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Homework in a transnational family: Mobilizing others to resolve language-related epistemic issues
Karlstad University, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences (starting 2013), Department of Language, Literature and Intercultural Studies (from 2013).ORCID iD: 0000-0003-3706-9880
2022 (English)Conference paper, Oral presentation with published abstract (Refereed)
Abstract [en]

This presentation adopts a conversation analytic approach and presents excerpts from a detailed analysis of the sequential organization of a parent-child homework activity in a Swedish-English transnational family. The data analyzed come from participant-recorded videos, which are part of a larger ethnographic project on language practices in bilingual families in Sweden. An implicit policy in Sweden exists in which parents are expected to assist with their children’s homework (Forsberg, 2007), but the knowledge required for this assistance is not necessarily possessed in full by parents in transnational families. Such families are increasingly common in an ever-globalized world, but current research has not fully investigated how parent-child homework practices are affected by parents who possess differing levels of expertise in the societal language. Drawing upon work on epistemics in interaction (Heritage, 2012), a number of sequences are examined where the progressivity of the homework activity is halted due to language-related epistemic issues. More specifically, these halts in progressivity are caused due to the homework tasks being written in Swedish in combination with the English mother’s lack of language expertise in Swedish. The sequences exemplify how these epistemic deadlocks are resolved through the mobilization of a more knowledgeable party (Betz, Taleghani-Nikazm, & Golato, 2020), the Swedish father. Upon his mobilization, the Swedish father orients to translation as a trouble resolution tool which facilitates epistemic progression and the progressivity of the homework activity. The presentation addresses how such mobilizations are dependent on participants’ monitoring of the local epistemic ecology, as well as the larger activity trajectory, and how both of these are intimately connected with co-participants’ linguistic abilities. Furthermore, the presentation comments on how the close analyses of bilingual parent-child homework sequences can reveal educational inequalities which may otherwise remain hidden.

Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
2022.
National Category
General Language Studies and Linguistics
Research subject
English
Identifiers
URN: urn:nbn:se:kau:diva-89171OAI: oai:DiVA.org:kau-89171DiVA, id: diva2:1646503
Conference
American Association for Applied Linguistics Conference (AAAL) 19-22 Mars, Pittsburg
Available from: 2022-03-22 Created: 2022-03-22 Last updated: 2022-03-30Bibliographically approved

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Roberts, Tim

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CiteExportLink to record
Permanent link

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Citation style
  • apa
  • ieee
  • modern-language-association-8th-edition
  • vancouver
  • apa.csl
  • Other style
More styles
Language
  • de-DE
  • en-GB
  • en-US
  • fi-FI
  • nn-NO
  • nn-NB
  • sv-SE
  • Other locale
More languages
Output format
  • html
  • text
  • asciidoc
  • rtf