Viewing family mealtime interactions from a task-based perspective: insights from a heritage language context

In migrant heritage households, food preparation and food consumption (FPC) activities often constitute an important aspect of remembering and reliving the heritage country. In families with young children, mealtimes can be important opportunities to socialise children into behaviours, practices and sensory perceptions related to their food heritage, and model and enact culturally appropriate practices in the heritage language. FPC activities involve a series of tasks that are essential for the creation and completion of the mealtime event. In this study, we draw on the task-based language teaching tradition and conceptualise tasks performed during FPC as heritage language learning opportunities. We undertake observations of Chinese-heritage families in New Zealand during mealtimes and identify task types that resulted in sustained parent–child verbal interaction. We affirm the importance of information gap tasks, and we demonstrate parents’ use opinion gap tasks to support their own communicative or activity-related goals. We demonstrate how the structured involvement of children in the mealtime event through tasks provides naturalistic opportunities for heritage language use, and reinforces connections between language and food-related experiences that are likely to be enduring. We provide recommendations for exploring parents’ metacognitive understanding of naturalistic opportunities for language reinforcement.