Affective and Experiential Influences on English Skills of Heritage Spanish Speakers

Gemstone Team GABS (Grammar Acquisition in Bilingual Students)

Culture in Transit: Digitizing and Democratizing NYC’s Cultural Heritage

Presentation from the MARAC conference in Pittsburgh, PA on April 14–16, 2016. S4 - Culture in Transit: Digitizing and Democratizing NYC’s Cultural Heritage.

Dancing the Archive: Rhythms of Change in Post-Volcano Identities on Montserrat, West Indies

In this dissertation, I demonstrate how improvisations within the structures of performance during Montserrat’s annual festivals produce “rhythms of change” that contribute to the formation of cultural identities. Montserrat is a small island of 39.5 square miles in the Caribbean’s Leeward Islands, and a volcanic disaster in the 1990s led to the loss of villages, homes, and material possessions. The crisis resulted in mass displacement and emigration, and today’s remaining population of 5,000 is now in a stage of post-volcano redevelopment. The reliability of written archives for establishing cultural knowledge is tenuous, and the community is faced with re-energizing cherished cultural traditions. This ethnographic research traces my embodied search for Montserrat’s history through an archive that is itself intangible and performative. Festivals produce some of the island’s most visible and culturally political events, and music and dance performances prompt on- and off-stage discussions about the island’s multifaceted heritage. The festival cycle provides the structure for ongoing renegotiations of what it means to be “Montserratian.” I focus especially on the island’s often-discussed and debated “triangular” heritage of Irishness, Africanness, and Montserratianness as it is performed during the festivals. Through my meanderings along the winding hilly roads of Montserrat, I explored reconfigurations of cultural memory through the island’s masquerade dance tradition and other festival celebrations. In this work, I introduce a “Cast of Characters,” each of whose scholarly, artistic, and public service work on Montserrat contributes to the shape and transformation of the island’s post-volcano cultural identities today. This dissertation is about the kinesthetic transmission of shared (and sometimes unshared) cultural knowledge, the substance of which echoes in the rhythms of Montserrat’s music and dance practices today.

THE MUSIC PERFORMED FOR THE SACRIFICIAL RITE AT THE ROYAL ANCESTRAL SHRINE OF THE CHOSŎN DYNASTY (1392–1910): INDIVIDUAL AGENCY AND DISCOURSE ON MUSIC EXPRESSED IN THE EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY KOREAN ENCYCLOPEDIA _TONGGUK MUNHŎN PIGO_ (1770)

In 1964, the South Korean government designated the music for the sacrificial rite at the Royal Ancestral Shrine (Chongmyo) as Intangible Cultural Property No. 1, and in 2001 UNESCO awarded the rite and music a place in the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. The Royal Ancestral Shine sacrificial rite and music together have long been an admired symbol of Korean cultural history, and they are currently performed annually and publicly in an abridged form. While the significance of the modern version of the music mainly rests on the claimed authenticity and continuity of the tradition since the fifteenth century, scholarly inquiry sheds further light on contextual issues such as nationalism, identity, and modernity in the post-colonial era (after 1945), as well as providing additional insights into the music. This dissertation focuses on the Royal Ancestral Shrine’s musical past as reflected in documentary sources, especially those compiled in the eighteenth century during the Chosŏn dynasty (1392–1910). In particular, the substantial music section of an encyclopedic work, Tongguk Munhŏn pigo (Encyclopedia of Documents and Institutions of the East Kingdom, 1770), mainly compiled by a government official, Sŏ Myŏngŭng (1716–1787), provides a considerable amount of information on not only the music and sacrificial rite program, but also on eighteenth-century and earlier concerns about them, as discussed by the kings and ministers at the Chosŏn royal court. After detailed examination of various relevant documentary sources on the historical, social and political contexts, I investigate the various discourses on music and ritual practices. I then focus on Sŏ Myŏngŭng’s familial background, his writings on music prior to the compilation of the encyclopedia, and the corresponding content in the encyclopedia. I argue that Sŏ successfully converted the music section of the encyclopedia from a straightforward scholarly reference work to a space for publishing his own research on and interpretation of the musical past, illustrating what he considered to be the inappropriateness of the existing music for the sacrificial rite at the Royal Ancestral Shrine in the later eighteenth century.

Heritage Language Maintenance and Biliteracy Development for Immigrants' Children: A Study of Chinese Immigrants' Family Language Policy and Biliteracy Practices

This study reports on research that examines the family language policy (FLP) and biliteracy practices of middle-class Chinese immigrant families in a metropolitan area in the southwest of the U.S. by exploring language practices pattern among family members, language and literacy environment at home, parents’ language management, parents’ language attitudes and ideologies, and biliteracy practices. In this study, I employed mixed methods, including survey and interviews, to investigate Chinese immigrant parents’ FLP, biliteracy practices, their life stories, and their experience of raising and nurturing children in an English-dominant society. Survey questionnaires were distributed to 55 Chinese immigrant parents and interviews were conducted with five families, including mothers and children. One finding from this study is that the language practices pattern at home shows the trend of language shift among the Chinese immigrants’ children. Children prefer speaking English with parents, siblings, and peers, and home literacy environment for children manifests an English-dominant trend. Chinese immigrant parents’ language attitudes and ideologies are largely influenced by English-only ideology. The priority for learning English surpasses the importance of Chinese learning, which is demonstrated by the English-dominant home literacy practices and an English-dominant language policy. Parents invest more in English literacy activities and materials for children, and very few parents implement Chinese-only policy for their children. A second finding from this study is that a multitude of factors from different sources shape and influence Chinese immigrants’ FLP and biliteracy practices. The factors consist of family-related factors, social factors, linguistic factors, and individual factors. A third finding from this study is that a wide variety of strategies are adopted by Chinese immigrant families, which have raised quite balanced bilingual children, to help children maintain Chinese heritage language (HL) and develop both English and Chinese literacy. The close examination and comparison of different families with English monolingual children, with children who have limited knowledge of HL, and with quite balanced bilingual children, this study discovers that immigrant parents, especially mothers, play a fundamental and irreplaceable role in their children’s HL maintenance and biliteracy development and it recommends to immigrant parents in how to implement the findings of this study to nurture their children to become bilingual and biliterate. Due to the limited number and restricted area and group of participant sampling, the results of this study may not be generalized to other groups in different contexts.