Creating a dialogic space for research: a reading conference in a Chinese complementary school

ABSTRACT

This article draws on research carried out in a Chinese complementary school in Scotland. The research focused on children's experience of learning to read Chinese and on the strategies that they used to support their learning. Here, I provide an account of one particular aspect of this research, namely the creation of a dialogic space for gathering and interpreting data through the setting up of six reading conferences between individual students and their teacher. The reading conferences involved two broad activities. First, each child was asked to read aloud a passage written in Chinese. This was followed by a think-aloud session which took the form of a three-way dialogue between the child, the teacher and me (as the researcher). In this article, I show how the reading conferences unfolded by drawing on one example of an eight-year old boy of Hong Kong heritage. I also detail some of the insights into his learning strategies that emerged from the three-way dialogue during the think-aloud sessions. The article concludes with reflection on: (1) the particular advantages that accrue from creating such dialogic spaces for research, especially at the stage of data interpretation; and (2) on the value of dialogic methodology in educational settings characterised by considerable linguistic and cultural diversity.

KEYWORDS:

• Literacy
• complementary schools
• dialogic spaces
• learning strategies

Acknowledgements

I would like to express my gratitude to Professor Marilyn Martin-Jones for her detailed and helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper. I am also thankful to the editors of this Special Issue for their support.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Ying Yan is a fictitious name that was chosen to preserve confidentiality.

2 Of the nine basic tones of Cantonese, six are commonly used, and changing the pitch level can alter the meaning of the character. Cantonese has nine tones, 1 = high level; 2 = high rising; 3 = mid-level; 4 = low falling; 5 = low rising; 6 = low level; 7 = glottalized high; 8 = glottalized mid; and 9 = glottalized low. Even with tonal distinctions, this does not eliminate lexical ambiguities associated with the massive number of Chinese homophones (syllables which sound the same but have different meanings and are distinctive in writing). It is claimed that on average 11 characters share 1 pronunciation but the distinctive graphic form provides ‘an escape from rampant homophony’ (Tan and Perfetti 1998, 168).

3 The character [樣] is used in conjunction with [這] to form the two character lexical unit [樣 這] meaning ‘in this way’.

4 Cook-Sather (2009) was actually writing about pedagogy and about taking account of learners’ perspectives. This principle also holds for research practice, particularly in research conducted in culturally diverse schools and classrooms.