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Everyday Knowledge, Education and Sustainable Futures pp 41–58Cite as

Negotiating Chineseness and Capitalising on Resources Through Learning Chinese Heritage Language: Habitus and Capital in Fields

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Part of the book series: Education in the Asia-Pacific Region: Issues, Concerns and Prospects ((EDAP,volume 30))

Abstract

The increasing linguistic and cultural diversity of our society has seen the growing salience of facilitating heritage language learning of ethnic minority people. The maintenance and development of Chinese heritage language (CHL), given the long history and the large scale of the migration of its speakers, has gained much scholarly attention. This leads up to a rich stream of research addressing Chinese heritage language learners (CHLLs)’ perplex, multifaceted commitments to, and their subtle, multilayer identities in, CHL learning. Much, if not most, of this scholarship draws on social psychological and poststructural frameworks and provides empirical evidence predominantly emerging from North American contexts. The current chapter differs, however, in its use of Bourdieu’s sociology to speculate CHL learning in Australia, an idiosyncratic cultural and social space for CHLLs. I will open the chapter with a panoramic review of different approaches to CHLLs’ commitment to, and their identity construction through, CHL learning. This will give rise to my sociological investigation of how Chinese Australians negotiate Chineseness and capitalise on resources through CHL learning.

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  1. Faculty of Education, Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Australia

    Guanglun Michael Mu

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  1. Guanglun Michael Mu
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Correspondence to Guanglun Michael Mu .

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  1. School of Education, La Trobe University, Melbourne, Australia

    Margaret Robertson

  2. The Hong Kong Institute of Education, Tai Po, New Territories, Hong Kong

    Po Keung Eric Tsang

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Mu, G.M. (2016). Negotiating Chineseness and Capitalising on Resources Through Learning Chinese Heritage Language: Habitus and Capital in Fields. In: Robertson, M., Tsang, P. (eds) Everyday Knowledge, Education and Sustainable Futures. Education in the Asia-Pacific Region: Issues, Concerns and Prospects, vol 30. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-0216-8_4

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