Chapter 4 depicts a US elementary school that a second-generation Chinese immigrant child attends. It explores the school’s multicultural ideology and monolingual ethos from the child’s kindergarten teacher’s viewpoint. It further explores how this child’s family language ideology and policy are shaped by his first-generation immigrant parents’ own language limitations in the U.S. and their comparative views on Chinese versus American communicative styles. Through observation and narrated stories, this chapter brings the reader to the child’s elementary-school classroom, his school’s field day and international day, and his parents’ workplaces. It presents a case where not only do the parents fully support the English-only policy and practice at school, but they also are ready and willing to deliberately shift to greater use of English at home, based on their careful cost–benefit assessment of the consequences of the language shift for their family.

As an increasingly established research field, family language policy (FLP) provides a very useful lens to view how bi/multilingual home language-use patterns are influenced by socio-political ideologies and economic factors at the macro level and by family members’ language ideology at the micro level. This chapter starts with an introduction to FLP and outlines the development phases of the field. It then provides a discussion of the major research contributions to the field. Following that, it provides a synthesis of the extant research on how FLP is established and maintained in a range of countries and contexts, particularly in multilingual families. The synthesis focuses on internal factors, such as emotion, identity and cultural practices, and child agency in the negotiation of a family language policy. Lastly, insights gleaned from the more diverse range of social contexts are taken into consideration when making implications for parents, educators, and policy makers and a call for future research.

This chapter discusses the notion of “homescape” and the role of material homescapes showcasing visible linguistic resources in general, and games and toys more specifically, in the development of the multilingual child. This contribution offers a state of the art regarding the constitution and perception of the linguistic landscapes of infancy and the linguistic, cognitive, affective, social and identity affordances provided by them. We focus particularly on: (i) the multilingual resources of multilingual families and communities engaged with the transmission and maintenance of heritage languages (and therefore involved in multiliteracy practices); (ii) children’s, families’ and educators’ perceptions of multilingual settings and resources available at home; and (iii) their practices and agency within such settings, in order to foster children’s language awareness and literacy across languages. A review of methodologies employed to research homescapes will be critically discussed and a research agenda is outlined, in terms of both potential themes and methodologies.