Speaking Spanglish con los Friends: The Promise and Challenge of Translingual Literacy Practices

• In Event: Roundtable Session 22
  In Roundtable Session: Peer Networks in the Context of Multiple Languages and Literacies

Abstract

This paper helps broaden conceptions of what counts as desirable and essential literacy practices in a global and digital world. Using data from an exchange between Spanish/English bilingual adolescents in two San Francisco Bay Area schools and a school in Jalisco, Mexico, this paper aims to: (1) describe the multimodal language practices that characterized exchanges on an online social network; (2) explain participants’ choices between English and Spanish, taking into account relations of authority and intimacy; and (3) illustrate how both multimodal artifact production and sharing as well as complex language usage and hybridization revealed new possibilities for conceptualizing academic literacy practices.

Authors

• José Ramón Lizárraga, University of California - Berkeley

• John Michael Scott, University of California - Berkeley

• Glynda A. Hull, University of California - Berkeley