Journal of Early
Childhood Literacy
http://ecl.sagepub.com/
Biliteracy and trilingual practices in the home context: Case studies of
Chinese-Canadian children
Guofang Li
Journal of Early Childhood Literacy 2006 6: 355
DOI: 10.1177/1468798406069797
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a rt i c l e
Biliteracy and trilingual
practices in the home
context: Case studies of
Chinese-Canadian children
G U O FA N G L I
Journal of Early
Childhood Literacy
Copyright © 2006
sage publications
London,Thousand Oaks, CA
and New Delhi
vol 6(3) 355–381
DOI: 10.1177/1468798406069797
Michigan State University, USA
Abstract Although Chinese has become the third largest mother
tongue in both Canada and the USA, Chinese/English biliteracy
development has received little attention in educational research. This
article explores three Chinese-Canadian first and second graders’
biliteracy (Chinese/English reading and writing) and trilingual
(Mandarin, Cantonese, and English) practices in the home milieu.
Findings suggest that the home context is a crucial environment for
success or failure in achieving biliteracy. All families expected their
children to become biliterate and multilingual, but the three children
vary in their preferences and use of different languages and literacies
at home. Factors such as parents’ perceptions of their minority status
in the host society, their attitudes toward the role of heritage language
and their own proficiencies in the dominant language, as well as
several school and societal factors, such as quality of instruction in
heritage language schools, language policies in the mainstream
schools, and the media, played an important role in shaping the
children’s language choices and patterns of use at home.These multiple
factors suggest that helping immigrant children become biliterate and
multilingual is a challenging task that requires concerted efforts
between parents, public schools, and community organizations.
Keywords biliteracy; Chinese-Canadian children; home context; trilingual practices;
language choices; language use
Canada and the USA are becoming more multilingual in the wake of
growing numbers of immigrants whose mother tongue is not English. In
the USA, the Census Bureau 2000 results show that 18 percent of the total
population aged 5 and over, or 47.0 million people, reported they spoke a
language other than English at home, an increase of 47 percent since the
1990s. Among these home languages, Chinese is reported to be the
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language most frequently spoken at home, other than English and Spanish
(Shin and Bruno, 2003). In Canada, Statistics Canada 2001 Census reports
that almost 5,335,000 individuals (about one out of every six people) were
allophones who speak a mother tongue other than English or French, an
increase of 12.5 percent from 1996, three times the growth rate of 4.0
percent for the population as a whole. Chinese is reported to have become
the leading mother tongue after English and French – almost 872,400
people reported Chinese as their mother tongue, up 18.5 percent from
1996 (Statistics Canada, 2002).
Although Chinese has become the third largest mother tongue in Canada
and the USA, Chinese/English biliteracy development has received little
attention in educational research, as bilingual education and research has
mostly concerned English/French immersion programs in Canada and
English/Spanish bilingual programs in the USA. As Chinese and English
have very different orthographic systems, biliteracy development in these
two languages can be very different from English/French and
English/Spanish, which are phonologically and orthographically similar
(Wang et al., 2005). In light of the rapid increase of the Chinese population
in North America, the lack of research on Chinese/English bilingual
education is troubling and has contributed to the invisibility of the Chinese
as frontline participants in remolding current language education policies
(Lao, 2004; Sheets and Chew ,2002). Given recent demographic changes,
there is an urgent need to understand Chinese/English biliteracy development among the new Chinese immigrants, especially among young
children upon their entry into the mainstream schools.
Research on young children’s bilingual development has discovered that
language shift and language loss are widespread, and heritage languages are
usually not maintained or rarely developed among the different generations
of immigrants (Krashen, 2000; Peyton, Ranard and McGinnis, 2001; Wong
Fillmore, 1991). Often a balance in abilities and interests in two languages
is difficult to maintain, as children learn to read and write in the school
language with steadily increasing proficiency.Although many reform efforts
in bilingual education have been undertaken in school contexts, research
findings have suggested that school-based programs alone are insufficient
in promoting biliteracy development (Fishman, 2001). In fact, in the
current socio-political climate, in which school and government support
for bilingual education is waning, the responsibility to maintain and
develop the heritage language falls mostly on the shoulders of immigrant
parents (Hinton, 1999).
However, there is a paucity of research on immigrant (i.e. Chinese
and/or Asian) parents’ practices undertaking such important tasks,
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especially in their home milieu. Most research on parents’ role in heritage
language maintenance focuses on either their efforts in community
language schools (e.g. Chao, 1997; M. Li, 2005; Shibata, 2000) or their
attitudes toward, and awareness of, bilingual education (e.g. Lai, 1999; Lao,
2004). Few studies have examined the specific strategies and practices that
immigrant parents employ and the ways in which they allocate resources
in their home context to support biliteracy development. As a result, how
parents make language choices and how each language is used, taught, and
practiced in immigrant homes remain largely unknown.
A lack of knowledge about how biliteracy is practiced in home settings
has also contributed to the difficulties for educators to embrace biliteracy
and multiliteracies in school settings, as teachers often do not have the
knowledge base about ethnic and cultural diversity in education, particularly minority children’s culturally specific ways of learning outside school.
Important questions often arise when classroom teachers try to understand
children from diverse cultural and linguistic backgrounds. For example,
what do home literacy environments look like and in what ways are different literacies supported at home? How do home literacies differ from
school experiences? How might children’s home experiences inform us
about fostering children’s literacy learning in school? To seek answers to
these questions, there is a need to explore the ‘funds of knowledge’ from
minority homes and communities, and to acquire a more situated understanding of children’s non-school literacy experiences in both their first and
second languages (Cummins, 2000; G. Li, 2002, 2006; Moll, 1992;Valdés,
2001).
This article contributes to the existing literature on bilingual research by
exploring three Chinese first and second graders’ biliteracy (Chinese/
English reading and writing) and trilingual (Mandarin, Cantonese, and
English) practices in the home milieu.1 Drawing on a year-long ethnographic study of Chinese immigrant children’s school–home literacy
connection, the present article explores (1) the children’s literacy environments, (2) the pragmatic and symbolic values the parents attribute to each
language, (3) the children’s language choices and practices, and (4) the
different strategies and resources the parents employ to support their
children’s language and literacy development at home.
Theoretical framework: language socialization as cultural
practice
In this article, I situate my understanding of Chinese children’s biliteracy
and trilingual practices in theories of language socialization, which focus
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on the process of becoming a culturally competent member through
language use in social activities (Ochs, 1986; Ochs and Schieffelin, 1984;
Schieffelin and Ochs, 1986). Language and literacy learning is seen as part
of a process through which novice learners acquire particular values and
relationships from experts in the social context where learning takes place.
Since the process of acquiring language is deeply affected by the process of
becoming a competent member of a community, language learning is intricately linked to the construction of social roles, cultural affiliations, beliefs,
values, and behavioral practices (Schieffelin and Ochs, 1986). Thus,
children acquire a world-view as they acquire a language.
For second language learners, who walk in two cultural worlds, the
process of acquiring a language(s) may involve the intersection of
multiple/different cultural values and beliefs and multiple social contexts
of socialization. For such learners, language practices do not exist in
isolation from each other, just as cultures and communities do not exist as
discrete entities, but rather interact with each other in various degrees of
complementarity or conflict (Lam, 2004). The multitude of interactions
between different belief systems and social languages between school and
home define individual learners’ social identities and shape what their
voices can say (Wertsch, 1991). For example, power struggles between
social languages in primary and secondary discourse may affect individual
learner’s choices of appropriating or ‘speaking’ a particular social language
and becoming a member of that community.
Many factors can affect the families’ beliefs and the children’s language
choice at home. Tse (2001), in her study of successful bilinguals, associates language attitudes with ethno-linguistic vitality, that is, the status and
prestige of a language as perceived by speakers of that language. Tse
discovered that different factors help shape members’ perception of their
language vitality and subsequently their motivation to learn the language.
One of the most critical factors is having a peer group that values the
heritage language. Such a peer group not only can help one develop positive
attitudes toward the language, but can also socialize one into different
literacy related activities in the language. Another factor related to the
ethno-linguistic vitality of a language is a member’s socio-geographic
location. For immigrants who resettle in cities with a high percentage of
their ethnic representation (e.g. Vancouver, Toronto, and New York), the
heritage language is perceived to be more useful and prestigious than for
those who settle in cities with low ethnic representations.
Another important factor is contact with institutions that value the
heritage language. These institutions include both those in the heritage
language community, such as weekend language schools, and those in
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non-heritage communities, such as mainstream public schools. Support
from institutions both inside and outside the ethnic communities can
greatly shape an individual’s positive attitudes toward his or her heritage
language. In a heritage language community, students who receive formal
instruction in weekend language schools and are involved in a variety of
heritage cultural activities tend to develop more positive views of the
language and are exposed to more varieties of literacy activities (Hinton,
1999; Oh, 2003; Tse, 2001). Similar positive attitudes can also be shaped
by non-heritage communities when public schools value and validate
minority cultures and languages in their instructional practices. Research
has concluded that when schools devalue students’ first language and
enforce an English-only policy it often results in students’ negative attitudes
toward their first language and culture and their rapid language shift to
English (Li, 2002, 2006; Valdés, 2001).
A third critical factor is parental or familial attitudes toward heritage and
mainstream languages. Parents or families who attach importance to maintaining and developing a language and emphasize the need to continue
speaking the language often foster a positive influence on the children’s
perception of that language. In some cases, parents’ positive attitudes
towards becoming bilterate and multilingual can help motivate children to
become multilingual. In their study of trilingual children’s home language
practices in French Immersion in Canada, Dagenais and Day (1999)
discovered that when parents actively promoted the development of trilingualism through French immersion as a means to access cultural capital,
children also developed a positive disposition toward becoming trilingual
and saw the advantages of this status.
In terms of the attitudes toward biliteracy and trilingualism, the degree
of home support also matters. In their study of families of Mexican backgrounds in California and Texas, Schecter and Bayley (2002) suggest that
though the parents are of the same ethnic origin, the pragmatic meanings
of heritage language maintenance, the ways in which the families choose
to pursue the goal of biltieracy development, and the practices they engage
in to achieve their goal vary widely among individuals.While some families
wished to maintain a minority language at home, fostering their children’s
academic development in the dominant language, other families altered
their home language practices to match those of the schools their children
attended.
Similarly, many researchers (e.g. Hinton, 1999; Kondo, 1997; Luo and
Wiseman, 2000; Mills, 2001; Oh, 2003) have found that parents who
explicitly display positive attitudes toward heritage language have a strong
influence on the children’s attitudes, language use and proficiency. For
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example, when parents choose to use the heritage language at home and
enforce a heritage-language-only policy at home, the children tend to
develop a more positive attitude toward and higher levels of proficiency in
the language. They would also be more likely to continue to use the
language even after exposure to English compared with children whose
parents do not make this effort (Oh, 2003).
These individual differences among families suggest that language
choices and patterns of use in the home milieu are a dynamic and fluid
process that help determine the development of bilingualism and biliteracy among language minority children (Hakuta and Pease-Alvarez, 1994;
Schecter and Bayley, 2002; Vásquez et al., 1994). For these children,
becoming biliterate and multilingual is an important means of maintaining the strengths of the minority language, in both linguistic and cultural
senses, as the majority language plays an increasingly dominant role in their
lives outside home (Harding and Riley, 1986).
With Chinese learners, though extant research has concluded that
Chinese parents generally hold positive attitudes toward bilingual
education (Lao, 2004), it remains largely unknown how they translate their
beliefs into home practices. In the following, drawing on a larger ethnographic study, I examine the pragmatic and symbolic roles different
languages and literacies play in the everyday lives of three Chinese Canadian
children.
Methodology
The city in which this study took place is called Riverview, a significant
suburb of the Greater Vancouver area, British Columbia, Canada. The high
influx of Asian immigrants from Hong Kong and Mainland China since
1997 has significantly changed the demographics of the city. According
to the 2001 Census, about 65,325 new Chinese immigrants came to
settle in Riverview and this number comprises more than one third of the
total Riverview population (148,150) (Statistics Canada, 2002). Chinese
(Mandarin and Cantonese) has become the second most common
language spoken in homes. Because of its high ethno-linguistic vitality, it
has gradually gained some official status within the public sphere. In
1994, the newly formed Chinese Language Education Advancement Coalition of British Columbia urged the British Columbia government to
include Mandarin in the provincial examinations for students leaving
grade 12, and to allow some Mandarin/Cantonese courses to be taught
in high school. In addition to these efforts, they established traditional
Chinese schools, where children can learn to read and write Chinese, since
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no Chinese courses were offered in the elementary and secondary school
system. Because of the importance of both English and Chinese in their
daily lives and the rising of the Chinese economy in recent years, most
Chinese parents in Riverview hope that their children will become biliterate
(Chinese and English) and trilinguals (Mandarin, Cantonese, and English)
so that when they grow up they can work and live in both Eastern and
Western worlds.
The three focal students and their families were part of this demographic
change in Riverview. All three children were in a grade 1 and 2 combined
class in a multiethnic elementary school with 80 percent Chinese student
population. In contrast to its multiethnic student population, the teachers
and staff in the school were homogenously white. The school had one
Chinese employee, Ms Wong, who was a classroom assistant. Her main
responsibility was to provide support for the few special needs children in
the class.The school is an English-only school with French, Canada’s second
official language, being offered at grades 5, 6, and 7. Because of its high
English as a Second Language (ESL) population, the school also offered
pullout ESL programs to support the children’s English learning.The pullout
ESL classes were taught by three monolingual English-speaking ESL/
Resource teachers. No Chinese courses were offered in the school. In fact,
speaking Chinese was discouraged in the school contexts. It was widely
believed by the regular classroom teachers and the ESL/Resource teachers
that many students failed to learn English because they often spoke Chinese.
Because of its English-only environment, many students referred to the
school as the ‘English school’ to differentiate from the ‘Chinese school’ that
they attended on weekends.
The three focal children were recommended by their regular classroom
teacher, Mrs Haines. Alana Tang and Kevin Ma were six years old and in first
grade and Anthony Chan was seven and in second grade. Both Kevin and
Anthony were born in Canada, while Alana was born in China. All three
children came from middle- and upper-middle class families.
Data collection and analysis
A researcher’s positioning and role are critical to the design, implementation, and interpretation of an ethnographic study (Alvermann et al., 1996;
Goetz and LeCompte, 1984). I am a Chinese/English bilingual and
bicultural researcher who had educational experiences in both China and
Canada. I can also speak or understand several Chinese dialects including
the Wuhan dialect. My multilingual and bicultural background enabled me
to have easy access to the field and to quickly establish rapport with the
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teachers and the Chinese families and students. I was perceived by the
teachers as a resource person to help them understand the Chinese parents
and their communities, and to discuss cultural and educational issues they
encountered while working with Chinese students. The Chinese parents
were willing to share with me answers to questions regarding first and
second language education, and at times, approached me with questions
and concerns about their children’s education or Canadian schooling in
general.
During October 2000 and June 2001, I collected data in the homes and
the school that the three children attended, using a variety of ethnographic
methods including direct observation, participant observation, interviews,
and document collection. My fieldwork entailed weekly visits (one school
day per week) to their classroom. During the school visits, I observed the
focal children’s interactions with peers and teachers. I paid particular
attention to the literacy activities in which they participated, their language
use and choices in different settings, their interactional patterns with
teachers and peers, and the ways they used or talked about their home
literacy experiences. I also collected, read, and/or photocopied samples of
their written work. During the course of the research, the children also
participated in two whole class discussions on their home reading and
writing experiences.They were asked to talk about what they read and write
at home and draw pictures to illustrate their home reading and writing
experiences.
I had many informal conversations with the children’s parents throughout the research process. Towards the end of the research project, I also
conducted a semi-structured interview with one parent in each family at
their homes. I asked the parents about their children’s home literacy practices, their beliefs and values of language learning, and their perceptions
of schooling in Canada. All the interviews were audio-taped and later
transcribed and translated into English if the original transcripts were in
Chinese.
In order to gain more information about the focal children, I conducted
two semi-structured interviews with their teacher Mrs Haines: one at the
beginning of the research project and one at the end of the research project.
I also interviewed Mrs Haines’s assistant Ms Wong. I asked them about their
experiences teaching the Chinese children, their insight into their
children’s experiences in school, and particularly their assessment of their
literacy performance.
Merriam (1998) suggests that the process of qualitative data collection
and analysis is recursive and dynamic. Data analysis in this study was
ongoing throughout the data collection period. The ongoing analysis
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helped to identify emerging patterns and themes (e.g. students’ different
home and school literacy practices, and uses of their first language in school
settings). However, more systematic analysis was conducted after data
collection was completed and the interviews transcribed.
Following Wolcott’s (1994) approach to domain analysis, I developed
major domains such as parents’ views of the host society, student’s home
and school literacy experiences, student’s interaction with peers, teacher
and parent perceptions of the student, and cross-cultural differences.These
domains were further broken into smaller categories. For example, in the
domain of ‘parents’ perspectives on literacy’, four smaller categories
(‘literacy education’,‘L1 use and maintenance’,‘home literacy’, and ‘L2 use
and learning’) were developed. These subcategories were used to code the
transcripts and field notes. After this stage of data analysis, I narrowed down
key themes and categories that were relevant to this article and embedded
the analysis in the research findings that follow.
Biliteracy and trilingual practices in three Chinese Canadian
families: the findings
In this section, I provide a detailed description of the three children’s
biliteracy and trilingual experiences in the home milieu. Though the three
children shared similar cultural backgrounds, their home literacy practices
differed in activities and in linguistic and cultural orientations.Their respective language learning and literacy practices at home were intricately shaped
by the parents’ perceptions toward the host society as well as their
aspirations and the values they ascribed to each language.
Anthony Chan’s experiences: ‘I don’t want him to speak
Chinglish’
The Chan family came from Hong Kong to Canada in 1987, before the big
rush of immigration in the 1990s, and they settled in Riverview where
Chinese was the main language of communication. As Mrs Chan noted,
‘There’re many Chinese here . . . We have Chinese grocery stores, Chinese
restaurants . . . sometimes I feel as if I live in Hong Kong, especially in this
neighborhood’. Mrs Chan had post-secondary education in Hong Kong and
was an executive secretary before moving to Canada. She was now working
as an executive assistant in a children’s hospital, and was also taking courses
in alternative medicine. Mr Chan received an undergraduate degree in
Hong Kong and a master’s degree from the USA. Before moving to Canada,
he worked as an advertising agent, first in New York, then in Hong Kong
for a few years. He worked at the time of the research as a print marketer
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in Riverview. Mr and Mrs Chan were both trilingual speakers of English,
Cantonese, and Mandarin.
Although they had lived in Canada for many years and were more
integrated into the mainstream society than some other Chinese families
who worked within the ethnic economy, the Chans still felt like sojourners. As Mrs Chan noted,‘This is Canada, this is not Hong Kong . . . you have
to realize like when you go to a friend’s house, you know who is the host,
and who is the guest.You don’t jump in and take over. So it’s the same kind
of feeling that I have’. Her feeling as a sojourner greatly influenced her attitudes toward Anthony’s education, especially in terms of his language
learning. She believed that only success in education can help the next
generation overcome similar feelings: ‘If it’s something that the better
education can make happen, then it’s good. But you don’t complain and
you don’t want to take charge’.As discussed below, Mr and Mrs Chan altered
their home practices to match those of the school in order for Anthony to
be successful.
Anthony’s home literacy practices Seven-year-old Anthony was born
and raised in Canada, and was the only child. He was in second grade, and
his English was at the grade level. In school, he appeared quite nervous and
rigid. In the first year when he drew pictures, he usually drew tiny, tiny
pictures and pressed very hard with the pencil until there was a big hole
in the paper. He had also developed a tacit way of avoiding participating in
school. Mrs Haines noted that ‘he behaves in a very quiet way, and he
doesn’t act out behaviorally. But he is . . . resisting passively’. He was very
cautious about speaking up and participating in classroom activities. Since
the school enforced an unofficial English-only policy, Anthony, like many
other Chinese children, rarely showed that he knew Chinese and never
spoke it in school. When asked about his Chinese, he said, ‘I don’t know
how. I’m supposed to know, but I don’t know. My mom and dad always
speak to me in English at home’.
At home, Anthony was a busy child. He was enrolled in six different after
school classes including Chinese: (1) Swimming lessons once or twice a
week; (2) Kickboxing lessons once a week on Tuesday (to learn self-defense
and self-discipline); (3) Piano lessons once a week on Sunday and practice
nearly every day; (4) Chinese lessons two hours per week on Saturday;
(5) Soccer games and practice once a week on Saturday; (6) Math school
several times a week (this was dropped later at Mrs Haines’s suggestion,
but continued at home by his father using math textbooks from Hong
Kong). Because of these different lessons and the longevity of his eating
habits (which usually involved about an hour and half to three hours of
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spoon-feeding him at dinner), they ‘don’t have much time to read’ at home.
Even if he had time to read, he often read English story books.
Despite his denial of knowing Chinese, Anthony attended a weekend
Chinese school every week to learn how to read and write in Chinese. He
told me, ‘I am in level one Chinese. I go once a week. We have class for
about two hours. We have a lot of homework, writing Chinese’. Figure 1 is
Anthony’s portrait of himself writing Chinese at home. Anthony did not
like Chinese classes and considered learning Chinese very hard and boring.
He enjoyed reading English story books (such as the Franklin series) and
watched English cartoons (such as Pokémon and Digimon) at home. A few
years ago, he was able to watch Chinese TV programs at home but because
he (or his parents) rarely watched them, they unsubscribed the programs.
Anthony was exposed at the time of the research to Chinese radio when
his parents listened to it occasionally.
Mrs Chan considered Anthony’s English to be better than his Chinese. She
noticed that Anthony sometimes used ‘Chinglish’,2 that is, he spoke English
sentences ‘in Hong Kong style’. She was not happy about this hybrid English
and she did not want him to pick up a Hong Kong accent, ‘I want him to
learn real English’. For this reason, Mr and Mrs Chan decided to speak to
him in English at home.
In terms of dealing with the two cultures, though they lived in a
predominantly Chinese community, the Chans considered themselves more
open-minded in raising Anthony in the Canadian culture:
. . . Because of the kind of the work we do, we have lots of interaction with
people from different culture.We are in a better position than those people who
don’t work or work in companies owned by Chinese. We observe more
[Western] things than the traditional Chinese family. Every St Patrick’s Day, we
and Anthony wear green . . . and Christmas, we don’t usually put up a tree . . .
We don’t observe Chinese festivals as much. Chinese New Year is something
important, and we give out red packages. But other festivals, we don’t even
remember. Like, the dragon boat festivals, sometimes I don’t even remember.
Figure 1 Anthony writing Chinese at home
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Even though they considered their home culture was a mix, both Mr and
Mrs Chan believed that it was important for Anthony to learn his first
language, Chinese. They wanted him to know both languages. Although
they did not expect him to be able to write Chinese, they wanted him to
know how to speak and to learn how to write some basic characters in the
language (e.g. writing his name). Mrs Chan commented, ‘I think it is
important to have both languages. Even if one is proficient in English, I
don’t think that’s enough. People will look at you as Chinese and they
expect you to know Chinese’. Originally they wanted him to attend Chinese
school twice a week on Saturdays and Sundays, but Anthony refused to go,
so they made him attend only once a week.
Mr and Mrs Chan noticed Anthony’s resistance to learning Chinese. Even
if they spoke Chinese to Anthony, he would reply in English. Sometimes,
when they insisted, and Anthony wanted something desperately, he would
reply in Cantonese. Otherwise he ‘refused to use Chinese’ even though he
knew how.The Chans tried to force him to speak Chinese on weekends, but
it was hard to follow through because of Anthony’s reluctance to comply.
Gradually, they had to use English to communicate with him. Mrs Chan
could not figure out why he started to reject Chinese as she remembered
that in pre-school Anthony was actually bilingual and preferred to use
Chinese. She recalled Anthony’s change in his choice of language use:
I don’t know why. When he was in pre-school, there were a lot of Chinese, and
most of them, a lot of them moved from Hong Kong recently.They don’t speak
English at all. When they came to pre-school, they all like to play with him
because he speaks English and Chinese. We had a Filipino nanny, so he spoke
with her in English even when he was very little. So he knows both. By the time
he was three he went to pre-school. I didn’t like when they all spoke Chinese
at pre-school. My husband actually talked to the teacher, and she said, ‘There is
nothing I can do because I don’t understand what they are talking about’. And
the same thing happened when he went to kindergarten. But since he was in
grade 1, the first few months, he spoke some Chinese but then I think children
are learning to speak English already, so he refused to speak Chinese.
Despite the fact that Anthony did not like to use Chinese, he still dutifully
went to Chinese school every Saturday and did his Chinese homework.
Mrs Chan told me that the Chinese homework was almost all the writing
Anthony did at home. Realizing that Anthony had lost his first language,
Mrs Chan commented, ‘I think from a family [perspective], their children
won’t be able to speak English and [parents] want them to be speaking
in English. But they don’t know that with time, they will lose their
Chinese’.
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Alana Tang’s home experiences: ‘she has to maintain her
Chinese’
Alana Tang was born in mainland China and came to Canada with her family
in March 1999, when she was almost five years old. She also had a brother
who was in seventh grade. Both of her parents had associate degrees from
colleges in China. Her father had his own real estate business and was a
multi-millionaire and her mother was in business management in China.
They came to Canada as investors. Mr Tang stayed home, buying and selling
stocks on-line and researching new ideas for business in Canada and in
China, while Mrs Tang worked part time as a technician for a biochemical
company in the area (operated by Chinese speaking people) to kill time.
Although the Tangs were newcomers, they came with a different attitude
toward their own status in Canada. Unlike the Chans, they displayed much
more confidence in their role as valuable contributors to Canadian society.
Mr Tang reasoned,
I feel we contributed a lot to Canada. As you see, we came as investors, and we
brought so much money. It will surely help Canada. Every investor will buy a
house, two cars and spend thousands of dollars here. Can you say it’s not a great
asset to Canada? I think it’s enormous. And for people like you who come with
PhD and master’s degrees, they will contribute greatly to the cultural development in Canada.
Mr Tang’s confidence in the Chinese contribution, together with their
uncertainty about whether to stay in Canada permanently, greatly affected
their attitude toward Chinese language and cultural maintenance at home.
Mr and Mrs Tang wanted Alana to become literate and bi-cultural in both
English and Chinese so that she was prepared for living in both countries.
Mr Tang expressed, in Chinese, his expectations: ‘I think they can combine
both and tap their potential to the full in both languages. For example, even
though the content is in English, they can use Chinese to express it and be
understood. If my kids can reach this level, I will be satisfied’. He firmly
believed that parents play a crucial role in educating their children at home
about the significance of their heritage language use, ‘I think as long as the
parents persist, they will still keep the Chinese ways even when they are 20
and go out into the society. They will act in Chinese way and understand
their parents’ thoughts at home. I think it should be like this’. Mr Tang’s
beliefs and attitude toward the Chinese language and culture are reflected
in Alana’s home literacy practices.
Alana’s home literacy practices At the time this study began, Alana had
been in the school for a year and a half, and had yet to develop proficiency
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in speaking English. She was a beginning Level 1 ESL student, and was
pulled out of class every day to work with two ESL teachers in small
language groups for 40-minute periods. Mrs Haines observed that Alana
could complete her journal writing with support and was beginning to
spell some words on her own. In school, even though it was English only,
Alana sometimes code-switched between Mandarin, Cantonese, and
English and was able to interpret for some new Chinese students who had
recently arrived.
Alana’s home was a distinctly different world from school although their
home was located across the street from the school. At home, Alana was
exposed to three languages/dialects (Mandarin, Cantonese, and English).
Though neither of her parents could speak English, they were bilingual in
their native languages. Mr Tang was a speaker of Mandarin and his native
tongue, Wuhan dialect, but he always spoke with Alana in Mandarin and
never in his dialect. Mrs Tang was a bilingual Mandarin and Cantonese
speaker. With Cantonese being her mother tongue, she always spoke to
Alana in that language. Alana’s English exposure at home came mostly from
TV. Everyday after school, Alana would usually watch English TV for a few
hours until suppertime. She generally watched cartoons in English such as
Sailor Moon, Digimon, Pokémon, and Power Ranger. Occasionally, Alana played video
games on the computer. These were the only times that Alana had contact
with English at home.
Since Mr and Mrs Tang could not speak English and were not sure
whether they wanted to stay in Canada permanently, they took Alana’s
Chinese development very seriously. They taught her Chinese reading and
writing and required her to speak Chinese at all times at home. Although
they understood that there were cultural differences between school and
home, they expected their children to ‘act in Canadian ways at school and
follow Chinese ways at home’. Mr Tang felt strongly about the importance
of keeping the Chinese language and culture:
As a Chinese, she has to learn her mother tongue to maintain Chinese culture
and tradition. I ask them that if we come back to China 10 years later and they
cannot speak any Chinese and cannot communicate with their grandparents,
what should they do then?
He also believed that it was important for his children to learn English as
well,‘since we came to Canada, they have to learn both English and Chinese.
Some Chinese cultures and traditions are really good and we have to keep
it. We also need to learn the good aspects of the Canadian culture’. Mr Tang
perceived that his role as a parent was to ‘teach them Chinese at home’. He
did not think he could do much to teach his children English, ‘They have
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to learn English themselves for our English is poor. It depends on themselves to learn it’.
Though they could not teach Alana English, they believed that Alana’s
skills in Chinese would help her in learning English. Every evening after
supper, Mrs or Mr Tang would teach Alana Chinese characters using textbooks they brought from China. Mr Tang told me that Alana was already
studying at a second grade level in Chinese, and could read many words.
They followed the textbook instructions and other Chinese literacy instruction methods, with which they were familiar, such as copying. Mr Tang
explained that,
We’re not as strict with her as we were in China. We used to ask her to copy a
lot, but now we’re here in Canada, and we still require her to finish all the
assignments, and learn more new words, and that’s OK. But we were not as
demanding as we were in China, strictly monitoring her progress everyday.
In March 2001, Alana told me in Chinese that her mother changed her
schedule so that she came home from work at around 4 pm to teach her
Chinese reading and writing. ‘I have Chinese homework. I also have to
practice the piano. Chinese is hard’. Though Alana thought it was hard to
learn Chinese, she enjoyed reading Chinese story books that her parents
brought for her from China and was very proud of her Chinese reading
ability. The home reading records (see Figure 2) showed that she read
widely and was a sophisticated and avid reader in Chinese.
Mr and Mrs Tang taught Alana not only Chinese at home but also math.
Like many new Chinese immigrants, they quickly learned from their son’s
seventh grade experience that math in Canadian schools was three years
behind schools in China. Mr Tang commented that,‘what is taught in eighth
grade math is the fifth grade level in China’. And, like many parents from
China, they already used Chinese textbooks to teach Alana math, and she
had already finished working on the first grade math textbook.
Although the Tangs could not understand much English, they tried their
best to monitor Alana’s progress by listening to her talk about school. They
noticed that Alana’s English had improved and they were pleased that she
was making progress, so they asked some of their friends about Alana’s
progress in English. Mr Tang observed that:
One year ago when I was worried about my daughter’s progress in English, one
of my friends told me that I needed not to worry about that and that my
daughter would catch up in a couple of years. I have asked many friends, not
just one, and they all had this experience. So with Alana, if her teacher did not
say she was not doing well, I would just pay some attention to her report card.
If one area is really bad or not meeting the standards, I will be very worried. I
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Figure 2 A sample of Alana’s home reading record
feel that she is doing OK, and she is also slowly making progress as my friends
have predicted.
Mr Tang felt that as long as his children were performing well in school
without failing any subjects, he did not need to communicate with the
teachers. For example, although he did not like it that the school emphasized drawing, he chose to adjust at home rather than talk to the teacher
about it,‘They do draw too much at school, so at home we emphasize more
academic aspects’.
Kevin Ma’s experiences: ‘he will learn it when he gets older’
Six-year-old Kevin was the second child in his family. He had a 15-year-old
brother who was in the ninth grade in a secondary school. His brother,
who came to Canada when he was nine, was struggling with English
reading and writing, and because of his English he also fell behind in other
core subjects, such as math and science. Since he was born and schooled
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in Canada, his parents hoped that Kevin would not have difficulty with
English reading and writing. Kevin appeared to be nervous both at home
and in school. Mrs Haines noted that, ‘he walked like a robot’ and often
murmured unintelligible words to himself.
Kevin’s parents were in the trading business when they were in Hong
Kong, and became investors after immigrating to Canada in 1994. They
were educated in Hong Kong; his father had a secondary school education,
while his mother had a diploma from a polytechnic institute. Mr Ma
worked from home and took care of the two children while Mrs Ma was a
sales representative in a telecommunication company whose work was very
busy. Both of them were trilingual Mandarin, Cantonese, and English
speakers, and they used more Cantonese and English at home. Although
they did not have much time to read for pleasure, they rarely missed their
daily reading of the Chinese newspaper. They seldom wrote in Chinese or
English, except for some emails to their parents in Hong Kong.
Different from the Chans and the Tangs, Mr Ma had a negative perception of Canadian society. He believed that discrimination was very much
alive in society, ‘There’s a defense in the mainstream community’ against
the Chinese community and ‘the Asians don’t belong to the mainstream
society, and they don’t get the same pay as them’. He hoped that through
education and learning better English, things would change for the better
for them in the future:‘For the next generation who will be born here, they
will not allow the situation to continue’. Mr Ma’s perception of the mainstream society made him worry about his children’s future advancement in
the Canadian society. His concerns were evident in his strong support in
Kevin’s English literacy development and his non-proactive attitude toward
his Chinese use and learning at home.
Kevin’s home literacy practices Mr and Mrs Ma and Kevin’s brother all
spoke Cantonese to Kevin though he spoke only English to them at home.
Mr Ma noted that Kevin could speak Cantonese, but just did not want to,
‘He’s used to English . . . I speak to him in Cantonese, but he will answer
me only in English’. He speculated that Kevin’s choice of language at home
might be related to his media exposure at home,‘Maybe because he seldom
watches Chinese TV programs. He likes to watch English ones and he is used
to it and English has become his language’.
Indeed, Kevin’s home literacy practices included mostly watching English
cartoons, playing video games, and reading English books. He enjoyed
watching a variety of cartoons, such as Pokémon and Digimon on several
children’s channels. Mr Ma also took Kevin to the public library once a week
to borrow videos and CD games such as Roman Empire and Asian Empire. He
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believed that these games were helpful for Kevin to learn about Western and
Eastern history, such as the Roman Empire and ancient Egypt.
After several hours of TV watching and game playing, Kevin spent most
of his spare time reading English books at home. He read at least one book
each day before going to bed. He read not only information books but also
short stories his parents borrowed for him from the public library and
bought for him from bookstores. He usually read by himself and constantly
asked his parents questions about the readings, many of which his parents
were often unable to answer. ‘Sometimes, he asked too many questions
when he read’, Mr Ma noted. For example, he asked many questions about
the sun and the stars when reading about the solar system in his favorite
book, Youth World Encyclopedia.
Over the course of the research, his home reading record suggested that
he had read over 100 books and many of them were collections of stories
or chapter books, such as 50 Favorite Stories, 50 Bedtime Stories, Volcano, and Haunted
House. Kevin not only read books, he also drew pictures or wrote about what
he read. For example, he read about the solar system, and he drew and
wrote about astronauts in space: ‘Astronauts can and up and down orbit
solar system. [Astronauts can go up and down the Orbit in the Solar
System]’.
Although Kevin was clearly a good reader, he was struggling with
writing, particularly printing and spelling. He seemed to lack coordination of his small motor skills. At the beginning of the school year, his
printing was unreadable. He was unable to spell many simple words even
if he could read them and recognize them while reading. For example,
he was able to read the words ‘like’, ‘was’, and ‘Riverview’, but he was
not able to spell them. Although Mr Ma was aware that Kevin’s printing
skills were problematic, he was not overly worried. He believed that
different children had different developmental stages and as Kevin grew
older, he would be able to better control the use of his muscles, and
therefore his printing would be OK. After all, he had just started school
as a first grader.
Mrs Ma was more concerned about Kevin’s expressive writing. She noted
that although Kevin could read and comprehend what he read, he could
not express his understanding through writing. In order to foster Kevin’s
writing, Mr Ma encouraged Kevin to write emails in English to his grandparents in Hong Kong. Although it was very simple, Mr Ma believed that it
would be a very nice way to practice writing at home. Mr Ma hoped that
Kevin would not have similar problems as his brother Rob. Rob was in ninth
grade and was struggling with reading and writing, relying on tutors and
extra classes so that he would be able to get into one of the universities in
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the city when he graduated. If Kevin would not be able to improve his
writing, they would have to send him for tutoring as well.
Mr Ma was supportive of Kevin’s reading and writing in English, but took
a more relaxed attitude toward Kevin’s Chinese development. He did not
believe that they should ‘require kids to grasp both cultures when they are
young. They can learn them when they get older’. With Kevin’s Chinese
development, his father relied mostly on Chinese heritage language school.
He enrolled Kevin in the Saturday Chinese School for two and a half hours
every week to study Chinese reading and writing. His hope was that Kevin’s
Chinese would reach to the level where he could read a Chinese newspaper,
‘I told them that there were at most 2,000 to 3,000 Chinese characters in
the newspapers. If they’re under some guidance, they will grasp it’.
However, Kevin has been going to the school for a year and had made
little progress in Chinese reading and writing. In fact, he disliked going to
the Chinese school, as Mr Ma explained: ‘For the Chinese school is not like
his school where he can play a lot. In Chinese school, he has to sit there
for two and a half hours. He once asked me why there was no playground
in the Chinese school’. Mr Ma also understood that it was hard for Kevin
to learn to read and write Chinese because of the limited time he put into
the studying language, as he had only two and a half hours of instruction
from the Chinese school a week. However, Mr Ma was very optimistic about
Kevin’s attitude toward Chinese; he believed that he would choose to speak
it when he got older.
Discussion
The children’s language choices and patterns of use in the home milieu is
a dynamic process that shapes their individual development of biliteracy
within their particular learning contexts. All three families expected their
children to become biliterate and multilingual, but the three children
varied in degree and consistency in achieving the balance between the use
and development of the different languages and literacies at home, reflecting distinctly different experiences in their homes. Anthony Chan’s family
resigned themselves to the inevitable dominance of English at home; Alana
Tang’s family tried to maintain her continued development in Chinese
literacy, while Kevin Ma’s family resorted to his own choice of language.
The portraits of the three focal children’s home practices in two literacies
and three languages demonstrate that the children’s language use and
learning are inextricable from their social contexts and are related to a
multitude of competing factors from home, school, and society (Dagenais
and Day, 1999).
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Factors from the home context
The three children’s diverse experiences suggest that the home context is a
crucial environment for the success or failure of biliteracy development. All
three children came from high SES homes, lived in a community with high
ethno-linguistic vitality where Chinese was highly valued, and were
exposed to, and socialized into, two literacies and three languages.
However, their experiences of becoming biliterate and multilingual varied
widely according to parental attitudes and the degree and direction of
parental support.
For Anthony and Kevin, though they regularly attended the weekend
heritage language schools, their lack of heritage language use in home (and
school) and their resistant attitude toward using it in different social
settings suggested a serious imbalance in their abilities and interests in the
two languages. As they learnt to read and write in English with increasing
proficiency and use, they were slipping into being monolingual English
users. In contrast, Alana did not attend the weekend language school, but
her parents acted as Chinese literacy teachers and enforced not only her oral
Chinese use but also her continued reading and writing in Chinese at home.
Alana’s sophisticated Chinese reading records and her ability to code-switch
in Mandarin, Cantonese, and English in school suggested that she was
becoming biliterate and trilingual in the truest sense.
The children’s divergent paths of language and literacy development are
closely related to their parents’ perception of the host society as well as the
pragmatic and symbolic values they ascribed to the languages (Schecter and
Bayley, 2002). For Anthony’s parents, their feeling as sojourners or guests
in Canada motivated them to adapt their home literacy practices to those
of the mainstream school. In order for him to learn English, they decided
to speak English only to Anthony at home when he entered first grade.
Kevin’s parents, who perceived racial discrimination as barriers to their
children’s advancement, invested more efforts in their children’s English
development and their expectations of their children’s Chinese learning
seemed to be low. In contrast, Alana’s parents viewed their status as assets
to Canadian society, attributed much more significance to Chinese language
and culture in that society, and therefore invested much time and effort in
Alana’s Chinese reading and writing development and in promoting her
Chinese use at home.
Another aspect of the symbolic value that the parents attributed to the
languages is related to the role they perceived the heritage language played
in their children’s English learning. Anthony’s parents believed that
Chinese learning was a hindrance to his English development and therefore decided to speak English rather than Chinese to him at home. Kevin’s
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parents did not believe that young children could acquire two languages
and cultures at the same time, and therefore took a non-proactive stance
toward Kevin’s Chinese development and left the choice to up to him.
Alana’s parents, in turn, believed that learning Chinese would enhance her
English learning, and therefore actively promoted her biliteracy development. Learning from his friends, Mr Tang realized the importance of the
parents’ role in emphasizing Chinese at home as Alana made progress with
her English abilities.
Another difference among the families is that Anthony’s and Kevin’s
parents were highly literate in English and their children’s preference for
English would not affect their communication, while Alana’s parents were
not able to speak the language. For them, Chinese maintenance at home
was a necessary and important means for enhancing intergenerational
communications and relationships and for keeping their cultural
traditions.
The different values that the parents attached to English and Chinese were
reflected in the kinds of support they provided to maintain Chinese at
home. Anthony’s parents even tried to enforce Chinese-only days at home,
hoping to rekindle his interest in Chinese. However, the earlier period of
‘benevolent neglect’ of Anthony’s Chinese use upon his entry into grade
one had molded his English monolingual orientation. Kevin’s parents did
not provide any extra support for his Chinese learning except for the
weekend Chinese language school.They hoped that as Kevin grew older, he
would come to realize the importance of Chinese and start to use it one
day. In sharp contrast, Alana’s parents provided different resources to
facilitate her Chinese language development: they read Chinese books to
her every day, taught her Chinese writing and math using Chinese textbooks, and enforced a Chinese-only environment at home. The differences
in what the parents did to support Chinese learning suggest that to foster
biliteracy, it is not enough for parents to simply enforce children’s oral first
language use at home; rather, they also need to engage children in literacy
related activities in the first language in the home milieu.
However, that Kevin and Anthony, who were born in Canada and whose
parents were multilingual and biliterate, did not develop biliteracy, while
Alana, who was born in China and lived in a mostly Chinese speaking
household, managed to develop biliteracy is worth noting here. From a
‘recognition’ perspective, parents’ languages and cultures are resources that
should be utilized in fostering intergenerational biliteracy development in
school (Vásquez et al., 1994). For Kevin and Anthony, their parents’
linguistic resources were not fully utilized due to parental misconceptions
about the roles of the two languages in their children’s English literacy
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development. In Anthony’s case, his parents’ fear of Chinese interference,
which might result in his learning of ‘Chinglish’, further prevented them
from using their own linguistic resources to foster Anthony’s biliteracy
development.
School factors
Although this study focused on the home contexts of biliteracy development, the children’s diverse experiences also revealed the impact of
powerful institutions outside the home. These powerful institutions
included the Chinese heritage language schools and the mainstream public
schools that the children attended. In terms of the impact of heritage
language schools, as evident in both Anthony’s and Kevin’s experiences,
they both disliked the instruction at the school. As Kevin’s father observed,
the rigidity of instructional methods that characterized Chinese instruction
may have contributed to the children’s reluctance and lack of interest in
learning the language.
In terms of the mainstream public schools, how or whether they
validate the students’ first language and culture matters as schools’
language policies often result in students’ negative attitudes toward their
first language and culture and their rapid language shift to English (G. Li,
2002, 2006; Valdés, 2001). The ‘English-only’ policy enforced in the
mainstream school may have contributed to the children’s negative
perceptions of the Chinese language and the meaning of being Chinese,
especially for children like Anthony and Kevin whose families’ attitudes
and actions inevitably validated similar messages from the public schools
and the wider society. For example, the message that Chinese is not valued
or welcomed in school may lead to Anthony’s resistant attitude toward
Chinese and therefore his pretense that he did not know any Chinese.
Similarly, Kevin never tried to speak in Chinese or acknowledge his ability
to understand Chinese and chose English as his language. As Wong
Fillmore (2000) described,
Children in such situations, irrespective of background or age, are quick to see
that language is a social barrier, and the only way to gain access to the social
world of the school is to learn English. The problem is that they also come to
believe that the language they already know, the one spoken at home by their
families, is the cause of the barrier to participation, inclusion, and social acceptance. They quickly discover that in the social world of the school, English is
the only language that is acceptable. The message they get is this: ‘The home
language is nothing: it has no value at all.’ If they want to be fully accepted,
children come to believe that they must disavow the low status language spoken
at home. (Wong Fillmore, 2000: 207–8)
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The influence of the media
Some scholars (e.g. Dyson, 1997) have analyzed the role of the media in
young children’s school work, but few have examined the influence of the
media on immigrant students’ language choice and patterns of use at home.
The three children’s home literacy experiences suggested important
influences of the media in shaping their literate lives, particularly their
language preferences. As evident in the children’s experiences, English
cartoons (and video games) were a significant part of their everyday lives
and exposure to English at home. As Dyson (1997) indicates, children are
active consumers and interpreters of the media, which in turn influences
the children’s social identification, social conflicts, and social interactions,
and makes salient new kinds of literacy choices and newly imagined ways
of depicting human relationships. The paramount importance of the
English media in the children’s lives and the lack of such exposure in
Chinese definitely contributed to the children’s preference for English,
especially to those like Anthony and Kevin whose parents also ascribed
more significance to English at home.
The linguistic factor?
This study did not focus on the impact of the differences in the Chinese
and English orthographic systems on the children’s biliteracy development.
However, that the children all complained about the difficulty of
learning/writing Chinese, may suggest that its orthographic system is a
factor in hindering the children’s motivation to learn the language. The
distinct features of the Chinese language and writing system as a logographic language have led to some differences in how reading works in
Chinese compared to English. In learning to read an alphabetic writing
system such as English, early emphasis is usually placed on phonological
processing skills. In contrast, early Chinese reading emphasizes the importance of a fully specified orthographic processing prior to the activation of
phonological and meaning information in reading Chinese (Wang et al.,
2005). Wang et al. also conclude that though there are certain levels of
phonological transfer, because of the distinct writing systems, it is difficult
for children to transfer orthographic skills from Chinese to English or vice
versa. Therefore, for the Chinese children to develop biliteracy, they need
to master the language-specific orthographic skills in learning to read and
write in the two languages in addition to acquiring the spoken forms of
the languages. Since the Chinese orthographic system is independent from
its linguistic representation of speech, the pin yin system, it may further
create difficulty in the children’s Chinese learning. The linguistic factor,
together with the pedagogical factor discussed earlier, suggests that more
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research on the disparate impact of the linguistic nature of the Chinese
language and its instruction is needed to better understand issues that may
hinder Chinese children’s biliteracy development.
Conclusion
A multitude of factors from different sources shape the children’s language
and literacy practices at home. As evident in the children’s divergent paths
to becoming biliterate, their continued use and learning of the heritage
language at home is critical for its maintenance and achieving a balance in
their abilities and interests in the two languages. Parents’ perceptions of
their minority status in the host society, as well as their attitudes toward,
and proficiencies in, the two languages, can also play significant roles in
shaping their supporting efforts and use of resources at home, and hence,
their children’s success or failure in becoming biliterate and multilingual.
Several school and societal factors, such as the quality of instruction in the
heritage language schools, language policies in the mainstream schools, and
the media, also played an important role in influencing the children’s
language choices and patterns of use at home.
These varied factors suggest that helping children become biliterate and
multilingual is a challenging task that requires concerning efforts between
parents, public schools, and community organizations. It is necessary for
parents to examine their own beliefs and practices at home and become
aware of the importance of their role in supporting biliteracy development.
They need not only to promote heritage language use but also to employ
a variety of strategies to ensure the children’s continued development in
reading and writing their first language at home.
Public schools need to establish bilingual policies that allow learners to
use both English and heritage languages in school settings. In the context
of high ethno-linguistic concentration, schools can also consider offering
Chinese/English bilingual programs. Lastly, Chinese heritage language
schools can play a more important role in the children’s biliteracy development by re-examining their curriculum and methods of instruction so that
they are more in concert with children’s learning interests and developmental needs. Such broad-based efforts will benefit not only the immigrant
children, their families, and ethnic communities, but also the nation as a
whole by preserving the language resources of the country.
Notes
1. The Chinese language has one written system but many dialects. Mandarin is the
official language/dialect taught in schools and used in all public affairs, while
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Cantonese is one of the many dialects spoken by people from southern China,
especially in regions such as Canton and Hong Kong.
2. Chinglish, a portmanteau of the words Chinese and English, is a term used to
describe poor or ‘broken’ English employed by native Chinese speakers. It is a
mixture of Chinese and English words, either using the Chinese grammar or the
English grammar (e.g. ‘welcome to take my taxi’). In English learning, Chinglish is
viewed as undesirable.
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Correspondence to:
guofang li, Department of Teacher Education, Michigan State University, 350
Erikson Hall, East Lansing, MI 48824, USA. [email: [email protected]]
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