Zhen Lin will be defending her PhD dissertation proposal at 1:00pm (Pacific Time) on Monday, October 25th virtually via Zoom.
All are welcome to attend.
Join Zoom Meeting (please arrive 5 minutes early)
Meeting ID: 630 3701 8868
Passcode: 161851
Supervisors: Dr. Guofang Li
Committee: Dr. Iris Berger, and Dr. Patsy Duff
Title: A Posthuman Investigation of Resources for Chinese-Canadian Children’s Heritage Language Maintenance at Home
Abstract:
The home context plays a vital role in facilitating heritage language (HL) learning for children raised in immigrant families overseas. For Chinese-immigrant children who are featured in many North American studies of bilingual development, an inevitable, gradual HL loss of Chinese-immigrant children has been disclosed despite considerable Chinese input in the home setting. Studies have identified the insufficient time and ability of parents and the lack of available resources as home factors that have contributed to the consistent decline of HL in Chinese-immigrant families (Li, 2006; 2015; Ma, 2008; Yu & Hsia, 2019; Wu, 2007). While a body of research has focused on what parents do or do not do to maintain HL at home, few studies have attended to the role of materials and resources in children’s HL development.
Current research on materials and resources for early literacy development has attended to the multimodal nature of early literacy development, seeing early literacy practices as involving multiple symbolic systems in real-world contexts. Research has generally emphasized what children can (pre-determinately) do with the multiple materials and resources to represent or communicate, and it often neglects the agential role of these materials or resources playing in generating practices of meaning-making in early literacy development (Hackett & Somerville, 2017; Hackett & Rautio, 2019; Kuby, Spector, & Thiel, 2019). There is a need to re-read children’s literacy learning process posthumanly by considering the power of materials in the intra-actions between children and other nonhuman entities (Jokinen & Murris, 2020; Kuby & Rowsell, 2017; Smythe et al., 2017), to gain new insights into early literacy development and practices.
This proposed study is an attempt to re-read early Chinese as a heritage language (CHL) learning by examining the intra-action between Chinese HL learners and the available resources for CHL learning in their home setting and how these children-material-context entanglements mediate CHL activities and practices at home in Canada. It seeks to understand how children meaning-making in CHL emerges from the moment-by-moment human-nonhuman entanglements between their bodies, the CHL material and resources, and the learning contexts in the home. Specifically, the study aims to address the following questions. 1) What resources (such as people, materials, and space) are engaged within Chinese immigrant families involving in children’s CHL learning? 2) How do the entanglements of people, time, space and materials produce HL literacy practices in the home context? 3) How do the intra-actions of the children with material objects, home environments, time, and other family members mediate family language planning and practices? The study employs a posthuman-informed ethnographic research design and will use observations, research journals, semi-structured interviews, unstructured object-interviews, photography, and video recordings to document the process of children’s bodies intra-acting with the nonhuman and the more-than-human entities. The findings of the study will aid a re-imagination of the hitherto underexplored resources of early CHL maintenance in Chinese-immigrant families in Canada. It is also expected to offer insights and new possibilities into how the Chinese-immigrant families support early CHL learning in the Canadian contexts by appreciating the in-the-moment entanglements of children, materials, time, and space.