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Ward, Shannon M.

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.

Article; Postprint

eng

Vancouver : University of British Columbia Library

10.14288/1.0447752

Arts and Social Sciences, Irving K. Barber Faculty of (Okanagan); Community, Culture and Global Studies, Department of (Okanagan)

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