Wartość języka/języków domu rodzinnego w procesie kreowania tożsamości kulturowej dzieci wychowywanych w rodzinach mieszanych
Value of the Language(s) of the Family Home in the Process of Creating a Cultural Identity of Children Raised in Mixed Families

Summary/Abstract: The article presents issues from the field of family and identity studies. There is a growing number of children raised in a culturally diverse environment who attend Polish educational institutions. For this reason, research into the upbringing and education of pre-school children who grow up in binational families and live outside the territorial border area takes on particular importance for teachers and educators. The aim of this article is to show the ways in which Polish-Italian families living in Kraków build the linguistic upbringing environment for their children. The results presented here were obtained as part of a research project aimed at analysing and interpreting the subjective experiences of Polish mothers raising pre-school children with partners of Italian nationality. The research material was collected during individual, in-depth, semi-structured interviews with ten mothers. The first part of the article presents the theoretical assumptions pointing to the fundamental role of language in the process of creation of cultural identity by human. Next, the results of the study are presented to show the different types of actions taken by the adult members of the families surveyed to support the children’s acquisition of Italian. The rich description of the practices of adult members of Polish-Italian families in the area of language education that emerges from the narratives of the mothers interviewed provides an opportunity for people directly involved in the upbringing and education of children to gain insight into the everyday life of their family educational environment.

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