bilingual education and heritage language maintenance with a more intense, lived, personal one. My husband and I wish to ensure that our children grow up bilingual-speaking, reading, and writing not only English but also their other heritage language, Japanese. The reasons for this imperative are threefold: