Translingual and Transnational Literacy Practices in Out-of-School Translanguaging Spaces

• In Event: Cultivating Bi/multilingual Learners' Full Range of Knowledge(s) and Skill(s): The Promise of Translanguaging Spaces

Abstract

The number of immigrant children grew by 51% from 1995 to 2014, to 18.7 million. (Camera, 2016). However, English-only, Eurocentric, and standardized-testing driven schooling experiences put these students (and their families) in the position to lose or deny their home and community knowledge, experiences, languages, and literacy practices in order to “succeed.” There’s a significant discrepancy between the hegemonical reality to which migrants must assimilate in schools, and their transnational/translingual/transcultural realities at home and in their (trans)local communities. The purpose of this study is to bridge this discrepancy through illuminating the out-of-school translingual and transnational literacy practices (TTLP) of one Chinese adolescent girl, Meiyi (pseudonym). I ask: What are the translingual and transnational literacy practices of one Chinese adolescent girl in out-of-school translanguaging spaces?

I draw from a larger critical ethnographic case study (Kirkland, 2014; Patel, 2016; Yin, 2017) aimed to explore transnational youths’ transnational, multimodal, and translingual literacy practices. The guiding theoretical frameworks of my presentation are transnational literacies, translanguaging, and translanguaging spaces. Transnational literacies are migrants’ literacies that engage their background knowledge, identities, border-crossing communicative practices, and social, political, and economic relations across national borders (Skerrett, 2015; Warriner, 2007). Translanguaging refers to the ways in which translingual persons draw on their linguistic and cultural repertoires fluidly for meaning-making and communicative purposes (Garcia & Li Wei, 2014; Makalela, 2015). Moreover, Li Wei (2011) theorizes translanguaging spaces as “a space for the act of translanguaging as well as a space created through translanguaging” (p. 1). As such, I consider translingual practices as a crucial part of transnational youths’ transnational literacy practices. The spaces in which translingual and transnational literacies are practiced are translanguaging spaces.

Meiyi arrived in the U.S. from mainland China in 2017. Currently, she attends 11th grade in a predominantly white private Christian school in a Southeastern metropolitan city in the U.S. She lives with her aunt, Kai, and grandparents, Yeye and Nainai. The data corpus includes semi-structured and artifact-elicited interviews, field notes, researcher memos, video recordings of family events, and Meiyi’s photovoice journals, social media posts, and poetry. I use thematic analysis (Miles et al., 2014) to explore Meiyi’s TTLP grounded in her transnational mobility.

Findings consist of two themes. First, Meiyi engages in TTLP organically in her out-of-school translanguaging spaces (i.e., home and Chinese community). These practices include reading the same book in English and Chinese, conversing with Kai in multiple languages, multilingual/multimodal journaling, and engaging in baking cookies and cooking traditional Chinese dishes with Nainai. Second, Meiyi’s out-of-school translanguaging spaces are unstructured and unguided. Instead, they are a salient part of her lived realities that sustain her entire linguistic and literate repertoire.

My study contributes to the ongoing conversations about translanguaging and how multilingual migrants can engage in learning experiences that value and sustain their languages and communicative practices. Through illuminating the translanguaging spaces of one transnational youth that are not forcefully created through policy or pedagogy, I emphasize the importance of (re)visiting, valuing, and sustaining migrants’ out-of-school lived realities in language and literacy education.

Author

• Tairan Qiu, University of Georgia - Athens