Heritage language recognition: The multimodal construction of language in a Tibetan-Canadian family’s literacy activities
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract This ethnographic study examines literacy activities in a Tibetan-Canadian family, members of a heritage language community facing intergenerational language loss. Drawing from twelve months of video ethnography, as well as ethnographic interviews and participant observation, I show how children use sound, gesture, and objects to mediate a shared understanding of the Tibetan heritage language, despite the dominance of English in their spoken repertoires. Informed by anthropological methods of language socialization, I examine children’s multimodal articulations of metalinguistic knowledge to argue that literacy activities provide material anchors for Tibetan children to identify as heritage language speakers through a process that I term heritage language recognition —an interactive objectification of language as culture that does not rely on metapragmatic discourse. Analyses discuss heritage language recognition in conversational patterns of entextualization, demonstrating that metalinguistic knowledge can be located in young children’s multimodal repertoires. (Heritage languages, language socialization, literacy, metalinguistic knowledge, multimodality)
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".