Multilingual Family Story-Making Through Community Translanguaging

• In Event: 77.042 - Translanguaging Embodied: Students' Expanded Translanguaging Practices Across Contexts

Abstract

Objectives
Whereas translanguaging research has highlighted the individuals’ integrated communicative spectrum, the framework has not been applied to understand how families or communities of multilingual members collectively translanguage for multiple audiences. This study examines how a family story-making project facilitated community translanguaging for the parent, child(ren), and other family/community members to collaborate across multiple languages and modes to create multilingual family storybooks. We specifically explored: How did families draw from their different communicative repertoires to create a family story? How did this family literacy project afford a community translanguaging space?

Framework
Translanguaging has been theorized mostly around the individual’s multilingual practice (Li,
2011). We expand the framework to examine how a community of multilingual members
collaboratively translanguaged across individual repertoires of different languages, modalities,
and cultural identities in a family literacy project. We also draw from the concept of leveraging,
defined as utilizing one’s home and community language for learning (Martinez, Morales, &
Aldana, 2017), to explore how families leveraged each member’s different communicative
repertoires (Rymes, 2014) as an integrated community cultural wealth (Yosso, 2005) to achieve
their literacy project.

Methods and Data
Using an ethnographic case study design (Yin, 2009), this study analyzed field notes of family
literacy workshop meetings, interviews, and the final family books and audio recording of the
class reading of the three case families: a Taiwanese immigrant family, and two biracial and multilingual families. Initial analysis used open and axial coding (Charmaz, 2010) to identify how each family perceived and performed their multilingual practices. The second level of analysis adopted the multimodal discourse analysis across textual and visual modes (Kress, 2000) to further examine the types and scale of community translanguaging, particularly how each family and other related community members expressed their voices and identities in multimodal and multilingual ways.

Findings
Analysis demonstrates that during the family story-making project, translanguaging
occurred in ways that maximized the leveraging of community literacy wealth, using diverse features of named languages, modes (spoken, written, visual), and across proficiency levels (basic to advanced). Multiple collaborations took place between the mom, child(ren), and other family members; the mom and workshop facilitator(s) in English; and the family and the child’s grade teacher for Spanish translation, in multiple roles including the writer, translator, and illustrator(s). Selection of the topic, language and mode considered the potential audience from various linguistic and cultural backgrounds. Translanguaging practices were part of the linguistic capital that nurtured the community cultural wealth of the families involved in the family literacy project.

Significance
This study contributes to the comprehension of how educators can create community
translanguaging spaces where students from diverse backgrounds, their family, and community
members can engage in a mutual meaning-making process while contributing to their literacy and identity development.

Authors

• Sujin Kim, George Mason University

• Kim Hyunsook Song, University of Missouri - St. Louis