Converging Worlds: Play, Literacy, and Culture in Early Childhood

Abstract

■ This qualitative case study explores the interrelations between play, literacy, and culture by closely examining the home play activities of Letitia, a 5-year-old Chinese Canadian girl. Letitia is growing up in a multilingual, multiliterate family of three children. She speaks Chao Chiu, her first language, and English at home, is learning Mandarin in kindergarten, and took Cantonese lessons when younger. Her parents, who immigrated to Canada from Vietnam, are literate in five languages, provide a rich home literacy learning environment, and have high expectations for their child's language and literacy learning in both the short and long term. Letitia, described as outgoing, articulate, ... and very interested in books and stories (p. 5), was just starting kindergarten when the study began. Thus, the author could observe her during her transition from home to school literacy, a critical research area given the widely recognized need for bridging the two literacy environments, particularly for multilingual children. The author visited Letitia in her home weekly for more than a year, playing the dual role of researcher and participant in the child's play and allowing her to direct and control the play to help overcome the obvious imbalance in power relations. Letitia welcomed the researcher's visits, and over time, the two developed a close and trusting relationship, placing the researcher in an especially favorable position for conducting her research and coming to understand how the child used play to express her understandings of self, literacy, and the world around her. The author draws on a variety of theoretical perspectives to frame the research, including emergent literacy and social constructivism and positioning theory on the situated and culturally specific nature of literacy learning and its embeddedness in power relations and identity construction. The author joins these perspectives with observations on the relations between play and literacy, which view play as an arena for identity construction and as a form of narrative or oral storytelling. Storytelling provides a particularly rich and unique analytical lens, allowing the author to examine the play episodes as literary and social texts and to explore play, literacy, and culture as an integrated whole rather than separately, as is commonly the case. Two introductory chapters (chapters 1 and 2) discuss the theoretical and methodological perspectives that frame the work and provide indepth information on Letitia's family and home context, gleaned from observations, conversations, and the close relationships established with family members. A selection of 10 of Letitia's play narratives, reflecting the two predominant play themes, home and school, are