A Korean Bilingual Child's Transnational Identity Construction Through Multimodal Journal Writing as a Family Practice

• In Event: Moving Toward the Public Good: Collaborative Research on the Complexities of Multilingual Writing

Abstract

This study aimed to examine how a Korean-English bilingual child used his multimodal journal writing as a space of authoring his worlds and his identities (Ahearn, 2001; Bakhtin, 1983; Holland et al., 1998). Building on the literature on translingual practices (Canagarajah, 2013), we explored how the focal child used various semiotic resources (e.g., English, Korean, images) to make sense of and explore himself and how his stance as a bilingual writer was expressed and implicated in his writing.
Jun (Pseudonym) was a third-grade Korean boy who lived in a Midwestern state. We collected his bilingual journal entries written as part of his home literacy practices for 20 months since the beginning of his second-grade. We conducted one formal interview with Jun and three formal and 10 informal interviews with his mother. By employing a multimodal analysis of written language and other semiotic resources (e.g., writing templates and drawings) (Sebba, 2012), we looked into Korean-English relationships, language-image relationships, and spatial configurations in constructing the content in Jun’s journal entries. As a co-author, Jun’s mother reflected on her positionalities shaping the ways she guided Jun’s journal writing.
Findings indicated that in his journal entries, Jun used his transnational experience and knowledge as resources to construct his local experiences and social relationships. For instance, Jun employed his knowledge of Mart and Kid’s cafe that he had learned through his visit to Korea to write about his current experience in a childcare program in a local US supermarket. Over time, how he used images and languages shifted in ways that reflected changes in his participation in surrounding social contexts. The primary language of his journal changed from English to Korean, and Korean words were embedded in the image section. This gradual shift began after he and his family visited Korea, and as he became more aware of himself as a regular participant in a Korean church and a Korean language program in which he engaged in Korean literacy practices across various subjects. Jun’s use of honorifics in his journal writing demonstrated his positive response to his parents and Korean language program teachers’ instruction on using honorifics when talking to elders and his positioning of himself as a full participant in Korean communities. In a way, his journal writing represented his resistance to normative norms and discourses of the bounded worlds in the English-dominant context.
This study shows how a bilingual child opens a space to author his narratives and construct his transnational identities in his journal writing by deploying hybrid and multimodal literacy practices. Furthermore, this study allows the mother to reflect on how she as a parent envisions his learning trajectories and this, in turn, informs his journal writing practice. In this sense, this study not only provides insights into how home literacy practices could promote bilingual children’s awareness of their transnational experience and knowledge as resources but illustrates the collaboration between researchers and parents as potential to deepen our understanding of children’s literacy practices in the home.

Authors

• Minseok Choi, The Ohio State University - Columbus

• Hana Cho