Literate Cultural Capital Building Through Father–Child Shared Book Reading: An Interactional Ethnography

Abstract

The study explores the dynamics and interactions between a father and a child of a multilingual family during their daily shared book reading (SBR) practice. Through Bourdieu’s lens of cultural capital theory, the study specifically explores how meaning was constructed, over time, through the child and parent’s verbal and nonverbal participation during SBR and how literate cultural capital was constructed through the father and child’s daily participation in SBR. The study employed interactional ethnography, in which the authors utilized multimodal data by collecting video recordings, transcripts, field notes, and books as artifacts to capture the complexity of interactions within a culturally localized context. Important themes emerged regarding meaning making practices and the construction of literate cultural capital. Findings highlight the role of families in cultivating linguistic and cultural resources that influence children’s literacy development, as well as underscore the importance of recognizing and integrating families’ cultural and linguistic resources into broader literacy initiatives to empower multilingual learners effectively.