Worlding with materials, bodies, and spaces: Chinese-Canadian children’s playful heritage language and literacies at home

Informed by Barad’s (2007) concepts of intra-action and entanglement and Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) notion of assemblage, this posthuman-informed ethnographic case study examines how Chinese heritage language (CHL) literacies were acquired, sustained, or remade through imaginative, emergent, and materially entangled play in Chinese-immigrant homes. Drawing on multimodal data generated during a year of regular home visits with three Chinese-Canadian families and their young children (aged 2–6) as part of a larger research project, the study focuses on three play episodes (one from each family) as analytic cases to trace how children intra-acted with human and more-than-human elements across bodies, materials, spaces, and semiotic modes. A posthuman reading of the data reveals that children’s Chinese literacies unfolded through dynamic assemblages of picturebooks, toys, household objects, spatial arrangements, digital technologies, family members, bodily movements, and affects. Within these assemblages, play did more than supplement language instruction by creating conditions in which Chinese became necessary, desirable, and consequential; children’s Chinese literacies took shape as they playfully participated in family worlds such as requesting help, commanding imagined figures, selecting and evaluating objects, and interpreting digital interfaces. CHL maintenance within Chinese-immigrant households therefore emerged not as a linear, predesigned, or skill-based developmental process, but as an embodied, relational, and more-than-human becoming through shifting human–nonhuman entanglements.