Recycling Chinese Heritage Cultural and Linguistic Learning Opportunities Through Translanguaging and Translation Practices with Emergent Bilingual Children

This chapter focuses on a virtual book club with young Chinese emergent bilinguals and parents interested in maintaining cultural and linguistic ties to their heritage. The qualitative research study spanned a six-month period in which families met with the three authors once per week. A translanguaging framework encompasses the multiple semiotic systems used by the teacher, students, and parents to make sense of interactions centered around building an understanding of Chinese culture while experimenting with the Chinese and English languages. The data collected included transcripts of video segments and children’s work samples. A multimodal analysis was conducted to closely examine how translanguaging, translation, and cultural images and stories supported heritage language learning. The findings include discussing recycled learning opportunities, including cultural identities, exposure to cultural artifacts or images, opportunities to write Chinese characters, listening to bilingual stories, book discussions across languages, and students’ creation of multimodal responses to stories.