Abstract
Storytelling is an important site for early childhood socialization. As young children engage in collaborative storytelling with adults, they not only develop interactional and linguistic competence, but also learn to navigate social roles, values and stances as part of becoming society members. While storytelling in adult-child interaction has been extensively explored in research traditions such as ethnography and discourse analysis, it has only been researched from a conversation analysis perspective since the last decade (e.g., (Filipi, A., Theobald, M., & Ta, T.B., Storytelling practices in home and educational contexts. Springer, 2022); (Kim, Y., & Carlin, A., Text & Talk 43:21-43, 2022); (Kim, Y., & Crepaldi, Y., Journal of Pragmatics 172:167-180, 2021)). Within this body of work, few studies have explored collaborative storytelling as a context for home language maintenance and socialization in bilingual families (e.g., (Evaldsson, A., & Fernandes, O., Research on Children and Social Interaction 3:36-64, 2019)). In this chapter, I will examine opportunities for learning Vietnamese as a heritage language during parent-child co-construction of personal recounts, a commonly recurring story genre in family talks. The data used for analysis were drawn from 120 h of audio-recordings of family conversations from five bilingual Vietnamese-English families in Singapore. The children’s ages ranged between 2;10 and 4;5 at the beginning of data collection. Conversation analysis of the data reveals how parents deploy interactional resources and practices to support and scaffold children’s recounts over extended sequences while simultaneously expanding children’s home language learning in everyday interaction. The study contributes to the fast-growing body of micro-interactional research on home language maintenance and socialization (e.g., (Fernandes, O. A., Journal of Pragmatics 140:88-99, 2019); (Kheirkhah, M. & Cekaite, A., Multilingua 34:319-346, 2015); (Meyer Pitton, L., Multilingua 32:507-, 2013)).