Languaging to Become Global Communicators: Transnational Adolescents' Digital Communicative Practice

• In Event: Expanding the Notions of "Multilingualism" and "Multimodality" by Examining Multilingual Practice Across Various Educational Contexts

Abstract

Objectives
This paper examines how transnational adolescents, bilingual teachers, and the researcher collaboratively built a multilingual community by reinforcing their multiple languages and literacy practices through multimodal and multilingual dialogues. In the context of a global online community for youth designed by educators, this study calls attention to the importance of creating spaces for youth to engage in multilingual, multimodal communication to leverage their multiple resources as global communicators.

Theoretical Framework
The theoretical underpinning of New Literacy Studies (Gee, 2015; Street, 2003) guided the design of this study to develop youths’ communicative repertoires by maximizing their linguistic and cultural resources through a digitally mediated transborder academic space. This sociocultural perspective on language and literacy provides a useful conceptual groundwork for adolescents’ dynamic multiple border crossings in their language and literacy practices, acknowledging the complexities of mobilities through global connectivity (e.g., Smith, Stornaiuolo & Phillips, 2018; Stornaiuolo & LeBlanc, 2016). Overall, this holistic theoretical perspective promotes an understanding of multiple language and literacy practices as socially and culturally situated.

Methods and Data
Employing design-based research (Barab & Squire, 2016), the platform for communication, digital tools, and curriculum were designed to facilitate students’ meaning-making practices. Among 300 participating students from five countries in the global community, this presentation focuses on 20 adolescents in two nations: South Korea and the U.S. These young people engaged in multilingual, multimodal writing individually and collaboratively beyond their local classrooms and communities. The researcher, two teachers, and students co-designed curriculum focusing on three main activities that mapped their individual and communal resources and experiences. Over one academic year, multiple data sources were gathered, including artifacts, interviews, surveys, analytic memos, field notes, and group chats. Data were analyzed using content analysis (Neuendorf, 2016; Saldaña, 2015) and critical discourse analysis (Fairclough, 2013; van Dijk, 2009) to find themes.

Results and Significance
Findings indicate that students who were engaged in cross-cultural communication in a digital context not only developed their transnational identities but also took up positions as mutual contributors who can build a global community by mobilizing their transnational language and literacies. Young people’s language use leads us to rethink the use of the English language “as a global means of inter-community communication” (Seidlhofer, 2016, p. 20), as adolescents engaged in global communication online with multiple languages and semiotic and other material sources for different audiences and purposes. The findings of this study contribute to understanding young people’s language and literacy practices in a transnational networked context by blurring the normative concepts of L2 (e.g., non-native language, second language, foreign language) in the current digital era. The focus of this presentation foregrounds the importance of our role as educators to accept greater responsibility for creating an equitable, accessible space for young people within multilingual educational contexts.

Author

• Jin Kyeong Jung, Texas Tech University