A Visual Dialectical Methodology: Using a Cultural-Historical Analysis to Unearth the Family Strategies in Children’s Bilingual Heritage Language Development

Abstract

Recently there has been an increasing emphasis on researching social and cultural sources in bilingual language development. Video has become the standard data collection tool for studies of human interaction in the naturalist context, as video records provide data for careful analyses and precise conclusions in educational language research (Barron 2007; Flewitt 2006). However, theoretical and methodological issues related to video recording have not yet received a great deal of attention in bilingual language development literature. This chapter focuses on how visual data supports cultural-historical analysis when determining family pedagogy in supporting children’s bilingual heritage language development. This chapter discusses the methodological dilemmas faced in data generation, transcription and analysis of dynamic visual data, which gives new insights into everyday family interactions and practices. Drawing on visual data from a cultural-historical case study of the shared book reading practices of a Chinese-Australian immigrant family, this chapter argues that visual data is an effective methodological tool to understand family pedagogy, by investigating the interactions between parents and children previously unaccounted for in early year’s child development research. It concludes that visual methodology allows cultural-historical researchers to understand child development within their everyday family practices.