Introducing English in children’s leisure activities: Discourses about immersion and language capitalisation among Catalan families

Abstract

In accordance with intensive parenting expectations, an increasing number of Catalan families are seeking entertaining and efficient activities for children to learn English outside the classroom. This article, based on an eight-month ethnographic study, examines a family strategy for primary-school children: a leisure space in English organised by a group of middle-class families from the same public school. The objective of this article is to analyse the motivations that justify the intensification of English through this family leisure strategy and the ideologies regarding English held by the families. Present-day parents invest in the early learning of English as part of an aspirational family language policy (Seals and Beliaeva, 2023) for the future social and geographical mobility of their children in a highly competitive market. Unequal access to English underscores the social agency and creativity of non-affluent middle-class families to mimic “immersive” options, such as speaking English to their children or early stays abroad, which are not always feasible linguistically and economically. This leisure activity run by a mother who has adopted English as a family language has allowed these families to (re)produce the discourse of immersion as more efficient for English learning than formal instruction (Codó and Sunyol, 2024) and to put it into practice in a playful space of English communication based on ideologies of learning-by-doing (Doerr, 2013) and “natural” acquisition (McDaid, 2020).