Four' in Chinese, You Will Find
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“WHEN YOU WRITE ‘FOUR’ IN CHINESE, YOU WILL FIND TWO ‘J’S’ IN IT”: A CASE STUDY OF FOUR CHILDREN LEARNING TO BE LITERATE IN ALPHABETIC AND NON-ALPHABETIC PRINT Mei-Yu Lu Submitted to the faculty of the University Graduate School in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Language Education Department Indiana University September 2006 Accepted by the Graduate Faculty, Indiana University, in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Doctoral Committee ____________________________ Jerome C. Harste, Ph. D. (Chair) ____________________________ Carolyn L. Burke, Ed. D ____________________________ Virginia A. Woodward, Ed. D. ____________________________ Linda Mabry, Ph. D. Date of Oral Examination – June 7, 2006 ii Acknowledgment To embark on a personal, professional, and academic journey without companions is a very lonely process. I was fortunately enough that many wonderful people traveled with me at different stages of this “dissertating” process and for different durations of time. Each of them shared with me different ways of seeing and understanding the world, and it was through such a process this inquiry takes shape and is born. I have many people to thank and some of them I cannot even mention their names in order to protect their privacy. I would like to thank Aileen, Rosan, Maya, Lucian, and their families for inviting me into their literacy learning processes and providing me with plentiful language stories, from which I learned valuable literacy lessons. I have felt that I am not only the teacher of these children, but also a student who have learned tremendously from them. Without them, this research would be impossible. The same thank-you also goes to my dissertation committee: Dr. Harste, Dr. Burke, Dr. Mabry, and Dr. Woodward. Dr. Harste’s multiple ways of understanding literacy allows me to re-examine and re-define what it means to be literate, and his belief in inquiry-based learning also helps me find a research program which is worthy of my life-long pursuit. Conversations with Dr. Burke have always been one thing I look forward to, for I am intellectually challenged, yet respected as a colleague. The different perspectives she provides me have helped me build a solid theoretical foundation in literacy education and learning. Dr. Mabry’s expertise in qualitative research and case study helps me develop into a competent researcher and a better human being. Without her patience and guidance, I would not be able to analyze all data I gathered for this research project. An early childhood professor, Dr. Woodward has been generously in sharing with me her expertise in children’s language development, as well as her insights into children’s literacy education. These enable me to see children’s language and literacy learning in a new light. My two dear friends, Manjari Singh and Karen Ngeow also deserve many thanks from the bottom of my heart. They have literarily held my hands and walked with me through this process—spending hours editing my drafts several times, listening to some of my “half-baked” theories, questioning my assertions, providing financial support, feeding me, and tolerating my non-research related talk about gardening and pottery when I was stressed out during the writing process. I also want to say “thank you” to Steve Stroup (a.k.a. Laoban), who read my earlier drafts many times and provided me with encouragement and emotional supports. I would also like to thank Mardziah Hayati Abdullah and Karen Grady for their friendship and brainstorming during my early stage of writing, as well as Elise Damerey and Karen Hoffmann, two wonderful tutors at the Writing Tutorial Center at the Indiana University who had read my earlier drafts and provided me with feedback in my writing. My appreciation also goes to my friends in the former ERIC Clearinghouse on Reading, English, and Communication: Dr. Carl Smith, Andy Wiseman, Wei Tu, Chia-Hui Lin, Ping-Yun Sun, and Rohany Nayan. Their ii friendship, encouragement, and willingness to help me in anyway they could make this process less bumpy. Last, but not the least, I would like to thank my family, for they have provided unconditional love, support, and everything I need to success in completing my PhD. They believe I can make it. iii Mei-Yu Lu “WHEN YOU WRITE ‘FOUR’ IN CHINESE, YOU WILL FIND TWO ‘J’S’ IN IT”: A CASE STUDY OF FOUR CHILDREN LEARNING TO BE LITERATE IN ALPHABETIC AND NON-ALPHABETIC PRINTS Framed within sociocultural, sociopsycholinguistic, and socio-semiotic views of language and literacy learning, I employed a qualitative case study approach to examine the nature of bilingual and biliteracy learning process of four young ethnic Chinese children living in a community where mainstream American culture and English predominated. I used observations, interviews, and analysis of documents to collect data over a 3.5-year period at a community- based, weekend mother tongue (Chinese) class where I was also the teacher of my research participants. A constant comparison approach was used to analyze and interpret the data gathered. Because of their heritage and life experiences, these children had access to two sets of cultural and semiotic resources in both minority (home and the weekend mother tongue school) and dominant (community where they lived and school they attended daily) sociocultural contexts. Findings from this research revealed that meaning making began when these children responded to existing or created texts while involved in semiotic engagements, and through this process iv these young learners acquired culturally and semiotically specific knowledge. Experiences with and exposure to these two sets of specifics enabled children to transfer knowledge they acquired in one context to the other, as well as to transmediate between sign systems across sociocultural borders. Finally, within the context of the classroom, these children also experimented with different ways of meaning making, drawing knowledge they possessed from both contexts to create new meaning, from which new specifics were generated. _____________________________________________ _____________________________________________ _____________________________________________ _____________________________________________ v TABLE OF CONTENTS CHAPTER 1: The Learner, the Teacher, and the Researcher………………..1 One Learner, Two languages, and Three Literacy Stories…….….……….1 Xiao-Gang, Taiwan, 1974…………………………………………1 Kaohsiung, Taiwan, 1979-1982…………………………………...1 Iowa City, Iowa, USA, 1991-1995………………………………..3 The Teacher and the Sign Systems………………………………………..6 Becoming a Researcher……………………………………………………8 My Research Questions…………………………………………………...9 Issues in Language and Literacy Learning……..……………..…………10 Mother Tongue vs. Mother’s Tongue…….……………………...11 Second Language vs. Secondary Language……………………...15 Mother Tongue Learning and Language Minority Children…….19 The Guiding Framework…………………………………………………23 Language and Literacy Learning in Socio-cultural Contexts…....24 Semiotic View of Language and Literacy Learning……………..25 Bilingual and Biliteracy Development from a Sociopsycholinguistic Perspective.……………….….…..27 CHAPTER 2: The Learners and the Learning Context, and The Researchers and the Research Process…………………………………………..…..31 The Community: Centreton…………………………...…………………34 Centreton Chinese School………………………………………………..35 The Class…………………………………………………………………37 The Children in the Classroom…………………………………..42 The Journey: A Chronology of the Fieldwork Experience..……………..53 Pre-Field Entry—My Acquaintance with the Focal Children.......55 Aileen…………………………………………………….59 Rosan.…………………………………………………….63 Maya...…………………………………………………...67 Lucian……………………………………………………72 Entry into the Field………………………………………………76 Data Collection………………………………………………..…80 Observations..……………………………………………82 Interviews………………………………………………..84 Documents/Artifacts……………………………………..86 Data Analysis: The Process and Procedure……………………...92 CHAPTER 3: Socialization through Language and Language through Socialization: What “My Uncle Is a Pig” Means..……………………99 Defining Culture………………………………………………..………103 Approaches to the Study of Culture…………………………….103 My Definition of Culture……………………………………….107 Culture and Child Development………………………………..108 Language Learning in Socio-cultural Context………………………….112 Family: Where Language and Literacy Learning Begins………113 Language and Literacy Learning in Communities……………...113 vi Language and Literacy Learning Among Linguistic Minority Children……………………………………...………….115 Chinese Language and Culture…………………………………………117 Chinese Language and Literacy Practices……………………...118 Chinese Culture Consideration…………………………………122 Culture, Language, and Child Socialization………………..…………..125 Developing an Identity: What’s in a Name...……………....…...128 Kinship Terms and Human Relationships: How You Address People …...…………………………………….138 Analyzing, Reasoning, and Meaning Constructing: Linguistic Thinking and Cultural Values…………………………..152 Summary: Language through Socialization and Socialization through Language………………………………………………………..177 Development of Identities...…………………………………….178 Development of Interpersonal Relationships……………….…..178 Roles of Linguistic and Cultural Specifics in Thinking and Learning……………………………………………179 CHAPTER 4: The Interplay Between First and Second Language: When You Write “Four” in Chinese, You Will Find Two “J’s” in It……..185 Bilingual and Biliteracy Learning: A Review of Relevant Literature….188 Psychological Foundation of Language