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Cultural capital and family involvement in children’s literacy learning
Citation
Proceedings of the Language Teaching and Learning: Meeting the Realities of a Changing World, Penang, Malaysia, 2008.
Abstract
This paper presents findings from a study which explored the lived literacy experience of Malay families in Singapore. The research strategy was one of multiple case studies. The research approach was ethnographic and the data set reported in this paper includes the data collected from the field of two of the sites. Data analysis show that participant parents, regardless of their background, value their children’s educational success, want their children to do well in school, and correspondingly see themselves as supporting their children in one way or another. The evidence, however, demonstrates a variation in familial perspectives and needs and a considerable distinction in how families of different background define literacy and which literacy they consider worth transmitting to the children. These in turn affect the way they foster their children’s acquisition of literacy. The focal children from the two families thus come to school with particular cultural resources and repertoires of literacy practices that position them in particular ways with respect to the curriculum to which they have to adapt. These conclusions draw on Bourdieu’s notion of cultural capital which explains how individual’s access to certain cultural signals (such as attitudes, preferences, tastes, and styles) either enables or limits their entry into high status social groups, organizations, or institutions such as schools. These views present an alternative to the cultural deficit thinking that blame students, their families, and their culture for their academic failure.
Date Issued
2008
Project
CRP 19/04 MAB