Multimodal Translanguaging of Transnational Migrant Youth in Digital Media

• In Event: 41.084 - Roundtable Session 16
  In Roundtable Session: 41.084-13 - Youth's Identity Work in Diverse Multilingual and Multicultural Contexts

Abstract

A growing body of research has examined the impact of digital media on youth’s learning, social relationship, and identity work (boyd, 2008; Gee, 2004). But only a handful of studies considered how youth from migrant backgrounds make sense of and articulate their transcultural and multi-/bi-lingual identities when afforded digital media enabling regular transnational social connections (Lam, 2009; Yi, 2009). As part of a larger ethnographic study on Korean migrant youth’s transnational identity work in digital space, this project asked: How did one case youth coordinate writing, relationships, and identities through digital literacy practice? Specifically, how did she modulate the multimodal writing tools in video making to communicate with different audiences, local and transnational?

This study draws on the sociocultural view of literacy as identity work (Gee, 1990; New London Group, 1996) to highlight how digital writing – video-making in particular – is a dialogic and intertextual interplay between the author and audience, and between texts and contexts (Bakhtin, 1981), in which the author makes particular choices of modalities and identities across different audiences and varying cultural worlds. Among a range of data sets from the original ethnographic project (Leander & McKim, 2003), this case study reports on one selected youth whose data include the most extensive corpus of literacy events and contexts across all participants. Analysis of two video sets that the youth created followed the methodological frames of discourse analysis. Initially, Gee’s (2011) building tasks analysis was conducted to examine how the youth drew on the particular language to achieve tasks of building, mainly, identities, relationships, discourses and significance. Next, Fairclough’s (1995) approach was used to examine how the youth enacted different social identities with the local versus transnational audiences, using particular genres, discourses, and styles of language and positioning. Finally, multimodal discourse analysis (Kress, 2003) uncovered how the youth orchestrated her multimodal messages and identities by attending to her gazes, gestures, bilingual diction, and images with which she positioned herself as a certain kind of person.

Analyses demonstrate that audience relationship played a critical role in the youth’s choice of topics, genres, modalities, and cultural identities adopted in each video. While she identified herself as an English-speaking, inquisitive youth responding to the task of exploring identity questions for her local (classroom) audience, she performed identities of a bilingual, humorous youth, and a caring family member for her transnational family. For purposeful dialogues with each audience, the youth strategically appropriated varying genres such as invitational dialogue and comedy, combined diverse semiotic resources of bilingual texts and speech, images and gestures, and thus communicated messages and identities relevant to each audience, and their linguistic and cultural worlds. The different storied self in customized modes in each video demonstrates that one’s identity has plural narratives across social relationships, and even more so for the transnational migrant youth with multiple cultural and linguistic affiliations. Implications for literacy classrooms are discussed, specifically on how literacy teaching can draw on media technology, diverse funds of knowledge, and multiple modalities.

Author

• Sujin Kim, University of Missouri