This article reports on a deep investigation of five Australian Chinese families regarding their preschool-aged children's bilingual experiences and development. Each family was visited 3 to 5 times by the first author. The mothers were interviewed about their attitudes toward their child's bilingualism and their practices to promote it. A detailed observation lasting 4 to 5 hours was undertaken of each family to record the interaction between parents and children. The findings suggest that Chinese parents have positive attitudes toward bilingualism for pragmatic reasons, such as future career success and ease of communication with family members. Yet they also expressed concern that their child's development of the home language would have a negative effect on their child's English language development. Observations demonstrated that parents' interactions with their children were frequently playful and informal, and English language was frequently used. Many of the materials parents provided to support their child's home language, such as picture books and DVDs, were actually rooted in English culture. These findings suggest there is room for Chinese parents to increase their awareness of bilingual development in children, including the relationship between first and second language development and strategies for facilitating their children's learning.

This study investigated five Australian early childhood educators’ negotiation of the complex terrain of working in partnership with Chinese parents regarding their children’s language usage in early childhood settings. Semi-structured interviews were undertaken to explore educators’ views on children’s language usage in early childhood settings, their perception of Chinese parents’ language expectations and their strategies in resolving the tension between parental expectation and educator views on children’s language usage under the current regulatory frameworks. Educators reported that many Chinese parents expected their children to use only English in early childhood settings. Such a practice would not align with educators’ views of permitting children to use languages freely. The educators developed different strategies to address the tension between their desire to achieve positive outcomes for children and their need to work in partnership with families. Implications for the further preparation of educators are discussed.

Abstract This article explores the musical cultures of young Indigenous and non-Indigenous children, their families, and communities in New South Wales, Australia, and Hawai‘i, USA. It presents the stories of four children, which illustrate children’s musical practices in four geographically disparate locales, and serve as examples of the musical borders that are regularly traversed in early childhood. These children engaged with the music surrounding them and appear to be on the path to enculturation into the knowledge, practices, and beliefs that were bound by these. They acquired the knowledge of norms and expectations of existing musical cultures through experiences in the home, school, community, and commercial music.

Musical Childhoods of Asia and the Pacific agglomerates stories of young children's music and musicking from around Southeast Asia and the Pacific. A collection of truly unique traditions are interrogated through a variety of contemporary methodologies. Readers are privileged to hear about children's musical worlds from children, mothers' musical worlds from mothers, a struggle to engage with music in a closed society, and new gender politics, among other stories. Researchers share experiences and insights gained from applying their chosen methodologies and add to the debate that shapes the continually transforming domain of music education research. Musical Childhoods builds on the diverse inquiry presented in the first three volumes in the series. This volume is an important addition to the libraries of colleges of education and schools of music, as well as music scholars and educators, researchers, and graduate students who are concerned with advancing both the scope and quality of research in the study of music teaching and learning.

This chapter presents the perspectives of Peter Whiteman and Regina Murphy, both having served as discussants at the 2009 Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association (AERA). Whiteman's contribution, entitled "On Being a Discussant," speaks from the perspective of a first-time discussant, while Murphy's contribution, entitled "Close to the Music of What Happens: A Discussant Evokes a Poem," offers the perspective of a seasoned discussant.. Both authors reflect. on the purpose and process of this important role in the understanding and dissemination of research.

This chapter reports aspects of a 3-year study of the singing of eight preschoolers. Monthly video recordings were made of the children's spontaneous singing during play. After transcription, these 443 songs and play episodes were coded for demographic, musical, and social aspects; the resultant dataset transferred to a qualitative software package (NUD.IST) for analysis and interpretation. Results exhibit some congruence with prior studies, especially those for which die social context. of music making was considered important. The children used songs for specific purposes, but individual patterns of musical development were distinctly different. Findings expand previous developmentally based investigations by showing that. conceptions based on a unidirectional model of musical development, closely linked to age, need to be refined to consider die diversity of social contexts and generative processes.

Contemporary views of children and childhood position children as valued coconstructors of their cultures, supporting the notion that learning and development are bound to a social context. Through this lens, scaffolding can be seen broadly as a collection of techniques employed by a knowledgeable other to assist a novice to internalize cultural signs. This paper reports images of the knowledgeable other constructed by a group of preschool-aged children engaged in spontaneous singing. Video-recordings of eight children singing during free-play over a period of 3 years were transcribed, and the songs and accompanying play episodes were analyzed using QSR NUDIST software. Results revealed the children constructed a range of images of the knowledgeable other, employing a variety of techniques to define this role. Cultural experience did not seem to rely strongly on chronological age, with younger children often viewed ill the role of the knowledgeable other.

SUMMARY Gathering data about children's development and learning has long been the domain of adults. However, there is increasing interest in including children's voices in their education and, a more challenging task, in research that impacts on educational practice and policy making. Techniques such as Instant Video Revisiting (IVR) offer a way for children's voices to be heard. In this paper, we discuss the use of IVR in investigations of young children and their symbol systems. Four year old children are offered opportunities to comment directly upon their experience in shared book reading and spontaneous singing. We discuss the opportunities offered by IVR and comment on the challenges faced by children, teachers and researchers when there is no shared meta-language for discussion.

The design, implementation, and performance of a video bandwidth compression system is described. In this system, compression is obtained by several methods including the use of DCT/DCPM hybrid coding, frame rate reduction, and resolution reduction. The overall compression ratio is up to 1000:1. The hardware-constrained design of the DCT and the DPCM is described and a new method is derived to solve the optimum integer bit-assignment problem associated with the block quantization process in the DPCM. Computer simulation results are presented which predict that the performance of the system using the derived optimal bit assignment method is superior to those obtained by other bit assignment methods. The real-time hybrid coding system design is optimized for a set of "modified" average statistics to compress a wide variety of input video images. This approach eliminates the problem of nonzero dc mean value which could otherwise cause serious degradations in the system performance. The compression system is fully implemented and the quality of the reconstructed video as predicted by computer simulation has been demonstrated by the actual hardware performance. The PSNR of the reconstructed imagery is in excess of 36 dB at 2 bits per pixel.