Chinese American children's bilingual and biliteracy development in heritage language and public schools.

摘要

Framed by sociocultural theory and the continua model of biliteracy, this study investigated four Chinese American immigrant children's bilingual-biliteracy development in their heritage language and public schools in an urban city of South Texas, U.S. The purpose of this study was threefold, exploring (1) what literacy instruction the focal children are exposed in their public and Chinese heritage language schools; (2) how the children read and write in English and Chinese, and what strategies, if any, appear to transfer across the two languages (3) how biliteracy play a role in the children's lives. I adhered to the qualitative approach, engaging in participant observation in classrooms across languages, home visits, interviews, and student work collection. Additionally, I adapted think-aloud tasks to monitor the children's reading comprehension and reading strategies applied in Chinese and English readings. Lastly, I utilized a wordless-picture story oral-narrative task to analyze their oral narrative skills in Chinese and English. The findings indicate that literacy instruction that the focal children have received across languages and contexts paves a possible path to biliteracy development and also draws attention to the needs to bridge community-based heritage language education with public education. Reading and writing strategies and background knowledge were transferred in literacy practices to enhance understanding across languages. Additionally, the children had limited opportunities to use Chinese language/literacy outside of their CHL schools. Meanwhile, they also had relatively limited opportunities to contact English language and mainstream culture; but, their learning needs have been overlooked by their public school teachers.