Chapter 6 portrays two adolescent speakers of Chinese as a heritage language and their respective families.  Drawing upon interview data as well as face-to-face conversational data in everyday interactions, it situates the adolescents’ attitude toward the Chinese language in the contexts of talking about their respective families in terms of values, behavioral patterns, and accents, talking for their families as they interpret and translate from Chinese to English for their parents and polish their parents’ English in everyday social encounters, and talking with their families in digital communication across three generations. It explores second-generation immigrant children’s perceptions of their parents’ attitudes toward child rearing, college preparation, and career choices. It also investigates the impact of the parents’ triumphs and challenges in their immigration experience on the children’s language choices.

This chapter reviews the perspectives and levels of an analysis that inform how an observation is made. This is done by demonstrating that there are two perspectives (language use and the human factor) and five levels (summation, description, interpretation, evaluation, and transformation) of analysis in discourse analysis. These perspectives and levels can be used to understand the frameworks of established methodologies, such as conversation analysis, critical discourse analysis, and narrative analysis. After reading this chapter, readers will know that the analytic process can combine different perspectives and levels of analysis.

Chapter 2 uses one first-generation immigrant mother’s narrative as a basis to outline the language background of the family and to explore the construction and the characteristics of the bilingual space at home, as well as the history and the forces behind the shift of linguistic repertoire in the household during the early years of children who are speakers of Chinese as a heritage language.

The chapter demonstrates that selecting an object of study is a consequential part of doing discourse analysis. Selecting an object of study requires considering many planning and analytic issues that are often neglected in introductory books on discourse analysis. This chapter reviews many of these planning and analytic issues, including how to organize and present data. After reading the chapter, readers will know how to structure an analysis; understand what data excerpts are and how to introduce them in an analysis; be able to create and present an object of study as smaller data excerpts; and know how to sequence an analysis.

Chapter 5 takes the reader to a community-based weekend Chinese language school. Drawing upon reflections from a Chinese language teacher there, it delineates the historical complexity of Chinese language traits and cultural values as well as the challenges in choosing what to impart to children who speak Chinese as a heritage language and how to instill a cultural ethos which may be divergent from mainstream culture. It explores the history and evolving emphasis of Chinese language schools over time, the nature and cultural significance of the Chinese writing system as well as the challenges it poses to learners of Chinese as a heritage language, the culturally specific ways of conceptualizing education, and the cultural shift that accompanies and motivates language shift.

This chapter demonstrates that a researcher is attached to the analytic process in ways that make it difficult to be completely independent and objective when doing research. Issues of objectivity and subjectivity are discussed, which offer a frame to understand the ways in which a researcher’s cultural familiarity with an object of study, as well as their professional vision and institutional positionality, inform the analytic process. After reading this chapter, readers will understand that discourse analysis research is inherently subjective; know that a researcher’s cultural familiarity with an object of study is crucial to doing discourse analysis; be able to identify and adopt multiple analytic perspectives; be capable of applying reflexive practices to the analytic process; and understand, and know how to deal with, the power dynamics that exist in discourse analysis research.

This chapter summarizes the main points established in prior chapters and reviews how research questions factor into doing discourse analysis. The aim of the chapter is to help readers synthesize the different aspects of conducting discourse analysis research into a coherent set of principles. This is done by introducing a practical model for doing discourse analysis. After reading this chapter, readers will be able to recall the mains points of doing discourse analysis; be capable of using a model for doing discourse analysis to conduct research; know a number of practical tips for doing discourse analysis; and be able to construct research questions that are relevant to discourse analysis research.

Chapter 7 follows a young adult college student who speaks Chinese as a heritage language and his girlfriend as they explore language, life, and race relations during the COVID-19 pandemic, trying to use the Chinese language to transform the very Chinese-American communities they grew up in and transcend the cultural identity that is assigned to them by society. It explores societal language ideologies regarding Americans of Chinese origin, cultural legitimacy and authenticity for second-generation Chinese immigrants both in the U.S. and in China, the relation between diaspora and domesticity, and the transformative role of Chinese as a heritage language in the context of the Black Lives Matter movement and anti-Asian hate during the COVID-19 pandemic. It highlights the nonlinear nature of language shift.

Chapter 3 presents a grandmother’s perspective on child rearing and cultural values in the household of two second-generation Chinese immigrant children. It explores the distribution of childcare responsibilities across generations, the values imparted to and instilled in the children, and the management of caring and teaching across languages at home. Drawing upon both narratives and recorded and transcribed interactions, it examines the family’s use of both Chinese and English during a range of recurrent speech events, such as having dinner, reading stories before bed, and doing homework after school.

The chapter defines theory and establishes how it informs discourse analysis. Theory is defined as an idea that explains what discourse is, how discourse should be understood, or both. Conversely, a theory is not an opinion, thought, or belief, which are simply intuitions without an explanatory framework. Topics discussed in this chapter include theories of knowledge and applied theories. After reading this chapter, readers will know how to define theory; understand how theory relates to the analytic process; know the difference between a theory of knowledge and an applied theory; and be able to identify the different types of applied theory that exist.

Chapter 4 depicts a US elementary school that a second-generation Chinese immigrant child attends. It explores the school’s multicultural ideology and monolingual ethos from the child’s kindergarten teacher’s viewpoint. It further explores how this child’s family language ideology and policy are shaped by his first-generation immigrant parents’ own language limitations in the U.S. and their comparative views on Chinese versus American communicative styles. Through observation and narrated stories, this chapter brings the reader to the child’s elementary-school classroom, his school’s field day and international day, and his parents’ workplaces. It presents a case where not only do the parents fully support the English-only policy and practice at school, but they also are ready and willing to deliberately shift to greater use of English at home, based on their careful cost–benefit assessment of the consequences of the language shift for their family.