Heritage language recognition : The multimodal construction of language in a Tibetan-Canadian family’s literacy activities
department or school: Arts and Social Sciences, Irving K. Barber Faculty of (Okanagan)
department or school: Community, Culture and Global Studies, Department of (Okanagan)
data provider: DSpace
creator: Ward, Shannon M.
issued: 2025-01-15T18:08:51Z
issued: 2024
description: This ethnographic study examines literacy activities in a Tibetan-Canadian family, members of a heritage language community facing intergenerational language loss. Drawing from 12 months of video ethnography, as well as ethnographic interviews and participant observation, I show how children use sound, gesture, and objects to mediate a shared understanding of the Tibetan heritage language, despite the dominance of English in their spoken repertoires. Informed by anthropological methods of language socialization, I examine children’s multimodal articulations of metalinguistic knowledge to argue that literacy activities provide material anchors for Tibetan children to identify as heritage language speakers through a process that I term heritage language recognition—an interactive objectification of language as culture that does not rely on metapragmatic discourse. Analyses discuss heritage language recognition in conversational patterns of entextualization, demonstrating that metalinguistic knowledge can be located in young children’s multimodal repertoires.
aggregated CHO: https://circle.library.ubc.ca/rest/handle/2429/90122
note: This article has been accepted for publication in Language in Society, published by Cambridge University Press. https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/language-in-society Heritage language recognition: The multimodal construction of language in a Tibetan-Canadian family’s literacy activities Shannon M. Ward Research for this article was funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (council grant number 430-2020-00782). Abstract: This ethnographic study examines literacy activities in a Tibetan-Canadian family, members of a heritage language community facing intergenerational language loss. Drawing from 12 months of video ethnography, as well as ethnographic interviews and participant observation, I show how children use sound, gesture, and objects to mediate a shared understanding of the Tibetan heritage language, despite the dominance of English in their spoken repertoires. Informed by anthropological methods of language socialization, I examine children’s multimodal articulations of metalinguistic knowledge to argue that literacy activities provide material anchors for Tibetan children to identify as heritage language speakers through a process that I term heritage language recognition—an interactive objectification of language as culture that does not rely on metapragmatic discourse. Analyses discuss heritage language recognition in conversational patterns of entextualization, demonstrating that metalinguistic knowledge can be located in young children’s multimodal repertoires. (Heritage languages, language socialization, literacy, metalinguistic knowledge, multimodality) Introduction In August 2023, I sat sipping sweet tea with Tenzin, a Tibetan refugee, in her living room in a suburb of Vancouver.1 Tenzin spoke of her two school-aged children, saying that when they are with their Tibetan friends, “I explain to them…the Tibetan language shouldn’t be vanished. Don’t speak English. You all come from India, and you know Tibetan”. Tenzin emphasized…
has type: Article
has type: Postprint
is shown at: 10.14288/1.0447752
language: eng
peer review status: Reviewed
provider: Vancouver : University of British Columbia Library
rights: Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International
rights URI: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/
scholar level: Faculty
subject: Heritage languages
subject: language socialization
subject: literacy
subject: metalinguistic knowledge
subject: multimodality
type: Text
identifier URI: http://hdl.handle.net/2429/90122