Languaging Across Borders: Semiotic Affordances and Meaning-Making in Transnational Digital Communications Among Youth

• In Event: 65.069 - Exploring Technology-Mediated Transnational Language and Literacy Engagements

Abstract

This paper analyzes communications among English learning youth globally that occur through the medium of English. Given the multiple global varieties of English, the diverse home languages, and the various stages of English proficiency they are navigating, how is language leveraged and deployed in tandem with other representational forms to convey messages, and how are these interpreted and understood on the ground by those who receive them? In other words: this paper explores the role of languages, literacies and complex representational modes in sense-making in transglobal communication among youth.
Scholars have theorized about multiliteracies (Cope & Kalantzis 2009) and multimodalities (Kress 2010), and the urgent need for youth to attend to design features of communication in a global world. We have posited the notions of translanguaging (Garcia & Kleifgen 2010), repertoires of languages and literacies (Gutierrez & Rogoff 2003), and translingual practice (Canagarajah 2012), pointing to multiple repertoires of language and literacy forms, features and functions that each person appropriates and must move between to interact successfully within various communities of practice in situated contexts. Scholars have pointed, too, to the lack of attention to communicative design in formal education. Here I analyze design forms and features and resultant negotiations of meaning from a project connecting pre-adolescent youth (living in poverty) globally via a dedicated webspace that hosts youth-produced videos and chats.
Data for this paper were gathered over 3 years from project sites in the US, Uganda and China, and consist of youth-created videos, text from the web-based chats they engendered, videotapes of meetings where youth plan videos and view and discuss videos from other sites, and interviews with youth participants and adult facilitators. Data were subjected to discursive (Gee 2010, Fairclough 2010) and multimodal (Kress 2010) analyses as I considered ways in which oral and visual features (talk, image and text) combined to convey meaning, and in which meanings were negotiated among youth.
Findings on two interwoven issues are discussed: 1) the ways in which languages, and forms of language, were represented and negotiated, and resultant understandings; and 2) multimodal design, and how constellations of features shape shifting understandings of ‘self’ and ‘other’. As one example: the Ugandan youth speak a Ugandan-inflected dialect of English, whereas students in the US sites are English learners from diverse backgrounds. Although the Ugandan youth speak more standard academic English than their US counterparts, the US youth, in response to a Ugandan video, offered to ‘teach them English’. Analysis of this and other interactions points to complex relationships between language, belonging, sense of self-as-tied-to-place, and power and status relationships. Further, meanings intended through video features- images, text (e.g., captioning), voice-overs, sequencing and transitions, sound effects- are often re-interpreted upon reception, pointing to the importance of explicit attention to multi-modal design in forging relations with global others. This study carries implications (to be discussed) for applying understandings of transnational trans-languaging and trans-literacying to schooling, if schooling is to prepare students to be effective communicators engaged in collaborative meaning-making in the 21st century world.

Author

• Margaret R. Hawkins, University of Wisconsin - Madison