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Converging Worlds: Play, Literacy, and Culture in Early Childhood. Maureen Kendrick. New York: Peter Lang, 2003. Pp. xi + 203.

� This qualitative case study explores the interrelations between play, literacy, and culture by closely examining the home play activities of Letitia, a 5-year-old Chinese Canadian girl. Letitia is growing up in a multilingual, multiliterate family of three children. She speaks Chao Chiu, her fi rst language, and English at home, is learning Mandarin in kindergarten, and took Cantonese lessons when younger . Her par-ents, who immigrated to Canada from Vietnam, are literate in fi ve languages, provide a rich home literacy learning environment, and have high expectations for their child’s language and literacy learning in both the short and long term.

Letitia, described as “outgoing, articulate, … and very interested in books and stories” (p. 5), was just starting kindergarten when the study began. Thus, the author could observe her during her transition from home to school literacy, a critical research area given the widely rec-ognized need for bridging the two literacy environments, particularly for multilingual children. The author visited Letitia in her home weekly for more than a year, playing the dual role of researcher and participant in the child’s play and allowing her to direct and control the play to help overcome the obvious imbalance in power relations. Letitia welcomed the researcher’s visits, and over time, the two devel-oped a close and trusting relationship, placing the researcher in an especially favorable position for conducting her research and coming to understand how the child used play to express her understandings of self, literacy, and the world around her.

The author draws on a variety of theoretical perspectives to frame the research, including emergent literacy and social constructivism and positioning theory on the situated and culturally specifi c nature of lit-eracy learning and its embeddedness in power relations and identity construction. The author joins these perspectives with observations on the relations between play and literacy, which view play as an arena for identity construction and as a form of narrative or oral storytelling. Storytelling provides a particularly rich and unique analytical lens, allowing the author to examine the play episodes as literary and social texts and to explore play, literacy, and culture as an integrated whole rather than separately, as is commonly the case.

Two introductory chapters (chapters 1 and 2) discuss the theoretical and methodological perspectives that frame the work and provide in-depth information on Letitia’s family and home context, gleaned from observations, conversations, and the close relationships established with family members. A selection of 10 of Letitia’s play narratives, refl ecting the two predominant play themes, home and school, are

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presented in chapters 3 and 4, respectively. The narratives are skillfully organized and presented, enabling the reader to appreciate the play episodes in all their rich, vivid (and at times overexacting) detail and to understand the researcher’s interpretations of their meaning and relation to sociocultural context, provided in commentary sections at the end of each narrative.

In the home-related narratives (chapter 3), which revolve around such activities as falling in love, marrying, and having babies, we learn about Letitia’s understandings of gender roles and relationships, mar-riage and family, and Chinese cultural practices, as well as how she perceives the future and the more intimate realm of her feelings and desires. We also learn about her developing literacy, her sense of self in relation to it, and her understandings of its forms and functions. In the school narratives (chapter 4), where she plays school and takes on the role of teacher, Letitia reveals how she sees the culture of school, with its rituals and routines, and how she understands herself in relation to literacy and deals with the various expectations she encounters. Some of the narratives are particularly interesting in show-ing how she experiments with power and status relationships in the context of play and the conditions under which she takes risks with reading and writing English and especially Chinese, which she found particularly diffi cult.

A wide range of relevant research and the study’s implications for research and education are discussed in chapter 5. The author fi rst brings together research on children’s personal storytelling from vari-ous areas, for example, children and narrative, literacy, identity, and childhood socialization, and discusses how her study, which looks at a child’s play as a form of personal storytelling, connects with and enriches this research. The study, all the more important because done in the home, clearly shows how the child used play for a variety of personal purposes to make sense of and experiment with her present and future worlds. As such, this research adds a valuable new lens for understanding children’s early literacy development and identity construction.

Letitia often uses reading and writing and assumes literate roles in her play narratives, and thus the author was also able to glean valuable insights into the child’s understandings of and attitudes and feelings toward literacy, that is, her literacy stance. For example, Kendrick’s analyses reveal how the child used play to deal with the different meanings and expectations for literacy she encountered at home and school and to begin to construct her own orientation to literacy. They also reveal the child’s awareness of the different forms and functions of literacy in the two contexts, her understandings of school culture, and her awareness and use of status and power relations in the play

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context. The analyses are very rich and suggestive of the importance of play as an arena for integrating home and school cultures, adapting to school culture, and learning and practicing literacy skills. The cul-tural content of the play narratives is also discussed, and play is high-lighted as a composing process. The child’s development as an author over the course of the study is traced as well.

The book closes with the author’s refl ections on lessons learned from the study both on a personal level and more broadly with respect to schools and classrooms (chapter 6). Although this was not a class-room study per se, the study carries many interesting implications wor-thy of attention by researchers, students, and educators interested in bridging the gap between home and school and improving literacy instruction for children of diverse cultures. This highly readable and fascinating analysis of how play connects to literacy, culture, and the construction of self should be of interest to researchers, students, and educators involved with multilingual children in a variety of fi elds, including but not limited to, early childhood literacy, family literacy, narrative and identity, children’s play in cross-cultural contexts, and second language learning and multilingualism.

ELAINE M. DAY Simon Fraser University British Columbia, Canada

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Values in English Language Teaching. Bill Johnston. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, 2003. Pp. viii + 163.

� A book on values in English language teaching (ELT) is welcome at a time when values have emerged so prominently in political, religious, and even entertainment discourse. Johnston’s treatment of values in ELT is intended primarily for ELT teachers and, secondarily, for per-sons engaged in teacher preparation. The author maintains that upholding a positive teacher-student relationship is of supreme impor-tance in ELT and that value-oriented decisions are to be made so as to safeguard and enhance that relationship. The value issues he sees are numerous and often pose dilemmas, paradoxes, and confl icts. His chapters successively focus on the teacher, classroom interaction, polit-ical concerns, testing, teacher identity, and teacher development. Chapters are followed by questions for class discussion and personal refl ection.