Navigating Chinese and English Multiliteracies Across Domains in Canada: An Ethnographic Case Study of Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Children’s Literacy Practices

Increasing diversity in the globalized world challenges the field of education such as policy development and curriculum design (Suarez-Orozco & Suarez-Orozco, 2009). With more and more students speaking a home language other than English entering schools, numerous studies have examined their English language development with a focus on how they learn to read and write at home and school. However, less is known about culturally and linguistically diverse children’s literacy practices across domains. This study investigated Chinese children’s literacy practices and asked What are Chinese children’s literacy practices at school, home, and in the community? What(linguistic and sociocultural) resources do Chinese children draw upon in their literacy practices? In what ways (if any) do classroom teachers, parents, and communities support Chinese children’s literacy practices? The study took the social and cultural perspectives toward literacy with a focus on multiltieracies (the New London Group, 1996). In order to examine children’s literacy practices across domains, I employed the case study approach using ethnographic tools such as participant observations and semi-structured interviews to collect data (O’Reilly, 2005; Yin, 2005). Participants included Chinese families and teachers. Data analysis involves data triangulation, constant comparison and critical reflection. Findings of the study indicate that children’s literacy practices were directed to print literacy in adult-organized literacy events and children’s literacy practices were multimodal in children-initiated literacy events, children drew upon their social, cultural and linguistic backgrounds to explore literacies, and adults provided certain degrees of support based on their understanding and backgrounds

The Crisis of Language in Contemporary Japan: Reading, Writing, and New Technology

My dissertation is an ethnographically inspired theoretical exploration of the crises of reading and writing in contemporary Japan. Each of the five chapters examines concrete instances of reading and writing practices that have been problematized in recent decades. By calling attention to underlying moral assumptions, established sociocultural protocols, and socio-technological conditions of the everyday, I theorize the concept of embodied reading and writing thresholds. The scope of analysis is partly informed by popular discourse decrying a perceived decline in reading and writing proficiency among Japanese youth. This alleged failing literacy figures as a national crisis under the assumption that the futurity of children's national language proficiency metonymically correlates with the future well being of its national cultural body. In light of heightened interests in the past, present, and future of books, and a series of recent state interventions on the prospect of "national" text culture, it is my argument that ongoing tensions surrounding the changing media landscape and symbolic relations to the world do not merely reflect changes in styles of language, structures of spatiotemporal awareness, or forms of knowledge production. Rather, they indicate profound transformations and apprehensions among the lives mediated and embodied by the very system of signification that has come under scrutiny in the post-Lost Decade Japan (03/1991-01/2002). My dissertation offers an unique point of critical intervention into 1) various forms of tension arising from the overlapping media technologies and polarized population, 2) formations of reading and writing body (embodiment) at an intersection of heterogeneous elements and everyday disciplining, 3) culturally specific conditions and articulations of the effects of "universal" technologies, 4) prospects of "proper" national reading and writing culture, and 5) questions of cultural transformation and transmission. I hope that the diverse set of events explored in respective chapters provide, as a whole, a broader perspective of the institutional and technological background as well as an intimate understanding of culturally specific circumstances in Japan. Insofar as this is an attempt to conduct a nuanced inquiry into the culturally specific configurations and articulations of a global phenomenon, each ethnographic moment is carefully contextualized to reflect Japan specific conditions while avoiding the pitfall of culturalist assumptions. Understanding how an existing system of representation, technological imperatives and sociohistorical predicaments have coalesced to form a unique constellation is the first step in identifying how the practice of reading and writing becomes a site of heated national debate in Japan. Against theories that problematize the de-corporealizing effects of digital technology within reading and writing, I emphasize the material specificity of contemporary reading and writing practices

Sindhī Multiscriptality, Past and Present: A Sociolinguistic Investigation into Community Acceptance

This thesis is on the sociolinguistics of writing. It investigates the use of scripts for the Sindhī language of South Asia, both from a diachronic and synchronic perspective. The thesis first analyses the rich but understudied script history of the Sindhī language from the tenth century to modern times. In doing so, it investigates the domains in which certain scripts were used, and identifies definite patterns in their distribution. Particular attention is paid to Perso-Arabic and Devanāgarī, which emerged as the two most widely used scripts for the language in the twentieth century. The diachronic analysis draws on several linguistic, literary and other academic works on the Sindhī language and brings to the fore hitherto neglected data on historical script use for the language. The thesis then presents and analyses oral interview data on community opinion on the recent proposal to use the Roman script to read and write Sindhī. The synchronic analysis is based on original fieldwork data, comprising in-depth qualitative interviews with fifty members of the Indian Sindhī community of diverse backgrounds and ages from various geographical locations. Empirically, this work is one of the first to provide a comprehensive diachronic and synchronic review and analysis of script practices in the Sindhī community specifically from a sociolinguistic perspective. It also provides revealing insights into the kinds of expectations an urbanised, highly educated and socioeconomically successful minority has of a writing system for its language. In doing so, the study challenges the prevalent simplistic claim in the literature that minority communities are desirous of seeing their language in writing. Most importantly, this work indicates the emergence of a so-called new variety of Sindhī phonology in India, which differs subtly from the old variety phonology. The implications of this subtle shift in phonology for Sindhī pedagogical material form a key part of the findings of this study. Theoretically, this work contributes to the concept of orthographic transfer, which is the phenomenon of phoneme-grapheme correspondences in a particular orthography being inadvertently applied to another orthography. The study also affirms the presence of a scriptal diglossia, or digraphia, in script use for the Sindhī language, where the use of particular scripts for the language is implicitly determined by domain and context. The potential impact of orthographic transfer and digraphia on the pedagogy of lesser-learnt languages is a key part of the study’s findings. Methodologically, the juxtaposition of historical and present-day sociolinguistic factors at play offers a fresh and nuanced look at the rise and fall of scripts in the context of a language with a centuries-old written tradition. The study concludes that usage of a particular script for a language is not the result of a simplistic binary opposition between authoritarian imposition and voluntary choice. Rather, it is a reflection of several pragmatic and symbolic considerations by the community in question. The thesis puts into perspective the various psychological, socioeconomic and cultural forces at work in determining script use for the Sindhī language. In doing so, the thesis makes several additions not just to the existing body of knowledge on the Sindhī language, but also to the fledgling field of inquiry that is the sociolinguistics of writing. These varied and unique contributions set the study apart from previous research on the subject

Photography and Social Life: An Ethnography of Chinese Amateur Photography Online

This dissertation explores the ‘middle-brow’ (Bourdieu, 1990) photography practices of contemporary Chinese people in the digital era and how they produce, circulate, and consume photographic images on and off the Internet. Through participant observation and interviews with Chinese photo hobbyists and professionals working in the visual-Internet industry based in London, Beijing, or in the virtual world, it asks how the marriage between photography and the Internet in China has been similar to, or distinct from, its counterparts in the rest of the world, consolidating a vernacular photo-scape that has emerged alongside China’s booming Internet economy and socio-economic transformation over the past forty years. The research further addresses the agencies of both individuals and images, which determine what people want from photography in today’s China and what photography wants from this new networked, mediated society. The dissertation moves across persons, communities, organisations, and real and virtual sites, making it a multi-sited ethnography that traces social relations and ‘the circulation of cultural meanings, objects, and identities in diffuse time-space’ (Marcus, 1995: 96). The thesis presents a panoramic picture of the everyday practices carried out by Chinese amateur photographers, who are often imagined and categorised as the country’s middle class. The study focuses on two main aspects. The first is the activity of amateur photography, including the conspicuous consumption of photographic equipment and participation in relevant events, as well as social behaviours on and off of Internet photography platforms. The second involves the judgement and appreciation of photographic images on sites such as Tuchong, focusing on various kinds of aesthetic strategies around and within photographic images. The combination of the two has helped photo hobbyists in China to shape their values, career paths, and new identities in the context of digitalisation and the rise of social media

Zou Qilai!: Musical Subjectivity, Mobility, and Sonic Infrastructures in Postsocialist China

This dissertation is an ethnography centered around two bands based in Guangzhou and their relationships with one of China’s largest record companies. Bridging ethnomusicology, popular music studies, cultural geography, media studies, vocal anthropology, and the anthropology of infrastructure, it examines emergent forms of musical creativity and modes of circulation as they relate to shifts in concepts of self, space, publics, and state instigated by China’s political and economic reforms. Chapter One discusses a long history of state-sponsored cartographic musical anthologies, as well as Confucian and Maoist ways of understanding the relationships between place, person, and music. These discussions provide a context for understanding contemporary musical cosmopolitanisms that both build upon and disrupt these histories; they also provoke a rethinking of ethnomusicological and related linguistic theorizations about music, place, and subjectivity. Through biographies of seven musicians working in present-day Guangzhou, Chapter Two outlines a concept of “musical subjectivity” that looks to the intersection of personal histories, national histories, and creativity as a means of exploring the role of individual agency and expressive culture in broader cultural shifts. Chapter Three focuses on the intertwining of actual corporeal mobilities and vicarious musical mobilities, and explores relationships between circulations of global popular musics, emergent forms of musical creativity, and an evolving geography of contemporary China. Chapter Four extends these concerns to a discussion of media systems in China, and outlines an approach to “sonic infrastructures” that puts sound studies in dialogue with the anthropology of infrastructure in order to understand how evolving modes of musical circulation and the listening practices associated with them are connected to broader economic, political, and cultural spatialities. Finally, Chapter Five examines the intersecting aesthetic and political implications of popular music sung in local languages (fangyan) by focusing on contemporary forms of articulation between music, language, listening, and place. Taken together, these chapters explore musical cosmopolitanisms as knowledge-making processes that are reconfiguring notions of self, state, publics, and space in contemporary China

Guessing human-chosen secrets

Authenticating humans to computers remains a notable weak point in computer security despite decades of effort. Although the security research community has explored dozens of proposals for replacing or strengthening passwords, they appear likely to remain entrenched as the standard mechanism of human-computer authentication on the Internet for years to come. Even in the optimistic scenario of eliminating passwords from most of today's authentication protocols using trusted hardware devices or trusted servers to perform federated authentication, passwords will persist as a means of "last-mile" authentication between humans and these trusted single sign-on deputies. This dissertation studies the difficulty of guessing human-chosen secrets, introducing a sound mathematical framework modeling human choice as a skewed probability distribution. We introduce a new metric, alpha-guesswork, which can accurately models the resistance of a distribution against all possible guessing attacks. We also study the statistical challenges of estimating this metric using empirical data sets which can be modeled as a large random sample from the underlying probability distribution. This framework is then used to evaluate several representative data sets from the most important categories of human-chosen secrets to provide reliable estimates of security against guessing attacks. This includes collecting the largest-ever corpus of user-chosen passwords, with nearly 70 million, the largest list of human names ever assembled for research, the largest data sets of real answers to personal knowledge questions and the first data published about human choice of banking PINs. This data provides reliable numbers for designing security systems and highlights universal limitations of human-chosen secrets

Multimedia Development of English Vocabulary Learning in Primary School

In this paper, we describe a prototype of web-based intelligent handwriting education system for autonomous learning of Bengali characters. Bengali language is used by more than 211 million people of India and Bangladesh. Due to the socio-economical limitation, all of the population does not have the chance to go to school. This research project was aimed to develop an intelligent Bengali handwriting education system. As an intelligent tutor, the system can automatically check the handwriting errors, such as stroke production errors, stroke sequence errors, stroke relationship errors and immediately provide a feedback to the students to correct themselves. Our proposed system can be accessed from smartphone or iPhone that allows students to do practice their Bengali handwriting at anytime and anywhere. Bengali is a multi-stroke input characters with extremely long cursive shaped where it has stroke order variability and stroke direction variability. Due to this structural limitation, recognition speed is a crucial issue to apply traditional online handwriting recognition algorithm for Bengali language learning. In this work, we have adopted hierarchical recognition approach to improve the recognition speed that makes our system adaptable for web-based language learning. We applied writing speed free recognition methodology together with hierarchical recognition algorithm. It ensured the learning of all aged population, especially for children and older national. The experimental results showed that our proposed hierarchical recognition algorithm can provide higher accuracy than traditional multi-stroke recognition algorithm with more writing variability