Learning Chinese in Diasporic Communities
Many pathways to being Chinese
Editors
| University of Reading
| University of Edinburgh
This book brings together new theoretical perspectives and bilingual education models from different sociopolitical and cultural contexts across the globe in order to address the importance of sociocultural, educational and linguistic environments that create, enhance or limit the ways in which diasporic children and young people acquire the ‘Chinese’ language. The chapters present a variety of research-based studies on Chinese heritage language education and bilingual education drawing on detailed investigations of formal and informal educational input including language socialization in families, community heritage language schools and government sponsored educational institutions. Exploring the many pathways of learning ‘Chinese’ and being ‘Chinese’, this volume also examines the complex nature of language acquisition and development, involving language attitudes and ideologies as well as linguistic practices and identity formation. Learning Chinese in Diasporic Communities is intended for researchers, teacher-educators, students and practitioners in the fields of Chinese language education and bilingual education and more broadly those concerned with language policy studies and sociolinguistics.
[AILA Applied Linguistics Series, 12] 2014. xv, 243 pp.
Publishing status: Available
© John Benjamins Publishing Company
Table of Contents
Preface
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vii–viii
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Contributors
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ix–xii
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List of figures
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xiii–xiv
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List of tables
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xv–xvi
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1–10
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Part I. Family socialization patterns in language learning and literacy practices
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13–34
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35–56
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Part II. Complementary/heritage Chinese schools in diasporas
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59–80
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81–96
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97–116
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117–136
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Part III. Bilingual Chinese educational models
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139–158
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159–180
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181–200
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Part IV. Chinese language, culture and identity
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203–218
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219–238
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Index
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239–244
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“This book makes a solid and sustained contribution to not only the burgeoning literature about Chinese as a global language but also our general understanding of linguistic, cultural and educational development in an increasingly multilingual world. Bringing together perspectives from an array of researchers from Asia, Europe, North America and Australia, it sheds new light on the creative and complex process whereby the Chinese language is used, taught, acquired, inherited and maintained in a wide range of socio-cultural-historical contexts. It advances our knowledge of the interaction between transnational migrations on the one hand, and language, identity, family dynamics, formal education, policy and politics on the other. It succeeds in striking a balance between rigor in research and richness in recounting.”
Agnes He, Stony Brook University
“This book is a very welcome antidote and corrective to recent writing and policy development in response to the rise of economic power of the People’s Republic of China that neglects the large number of geographically dispersed and socio-culturally diverse people who are the speakers of Chinese. In too many societies Chinese speakers are positioned as distant interlocutors to be encountered on foreign travel to conduct business in an admittedly very large but single socio-political entity. But Chinese is a living language of communities all across the world, one of its distinguishing features being the diaspora with its many varieties held together by common writing and some norms of origin, shared tradition and common values. In this diaspora there is also a multiplicity of socio-political realities, independent statehood, transitional autonomies of various degrees and both large and very small immigrant statuses. The authors and editors of this fine collection track the array of family socialisation patterns, complementary/heritage language schooling, diverse models of bilingualism and complex configurations of identity and culture that characterise the Sinophone world, and expand our sense of what it means to say “Chinese” and mean either people, language or culture. This is an important service to scholarship, to good teaching focused on learner needs and to new and more sophisticated language education policies adapted to the trans-national and diasporic realities of languages that have more than states behind them.”
Joseph Lo Bianco, The University of Melbourne
Cited by
Cited by other publications
Dong, Jie
Duff, Patricia & Liam Doherty
Duff, Patricia A.
Díaz, Adriana Raquel
Ganassin, Sara
Ganassin, Sara & Prue Holmes
Koh, Sin Yee, Chang-Yau Hoon & Noor Azam Haji-Othman
Locher-Lo, Caroline C. H.
Wang, Weihong & Xiao Lan Curdt-Christiansen
Xu, Jianwei & Hui Huang
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 29 december 2020. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.
Subjects
Linguistics
BIC Subject: CFDC – Language acquisition
BISAC Subject: LAN009000 – LANGUAGE ARTS & DISCIPLINES / Linguistics / General