Over the course of a year of data collection it was possible for me to identify emergent ideas for my study from the field work. Having collected an appropriate amount of data, my study contributed an understanding of the depth and richness of British South Asian children’s language and literacy learning. An additional understanding of intergenerational practices around digital technologies was also obtained. Therefore the study added value to what was already known from such earlier studies.
During the fieldwork with the four families one challenging task was to manage the parents’ and children’s interview timetable. I was aware that visiting time should be convenient for both parents and children. The Pakistani family’s parents were only available at home when the children were at school but the parents also had work commitments. This family’s children were mostly attending mosque after school hours. The video recording data was taken mostly at the weekend or during school holiday time. This is why, due to time constraints, data collection took longer with some families than with others. I needed to visit participants several times but the number of the visits was not the same for all of them. The mother of the Bangladeshi family was working
as a classroom assistant; therefore was available after school with her children also back from school. She mostly preferred me visiting them after school or at the weekends, if necessary. The Indian family’s mother was a single parent. She was also mostly available after 4.30pm on working days.
I gave a briefing to parents in all families about my research through social visits, before I started to collect any purposeful information. I also made them aware of my research objectives and the confidentiality about their personal details. I mentioned that parents could stay with their children while I video recorded their activities. The mothers were willingly involved during their children’s activities with digital technology. It may be argued that my study reflects only the voices of children and their mothers. The fathers were however, normally working during the time I visited; as a consequence the fathers’ voices were less influential in my study. During the children’s activities, I observed that the mothers were encouraging their children. As a South Asian woman, due to cultural reasons, it was not easy to approach fathers unless they enthusiastically showed involvement with their children’s activities. In my visit to each family, the presence of one of the parents in the home is adequate. As my research was not mainly focused on getting father’s voices, I didn’t give much priority to approaching fathers. I also got the impression that fathers preferred to just to greet me and leave it to the children’s mother. Goldman’s (2005) research on fathers’ involvement in children’s education suggested that fathers are less likely than mothers to read with their children and some men see reading as women’s work. The bond between mother and child is a special and somehow supernatural connection which transcends mere relationship (Mitchell, 1995). In this specific context, it can be argued that the mother’s influence is much stronger than the father’s. Drawing on the article by Macleod, (2008) which recounts fathers' reluctance to engage with locally based family learning groups. It can be argued that this means family learning is seen by fathers as ‘mother-centred’ education.
In terms of selecting the sample size for my study, three families and six children seemed adequate but I understood the dropping out one family to be a limitation of my study. This family’s children were mixed race in the fact that their father was Pakistani and mother was Bangladeshi. This study illuminates children’s digital multi-cultural communicative practices. I understand that these communicative practices could provide new insights into grammatical construction involving two different languages
(for instance, in the combination of Bengali and English in children’s communication). However I did not focus on mixed race South Asian children’s use of mixed South Asian languages (for example the combination of Bengali and Urdu in their communicative practice). My study was purposefully restricted to the interaction of a South Asian language and English, and the nature and use of hybrid language in communication within South Asian families in England.
There were also issues related to the understanding of the interviewees regarding the subject matter of research. In addition there were constraints related to ethical issues and confidentiality, as most of them did not have an understanding of disclosure of information in the context of research work, I had to ensure that they understood the importance of their permission to participate in my research. The details of this are provided in the methodology chapter.
It can be argued that this area of research is selective. Firstly, I worked with three South Asian families with six children and three parents. Secondly, it may be argued that this study reflects only the voices of those children privileged enough to have access to digital technologies in the home. As a consequence there are limited opportunities for children from disadvantaged backgrounds although research suggests that they still find a way to play. According to Gee (2003, p.10):
And, yes, poor children and teenagers do play video games, even if they have to find a computer or game console at school, in a library, or community centre, or at a friend’s house.
Evidence suggests that a ‘digital divide’ exists between socio-economic groups (Karsten, 2003), however in this contemporary, ‘digital native’ (Thomas, 2011) world, economic status does not deny children access to digital technology entirely. Nowadays, young people have digital technology and the Internet as a normal part of their everyday life activities as home access to these has risen over the past decade (BECTA, 2009; Ofcom, 2008).
It also can be argued that children’s learning through digital games is often not ‘good’ learning. For instance, children can learn morally questionable things through playing violent video games (e.g. shooting and killing in games, representations of crime). Many people who know little about digital games may not be aware of their children’s
learning through play and might think playing digital games is ‘just play’ or a waste of time. In this sense, I agree with Kress, who stated (2003, p.164):
Those who have been socialised into the contemporary media world may be disposed to see the screen as their point of reference for strategies of reading; those who were socialised into the former media world may see the page as their point of reference.
This can be defined as a shift in the communicative power of the medium within which text is located, for example a shift from paper based to screen-based text.
Some difficulties were encountered with participants responding to other members of the family while conducting unstructured interviews and using the video camera for data collection. This is hard to avoid in domestic situations. In order to overcome this problem, I revisited the same home as often as necessary to take additional video recordings of events to ensure that clear data records had been obtained.
The qualitative research strategies that I utilised (social visits and semi-structured interviews, participant observation and video recording) resulted in a large amount of data that was very complex to analyse. My data consisted of diversity in terms of children’s culture, age range and practice in the home environment. The children’s heritage languages were Bengali, Hindi and Urdu. Therefore apart from English, data consisted of Bengali, Hindi and Urdu. The children’s age range was 3 to 13 years, therefore the level of data was linked with early years, primary and secondary education. The three diverse South Asian family home environments were different in terms of practice. The Bangladeshi and Pakistani families’ religious practices were Muslim and the Indian family’s religious practice was Hinduism. The collected data can only be interpreted in relation to children’s literacy, language and cultural practices as reflected by their families’ backgrounds. Data sorting, categorising and selecting were complex procedures. Additionally, the video recorded data contained complex observations of multiple modes of communicative practice. Due to the boundaries of my research study, it was not always possible to capture all modes. For instance as my study focused closely on children’s screen based action through their use of digital technology, this meant that I mostly missed their facial expression. I found that if my camera was positioned towards children’s faces then I would miss their meaning of their on-screen digital practices and their speech in relation to on-screen digital actions. Children’s speech in relation to their on-screen digital activities helped me understand the meaning of their digital practices. At the beginning of each activity I captured their
facial expression just to make sure they were happy with me videoing them. I was not investigating children’s emotion with regards to their digital activities, and so did not use two video cameras (to capture simultaneous action and reaction).
The children also had access to a diverse range of digital devices. These lead to a diversity of practices in supporting knowledge transfer between home and school. Questions might arise regarding the location of my research (being based in home settings) and how knowledge transfer between home and school is evidenced in that setting. This was continuously made a requirement during my interpretation of research data drawn from the observations of the children’s digital literacy practices. I also asked children about their activities and whether they performed them in their school. I looked at the context of home-school relationship in terms of how children exchange knowledge from one domain to another. I particularly considered the issues of how children perform their homework (set by the school) using home-based digital technology and the associated home-school knowledge transfers. I also found out that their school homework connected to their heritage culture. Further research to involve school teachers, children and parents can be proposed on the basis of the identified potential of children’s multi-cultural knowledge transfer connection between home and school. The established boundaries and objectives of my research impose natural limits, for example, although I noticed children’s math practices during their use of digital technology this was not considered for analysis as it is beyond the scope of my research.
Due to the complex nature of this research which involved diversity of language, tradition, religion, social settings and values within South Asian culture, my study was limited to a small number of carefully selected families with a limited number of children. The complexity was further increased by the inclusion of the multicultural implications for South Asian families living in England.
The diversity of the data and the analysis process revealed further complexity and limits. These complexities covered various contexts: in language terms (trans- languaging, syncretism and hybridity), the symbiotic nature of the knowledge transfer relationships between home and school and multimodal forms of learning in terms of literacy and language. All of these required longer periods of time to format and interpret and understand my research data. Even as a South Asian researcher in
largely South Asian context I found my own understanding of this complex multicultural situation was significantly adjusted and extended. This realisation may have beneficial implications for others who are active in multicultural environments.
5.6 Summary
This chapter has focused on the process of data analysis. I began this chapter with a clear introduction to the whole data set that includes all of the introductory visits with the families for the purpose of rapport building and context setting. This included eating meals, watching children’s activities, semi-structured interviews and visits to the café; these visits were part of the data which supported and contextualised my research but were not included in the data for analysis. I then described the overall video based dataset and explained that some of the data was not included for reasons of clarity. Therefore, I needed to set up criteria for the data selection process. The outcome of the selection process helped me to identify five top quality episodes of video recording from the whole data set that would help me to answer my research questions. Children’s activities were naturally occurring in the various families. I have presented here the diversity of the five examples of video recording selected for my research. In my research, the descriptions contained in the five examples were then interpreted in order to promote a thematic perception appropriate to the data set and my research interest. The multilingual diversity issues recorded in table 5.7 required that analysis must be conscious of the multilingual and trans-language features. These features are defined in the literature review chapter 3 in sections 3.4 and 3.5 and also in the Glossary. In Chapter 6 I will describe five examples from my data. The emerging issues will be interpreted in Chapter 7 (data analysis). The conclusions will be presented in the Chapter 8.