Playing with funds of difficult knowledge: interactional insights for heritage language education

Abstract

Abstract Migration stories are at the heart of how many immigrant-background Heritage Language Learners (HLLs) construct a sense of home, community, and identity across spatiotemporal scales. Nevertheless, narratives containing difficult knowledge (e.g., about war) are generally seen as threats to, rather than as assets in language learning and in education more broadly, and as such, are rarely drawn on in classrooms. In this paper I analyse excerpts from a group interview that I conducted with four grade-four girls during a year-long ethnographic case study. In particular, I examine how we all used various linguistic and paralingiustic resources to construct play frames. The play frames created a lower-stakes space in which to navigate the emotionally complex cultural memories that my interview questions about origins and migration prompted. The findings have implications for how language teachers listen to and engage with their HLLs’ funds of difficult knowledge.

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