Korean–English bilingual sibling interactions and socialization

Abstract

This paper examines how a pair of Korean-American siblings interact and socialize and how their interactions change over time as the younger sibling starts to go to an Englishspeaking preschool. A 7-year-old Korean-English bilingual girl and her 3-year-old sister were observed in their home over 23 visits within a year. Their discourse data, including 33 h of audio-recordings, were analyzed from the Language Socialization perspective. The older sibling's authority derived from the age-based Korean family hierarchy inevitably played a role in creating shared benefits in the bilingual sibling relationship. After the younger sibling began to speak English, there were noticeable changes in the power asymmetry and language parallelism-the younger sibling's repetition of older sibling's utterances. This study offers insight into the bidirectionality of sibling socialization processes of sibling interactions in relation to their bilingual and bicultural development.

Fluid identity play: A case study of a bilingual child’s ethnic identity construction across multiple contexts

“…Second, due to limited space, this work does not include data the first author collected from the child’s home (Cho, 2018). How children construct and negotiate their ethnic identities might be different between home and school (Huang and Stormshak, 2011).…”

Grandparents in Minority Language Maintenance: Mandarin Chinese in Canada

“…Besides parents, the major "influencers" in the heritage language maintenance in immigrant families are siblings (Duursma et al, 2007;Cho, 2018). For example, children in Chinese Singaporean families speak more Mandarin than English with their siblings, particularly with younger ones (Cavallaro et al, 2021).…”

Power and socialization in sibling interaction

“…The literature on sibling talk, and by extension on peer talk, has shown that interactions between children are important loci for learning (Goodwin and Kyratzis 2007;van der Schaaf 2016). With regard to siblings, research has shown older siblings do a lot of direct language teaching and play word games with younger siblings (Blum-Kulka and Snow 2004;Cho 2018;Goodwin and Kyratzis 2007). Sibling talk and peer talk, however, also socialize children beyond linguistic skills.…”

“…Much research on socialization in sibling interaction above thus often suggests there are relatively fixed roles of socialization argent and target, in which the eldest usually is the agent and the younger sibling the target. However, longitudinal research has also shown that processes of socialization between siblings also change as children grow older; younger siblings take increasingly active roles in sibling dyads, initiating more games, cooperating and participating more in joint play, and become more effective in using their understanding of power in situations of conflict (Cho, 2018;Dunn, 2015). Dunn (2015) points out this is intricately connected to a change in power relations, but that it remains unclear what this exactly means for the siblings' abilities to influence one another, and establishing dominance in interaction.…”

“…For instance, the effect of a particular socialization effort will not have a uniform effect on different participants (Grusec and Hastings 2015;Schieffelin and Ochs 1986;van der Schaaf 2016). But socialization roles are also not fixed: in the case of sibling interaction, for example, longitudinal research has shown that dynamics of power between siblings, and the establishing of socialization roles and dominance changes over time, and that the impact of birth order becomes less pronounced (Cho 2018;Dunn 2015).…”