Language Socialization in Chinese Diasporas (Routledge Studies in Chinese Discourse Analysis)

The monograph provides ethnographically informed analyses of indigenous kin interactions in three Chinese diasporic households in the county of Los Angeles, California, U.S.A. Drawing upon the approach that regards talk as a form of social practice, the book demonstrates different ways in which kin relationships are indigenously orchestrated by foreign Chinese parents and their American-born children.

Micro-analytically, social actions of membership categorization, attribution, deference, compliance, commands, and story-telling that unfold in kin interactions are foregrounded as key language devices to discuss ways in which epistemic asymmetry, power hierarchy, and harmony in kin relations are constructed or deconstructed in Chinese diasporic social lives. By way of illustration, the monograph, macro-analytically, speaks to the cultural stereotype of Chinese immigrant/foreign parents’ style of parenting when they pass on the traditional Confucian ideologies in kin interaction.

This book can be a useful reference textbook for graduate courses that address the dynamic intricacy among language, culture, and society.

Hsin-fu Chiu is Associate Professor of Chinese at the California State University, Los Angeles. Trained at the University of California, Los Angeles, Dr. Chiu is a conversation/discourse analyst, interactional sociolinguist, and linguistic anthropologist. For him, human sociality and cognitive processes do not exist within the individual, but rather across symbolically mediated interactions among members of a social group. To document trajectories of human development, Dr. Chiu employs a range of qualitative methods (including participation observation, sociolinguistic interviews, video-recording, and analysis of textual documents) and conducts his research on language socialization in Chinese diasporas and second/foreign language acquisition of Chinese in the classroom and beyond.