Language Socialization in Chinese Diasporas

This book provides ethnographically informed analyses of indigenous kin interactions in three Chinese diasporic households in LA. Drawing upon the approach that regards talk as a form of social practice, it demonstrates different ways in which relationships are indigenously orchestrated by Chinese parents and their American-born children.

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.