Translingual Literacies in a Social Media Age: Lessons Learned from Youth's Transnational Communication Online PDF

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Translingual Literacies in a Social Media Age: Lessons Learned from Youth’s Transnational Communication Online José Ramón Lizárraga, Glynda Hull, John Scott We live in an interconnected world, awash in flows, with capital, people, information, texts, languages, and media moving, shifting, and blendi...

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Translingual Literacies in a Social Media Age: Lessons Learned from Youth's Transnational Communication Online Jose Lizarraga, John Scott

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Translingual Literacies in a Social Media Age: Lessons Learned from Youth’s Transnational Communication Online José Ramón Lizárraga, Glynda Hull, John Scott We live in an interconnected world, awash in flows, with capital, people, information, texts, languages, and media moving, shifting, and blending across geographic, cultural, and political borders (Appadurai, 1996; cf. Beck, 2000; Maira & Soep, 2005.). Appadurai, who earlier most powerfully articulated the nation-spanning, border-crossing potential of current patterns of globalization, has recently emended this metaphor of flows, acknowledging not just smooth circulations, but “global bumps, borders, black holes, and quarks, the diacritics of the new global order” (2013, p.1; 2006). We write this chapter knowing that the migration of people and the movement of texts are everywhere, bringing changes, and perceptions of changes, to demographic and semiotic landscapes (Blommaert, 2010; Blommaert & Rampton, 2011; Vertovec, 2007). Our interest is to explore the implications of these changes for conceptions and practices of literacy, including academic versions (cf. Canagarajah, 2002; Luke, 2003; Stornaiuolo, Hull, & Nelson, 2009). Global flows are uneven and unequal, and their impacts on the lives of most, uncertain, making paramount the role of creative, critical, and ethically alert educations for the widest spectrum of citizenry. As North American educators and researchers, we hope to contribute to understandings of the transnational language and literacy practices of youth within the U.S. and elsewhere, in such a way as to make conceptions of literacy both responsive to and transformative of our changing world (Hull, Zacher, & Hibbert, 2009). While multilingual and multimodal language and literacy practices have long been part of many communities’ communicative repertoires (Canagarajah, 2013 a,b; Finnegan, 2002), those practices have of late intensified and transformed through the mediation of digital tools and connectivities, wherever these resources are available. However, most conceptions of language, literacy, and learning in U.S. schools have yet to take such shifts into account, remaining persistently monolingual, logocentric, and constrained by the histories, conventions, and demands of specific institutional contexts (Canagarajah, 2011; May, 2014; Street, 2014). Nowhere is this more apparent than in discussions of “academic language” and “academic literacies,” which still tend to position students’ everyday and evolving semiotic practices as peripheral, marooned on the outside of those language and literacy practices that are inculcated in formal school contexts and deemed legitimate and valuable. In this chapter we call for a broadening of conceptions of what count as valuable and essential literacy to include translingual, transmodal, and trans-presentational practices, which include creating, negotiating, transforming, and sharing texts across multiple codes, channels, and symbol systems. We refer to those who are learning to participate in semiotic “contact zones” (Pratt, 1991; cf. Canagarajah, 2002)—that is, to create and circulate and interpret texts across diverse and asymmetric contexts, languages, ideologies, and modalities—as “emergent translinguals” (building from Garcia’s term, 2009, “emergent bilinguals”). We believe that their experiences can inform thinking about academic literacies, loosening the grip of a singular institutional context, and foregrounding how texts function in the world and how people engage them in a range of settings. At the same time, our youthful informants and their translingual, transmodal language practices lay bare values, strivings, and transgressions that obviate any belief that communication across difference is automatically or easily achieved. 1

Using data from an exchange between Latin@1, Spanish/English/Spanglish-speaking adolescents in two San Francisco Bay Area schools with an American interantional school in Jalisco, Mexico, our research aims to describe the language and literacy practices involved in exchanges via an online social network; explain participants’ uses of varieties of English, Spanish and hybridized codes, taking into account relations of authority and intimacy; and suggest how both transmodal artifact production and sharing as well as complex language patterns and hybridization strategies reveal possibilities for expanding conceptions of academic literacy in our social media age. Theorizing Language and Literacy in a Global World “Diversity … is not what it used to be,” writes Vertovec (2007) about Great Britain, where he coined the term “superdiversity” to capture the extraordinary range and mix of newcomers originating from new patterns of immigration (p. 1024). An important part of that diversity all over the world is linguistic, prompting May (2014) to identify a “multilingual turn” in critical applied linguistics, where researchers increasingly explore “the dynamic, hybrid, and transnational linguistic repertoires of multilingual (often migrant) speakers in rapidly diversifying urban conurbations worldwide” (May, 2014, p. 1). Blommaert and Rampton (2011) similarly signalled the broad shifts that have occurred in the study of language in a superdiverse world. They note, “Rather than working with homogeneity, stability and boundedness as the starting assumptions, mobility, mixing, political dynamics and historical embedding are now central concerns in the study of languages, language groups and communication” (p. 3). Such shifts requires an approach to researching language practices alert to “metapragmatic reflexivity”, or language users’ self-conscious, strategic, and evaluative semiotic practice. In addition, researchers of language in superdiverse contexts are tasked with challenging named languages (i.e., Spanish and English) as being bounded and naturalized; treating linguistic acts as one more semiotic tool among many; and recognizing that access to linguistic resources is never devoid of relations of power (cf. Blommaert and Rampton, 2011; Canagarajah, 2013a, 2013b; Kramsch, 2000, 2012; May, 2014). In the present study, we examined the practices of youth who themselves demonstrated the above-mentioned awareness as they engaged in interactions locally and with distant others online, constructing selves and seeking legitimacy as participants in a global exchange. Our research blends such sociolinguistic perspectives on language in a superdiverse world with sociocultural perspectives on literacy, specifically the tradition of New Literacy Studies (e.g., Barton & Hamilton, 1998; Gee, 1996; Street, 2003), where literacy is theorized as plural, diverse, socially-constructed meaning making practices. Rather than autonomous skills that are universal and neutral, this understanding of literacy posits that such practices are always multiple, situated, ideological, and power-laden ways of using language and other symbol systems to communicate, construct meaning, and enact identities in varied social and cultural worlds. Whereas sociolinguistic perspectives generally still privilege spoken language (Lillis & McKinney, 2013), sociocultural perspectives on literacy take material texts, whether paper, digital, or artifactual, as their centerpiece, but don’t typically give equal time to talk and interaction. Literacy and language use are of course conjoined in practice, and our research with Latin@ adolescents addresses their spoken and written languages (Spanish, Spanglish, English) and their production and sharing of textual artifacts, both in person and online. 2

Translingual and transmodal perspectives. Researchers of language and literacy in contexts of superdiversity, including the Internet, have offered a number of terms to capture salient language and semiotic practices, including “metrolingualism” (Pennycook, 2010); “polylingual languaging” (Jørgensen, 2008); and “hetero-graphy” (Blommaert, 2008). Looking across these concepts and the communicative phenomena they describe, Canagarajah (2013b) proposes “translingual practice” as an umbrella term. A translingual orientation expects language users to draw on a repertoire of codes that they appropriate, blend, and mesh, as needs be, in their negotiations with other language users across continually evolving communicative contexts. Translingual communication goes beyond words to includes diverse semiotic resources—oral, written, visual, and embodied—which themselves coalesce in meaning making (Canagarajah, 2013b). In focusing on semiotic resources, rather than just on words, researchers from sociolinguistic traditions join scholars from the New Literacy Studies, who have for some time been alert to language and literacy practices that are multimodal and digital (Bennett, 2008; Kress & van Leeuwin, 2001). In previous work we have been interested in such practices especially as they connect to the enactment of identities, both through the curation of online profiles and presence (Hull & Scott, 2013) and the creation of “new narratives of the self” (Stevenson, 2003, p. 346; Hull & Katz, 2006). In our current study, we explore how youth communicated translingually and transnationally with local and distant peers by creating and sharing digital arts via social media, examining how these practices helped our young language users to decode varieties of English and Spanish and to create new semiotic norms. This perspective on young language learners allowed us to explore the translingual practices of these students as legitimate and powerful discursive tools. We also extend our previous work on multimodality (i.e., Hull & Nelson, 2005) by examining, in the spirit of a translingual framework, how multimodal artifacts cross temporal dimensions in circulation through global networks of participation. We found this “transmodal” expansion necessary in order to think beyond static, discrete properties and affordances of modes as either braided (Mitchell, 2004) or orchestrated (Kress & van Leeuwen, 2001) to create new meanings. Rather, semiotic representations of these modes—vis-a-vis, icon, symbol, and index (Peirce, 1992, 1998)—are blurred and contested in the online exchanges we observed. This was especially the case for multimodal artifacts, such as profile pages on social networking sites, where uses engaged in ongoing performative curations in interaction with curations by other participants on the network. In effect, what we aim to describe and explore are acts of transsemiosis (Shin & Choi, 2013): a crossing of the homogeneous and individual semiospheres (Lotman, 2005) that give these modes their meaning. This pushes us to consider not just static forms of representation through multiple modalities, but a range of potential meanings or transpresentational strategies engaged during the communication and curatorial transactions among participants across the network. The promise of digital socially networked environments. In recent years online spaces have been examined and championed as productive sites for the creation of positive participant identities, especially through the strategic use of language and other semiotic resources. Lam (2008), for example, has examined the important role that language plays in computer-mediated 3

spaces where body-less pragmatics function, since the physical cues associated with most other forms of communication that foster community are reduced (Lam, 2008). There, language becomes a primary way of asserting social categories and normative behaviors. Further, what Lam refers to as the “hybridization of language”—vis-à-vis text, video, audio and other semiotic codes—can facilitate the formation of international and transnational digital communities, allowing “diasporic populations to sustain and recreate social relations of various sorts, and to foster multiple forms of group belonging and cultural participation across national borders” (2008, p. 306).2 Other scholars who have investigated how young people make meaning in interactive online contexts have posited that social networks afford new textual possibilities and challenges for youth to develop an expanded communicative repertoire (Beach & Doerr-Stevens, 2011; Beach, Hull, & O’Brien, 2011; DePew, 2011; Dowdall, 2009; Hull & Nelson, 2005; Hull, Stornaiuolo, & Sahni, 2014; Richards & Gomez, 2010). This expanded repertoire has proven especially important for language learners who can design a self in online spaces, where concerns of outsider-ness relating to accent is not foregrounded, and where there is a respite from spontaneity (Lam, 2000). Such advantages are highlighted in our discussion below of Julieta,3 who established and maintained a virtual relationship in written English, a language that she did not feel very comfortable speaking. The English language is still dominant in online spaces (Danet & Herring, 2007; Lam, 2008; Black, 2005), where it is viewed as an instrument for domination in a neo-colonial project (cf. Lin & Martin, 2005). We acknowledge this role, but in this chapter focus on exploring the role of English in the translingual practices that occur in the post-colonial contexts of the U.S. and Mexico, examining how it serves as a lingua franca for negotiation across across post-colonial contexts and contact zones. Lam notes that English is a prominent language of choice online, carrying the status of lingua franca. However, she also points out that English is used in combination and conjunction with “native, national, or heritage languages” (2008, p. 307) and thus is transformed to serve the purposes of a particular community. Her hope, like ours, is that transnational youth cultures will thrive online through multiple writing systems and different ways of representing via media, as they exercise metalinguistic awareness and creativity in how they communicate and develop hybridized codes in service of information sharing and identity development. Emergent Translingualism as an Additive Perspective. While Latin@ language learners have demonstrated a semiotic inventiveness and meta-linguistic awareness online and off, policymakers and educators in the U.S. have long viewed students who come to school speaking a language other than English as deficient. Labels such as English Language Learner (ELL) and Limited English Proficiency (LEP) have served to reify autonomous notions of language proficiency that position students who don’t learn and use the bounded language of standardized English as low-achieving and unsuccessful in school (Valdés, 1996; Valdés & Figueroa, 1994; Garcia, 2009). Subtractive schooling practices, under assimilationist agendas, have also historically devalued home cultural and language practices (i.e., Spanish and Spanglish language and Mexican culture), intending to supplant them with what were considered more desirable mainstream U.S. values and standard academic English (Valenzuela, 1999). Zentella (2007)

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views these policies as an instance of Hispanophobia whereby the language practices of Latin@s are viewed as inadequate, deviant, and un-American. The term emergent bilingualism (Garcia, 2009; Bartlett & Garcia, 2011) counters the deficit perspective associated with the current, ubiquitous label of English Language Learner (ELL) by suggesting that Latin@s come to the classroom with a wealth of linguistic practices, skills, and knowledge that should be leveraged in order to expand linguistic repertoires. Building on this perspective, we have adopted the term emergent translingual to describe the participants of our study, proposing that youth use language in more complex and expansive ways than for the purpose of gaining proficiency in two bounded languages. We believe that our term captures the spirit of student language use in both the online and offline contexts, as they craftily negotiated home, school, and peer languages in becoming translingual. Data Sources and Methods Our work with Latin@ emergent translinguals in the U.S. and Mexico continued a long-term, design-based research project that linked youth in the U.S., India, South Africa, and Norway by means of a private digital social network, Space2Cre8 (i.e., Hull & Scott, 2013; Hull & Stornaiuolo, 2014; Hull, Stornaiuolo, & Sterponi, 2013; Smith & Hull, 2012; Stornaiuolo, DiZio, & Hellmich, 2013). Previous studies using this platform, and a curriculum that asked participants to create and share digital multimodal narratives, yielded examples of students developing potent constructions of online selves and cosmopolitan habits of mind in their efforts to negotiate meaning and relate to others across cultural, linguistic, and geographic differences. Our aim in the current study was to shift our focus to students who shared certain cultural and linguistic resources, as do children of Latin@ immigrants in the U.S. and youth in Mexico, but were separated nationally, geographically, and socio-economically, thereby putting in play different contact zones. We were especially interested in linking children in California with children in Mexico, since the families of many children with whom we worked in California schools had immigrated from Mexico. We expected that children’s shared cultural and linguistic resources would result in compelling hybrid/multimodal texts that made use of Spanish and English and Mexican and American references. Our research questions asked: (1) How did students who shared linguistic and cultural resources, but who differed geographically and socio-economically, make strategic use of language and other symbol systems? (2) What social functions did these practices serve, and what successes and challenges did students experience in achieving them? (3) How were resources and functions distributed across communicative spaces and tools, on and offline, publicly and privately? Study participants included fifth, sixth, and seventh graders at one school in Mexico and two schools in the San Francisco Bay Area. Escuela de Las Americas (EDLA) was a private prekindergarten through twelfth grade international school located in the city of Guadalajara in the Mexican state of Jalisco. Its mission was to educate youth in a bilingual, bicultural, and secular setting that fostered critical and creative thinking. At the time of our study, EDLA served a total of 1431 students with the support of 161 teachers and teacher assistants and 19 academic administrators and counselors. Seventy-nine percent of the student population was Mexican national origin and had Spanish as a native language, while four percent were US nationals, and

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seven percent held dual citizenship from the U.S. and Mexico. The school designated the remaining ten percent of the school population as “other”. As an international school, EDLA is part of a growing transnational movement to create schools and networks of schools, many of which cater to elite, ex-patriot populations, especially in China, Hong Kong, and the Middle East, although there are also examples of networks of private, for-profit schools that serve an emerging middle class.4 We chose EDLA as a research site largely because of the contrast it provided: the school was secular while the U.S. sites were parochial schools, and EDLA was better resourced and its student population wealthier than the school research sites in the U.S. Yet the student populations were similar in age, languages, and cultural backgrounds. Our intent with this contrast was to interrupt customary “polarities of interpretation” (Silverstone, 2007) and to provide opportunities for students to connect across a range of boundaries, including social class. In addition, EDLA also had the technological and pedagogical resources needed to sustain a digit...