Multivoiced Participation: Footing and Heteroglossia in Bilingual Children’s Heritage Language Learning

• In Event: Translanguaging, Multimodality and Affect in School and Community Learning Ecologies

Abstract

1. Objectives
This study explores how young bilingual Swedish–Chinese children (3-5 years old) exercise agency and shape classroom participation through multivoiced and embodied storytelling in a Chinese heritage language (HL) weekend school in Sweden. It aims to understand how children creatively appropriate language, stance, and reported speech to shift participation frameworks from teacher-led to child-centered, engaging affective, linguistic, and embodied resources along with personal experiences. It also shows how the teacher responsively designs her talk and embodied actions through embodied affective displays and translanguaging to support children’s participation and heritage language learning.

2. Perspective(s) or theoretical framework
Grounded in language socialization theory (Ochs & Schieffelin, 2011), this study draws on Goffman’s (1981) concept of footing and Bakhtin’s (1981, 1986) heteroglossia and multivoicedness to examine how children use reported speech negotiate participation in interaction. The analysis also considers recipient design (Sacks et al., 1974) to highlight how both children and the teacher tailor their talk and embodied actions to each other’s epistemic and affective stances, and interactional status.

3. Methods
The study uses multimodal conversation analysis to investigate video-recorded classroom interactions based on ethnographic fieldwork. It examines how children use embodied, affective and verbal practices to launch personal experiences and display peer alignments, and how teachers scaffold these contributions through responsive language use and embodied affective displays.

4. Data sources, evidence, objects, or materials
Data consist of around 50 hours of video-recorded classroom interaction collected during a fieldwork for over two semesters in a Chinese weekend school. Participants are multilingual preschoolers from Swedish–Chinese families. All children are born in Sweden and have varying proficiencies in Chinese. Despite the school’s monolingual instruction, translanguaging occurs in practice. Three excerpts are closely analyzed, focusing on collaborative storytelling moments where children use embodied forms of reported speech to introduce personal accounts, referencing absent family members to assert epistemic and moral authority.

5. Results and/or substantiated conclusions
Our findings show how children draw on multi-voiced resources (e.g. reported speech, adult registers, embodied enactments, and translanguaging) to co-construct interaction and assert speakership. These unsolicited initiatives shift participation frameworks, allowing children to claim speakership and align with peers. The teacher supports these shifts through recipient design, adapting her talk, gaze, affect, and embodied stance to the envolving needs. Her affective engagement, for instance smiling, nodding, and prosodic tones validates children’s efforts and sustains their engagement. Rather than enforcing monolingual norms, the teacher’s translanguaging stance affirms the use of both Swedish and Chinese, supporting understanding and HL learning.

6. Scientific or scholarly significance of the study or work
This study offers empirical insight into how young children creatively use language, affect, and embodied actions to participate in HL learning. It contributes to theoretical work on heteroglossia, children’s agency, and multimodal participation, while showing how responsive and inclusive pedagogies can support bilingual children’s heritage language learning. By integrating translanguaging theory with multimodal interactional analysis, the study deepens understanding of how classroom learning is co-constructed through affective, linguistic, and multimodal collaboration.

Authors

• Zejia Xu, Uppsala University

• Ann-Carita Evaldsson, Uppsala University, Sweden