Global Youth Developing Multilingual Literacies Through Digitally Mediated Transnational Communication

• In Event: 41.084 - Roundtable Session 16
  In Roundtable Session: 41.084-5 - Multilingual and Multicultural Resources in Technology-Mediated Engagements: Exploring and Supporting the Digital Literacies of Nondominant Students and Families

Abstract

The fourth paper in this symposium considers ways that students seek to practice multilingualism in out-of-school, digitally-mediated settings. Proposals emphasizing multilingualism’s value have been situated predominantly in the context of linguistic minority students (Agnihotri, 2007; Paris & Alim, 2014). This focus has been critical for issues of educational equity; however, an unintended consequence is that minority languages exist as a concern and learning goal of their heritage language communities (Gorter, Zenotz & Cenoz, 2014). Building on Canagarajah’s (2013) conceptualization of code meshing - multilingual, multimodal text production among non-Western communities - this paper presents this emergent form of communication among global youth in an online forum devoted to Korean dramas. The forum’s participants included but were not limited to adolescents who did not identify as being of Korean heritage and resided in places such as the United States, Malaysia, Indonesia, Ukraine, the Philippines, and Bahrain. These global youth used the affordances of online communication to practice multilingual identities.

The larger study from which this paper draws focused on adolescent literacy and language practices in the Korean dramas discussion forum of the free website, DramaCrazy.net. Data included peripheral observations, web traffic estimation data, over 200 screenshots, and eight printed discussion threads. An inductive approach of conceptually driven sequential sampling (Miles, Huberman, & Saldaña, 2014) led to selection of the discussion threads. The unobtrusive method using publicly available data (Hine, 2015) additionally included participants’ created profiles, albums, friend networks, blogs, and interactions. Qualitative content analysis (Cho & Lee, 2014; Saldaña, 2011) involved examination of how participants’ literacy and language practices related to intercultural learning and issues of identity and community.

Data presented in this paper focus on participants’ language practices. Findings included (1) participants’ self-directed Korean language learning, (2) peer-supported and collaborative Korean language learning, and (3) multilingual interactions that mixed English, Korean, and other languages, in written and visual formats. Analyses of these multilingual interactions highlight engagements with transnational media as potentially generative for the development of an assets-based orientation towards multilingualism. To achieve the promise of educational equality requires promoting an assets-based perspective of multilingualism among all students. The affordances of digitally mediated, transnational communication offer youth educational opportunities for developing linguistic flexibility. This paper’s case illustrates a potential for multilingual literacies practiced through online engagement with transnational media to support this perspective.

Author

• Grace MyHyun Kim