Zhang, Z. (principal applicant). (2018-2019). Building on assets: A netnography of a cross-border, online biliteracy curriculum, SSHRC PEG.

This project responded to two of SSHRC’s major future challenge areas: 1) harnessing new media and technologies and 2) strengthening Canada’s global connectivity through a close examination of biliteracy curricula. Emergent literature on bilingual education in Canada has addressed the use of transformative multiliteracies pedagogies to leverage bilingual learners’ assets of meaning-making in different languages, modes, and technologies (e.g., Cummins, Hu, Markus, & Montero, 2015). However, there is a scarcity of online, cross-border biliteracy programs in Canada that harness biliteracy learners’ assets of meaning-making, in both English and their heritage language of Mandarin. In this project, we enacted a cross-border, online biliteracy curriculum that connected Canadian biliteracy learners (i.e., learners in Canada who speak the heritage language of Mandarin but are more fluent in English) and Chinese biliteracy learners (i.e., learners in China who are fluent in Mandarin but learning English as a foreign language). The study built a social networking space for these learners to develop biliteracy and new media literacies skills.