Young Children’s Reading Experiences in an Online Family Book Club Centered on Multimodal Responses

This ethnographic case study explored Chinese American children’s heritage language and culture learning and their multimodal responses to culturally relevant picture books. I focus on six Chinese American families who participated in an online family book club. The children were between four and six years old. In each session, I first introduced Chinese characters or cultural traditions related to the book, and then had an interactive read aloud of a culturally relevant picture book. The children discussed the book with one parent and came up with a question and a connection. The children then responded to the book through creating multimodal artifacts. The data included video-recordings of the whole group activities, audio-recordings of the family’s book discussions, the children’s multimodal artifacts, and semi-structured interviews conducted with the families. This dissertation contains three articles. The first article focuses on exploring how the children read and discussed global literature. It was published in Talking Points. The findings showed that the children made connections, disconnections, and misconnections as they draw upon their funds of knowledge in response to the culturally relevant picture books. The second article focuses on exploring how parents participating in reading experiences influenced children’s responses to culturally relevant texts. It is under review by Literacy Research: Theory, Method, and Practice. The findings showed that parents shaped the children’s reading experience and cultural knowledge by building on and extending existing cultural knowledge, redirecting children attend to new cultural knowledge, making the decision not to address certain types of cultural knowledge, utilizing home resources to build connections, and cultivating intercultural awareness along with language learning. The third article focuses on investigating how different modalities support children to express their cultural and linguistic knowledge in respond to culturally relevant picture books. It will be submitted to Journal of Early Childhood Literacy. The findings showed that the children utilized various modalities in their culturally relevant responses. This study has implications for teachers, educators, and parents to facilitate young children’s cultural knowledge and responses using multimodal materials.