The Hundred Languages of Children on the Move: Digital technologies & transnational childhoods
Dr Sumin Zhao, University of Edinburgh
12-1.30pm, Friday 29th March, Paterson's Land room 1.18, Moray House School of Education, Holyrood Road, EH88AQ
Abstract
There are a growing number of young children around the globe whose lives now move across the boundaries between nations, languages and cultures. This new phenomenon – childhood on the move – is shaped by the interaction of two types of mobility, population and technologies (mobile devices and applications). The literacy practices of these typically multilingual children often transgress the traditional boundaries of time and space and take place in multiple transnational sites. In this talk, I explore the role mobile technologies play in the literacy practices of young children from immigrant and expatriate families, drawing on two projects I have worked on in the past four years. The first project explored the use of social media apps (WeChat) for heritage language learning by children from Chinese-speaking families in London, while the second looked at the use of book apps for English language learning by multilingual children in an international school in provincial Denmark. The talk is organised loosely into two parts. In the first part, I will illustrate the “semiotic resourcefulness” (Mavers, 2009) of young children—the creative way in which children explore various multimodal resources available in the technological interface in their learning and communication. I will then contrast children’s “semiotic resourcefulness” with the paradoxical lack of digital resources in their education, highlighting the gaps between the design and the distribution of apps, the school curriculum and classroom practices, and the everyday reality of migrant children. Throughout the talk, I will also discuss the methodological challenges for researching children on the move.
Biography
Dr Sumin Zhao is a lecturer in Discourse Analysis at University of Edinburgh. Sumin received her academic training as a text linguist in the Hallidayan tradition at the University of Sydney. Her areas of expertise include Discourse Analysis (multimodal & critical), Social Semiotics, and Systemic Functional Grammar. Prior to joining Edinburgh, Sumin held the Carlsberg Distinguished Postdoctoral Research Fellowship at the University of Southern Denmark (2016-2018) and the Chancellor's Postdoctoral Research Fellowship at the University of Technology Sydney (2013-2016). Sumin was a visiting research associate at UCL Institute of Education in 2015 and 2016.