Translingual writing allows multilingual students to draw upon all their linguistic resources to engage in meaningful written communication (Canagarajah, 2011). Because communication is a product of social practices and "languages are not something that human beings have but what human beings are" (Tiostanova & Mignolo, 2012, p. 61), it is important to understand multilingual students' lived experiences and sense-making in their everyday written communication before rethinking the implementation of translingual writing in American college composition classrooms. To unpack multilinguals' written communication across social and academic contexts, this exploratory qualitative study integrates digital ethnographic (Pink et al., 2016) and interview methods to explore the first-semester communication experiences of ten Chinese international students in a private research institution in the United States. The research questions are: (1) How did the participants engage in translingual writing in academic contexts? (2) How did they engage in translingual written communication in social contexts?
Data sources of the study included (1) two 45-minute semi-structured interviews with each participant and (2) a four-month digital ethnography of participants' written communication via a multilingual and multimodal digital platform WeChat. Data were analyzed following the coding procedures of applied thematic analysis (Guest, MacQueen, & Namey, 2012). Constant member-checking was conducted to reduce biases (Creswell & Miller, 2000).
The findings indicate participants creatively tapped into their rich multilingual communicative repertoires and engaged in translingual written communication as part of their lived experiences in social contexts. However, they were reluctant to draw upon their home language in English-medium academic settings. Based on the findings, I discuss the pedagogical implications on supporting multilingual students in English-medium college composition classrooms. I argue that instructors must reposition themselves as co-learners together with their multilingual students to enact a translingual stance (Horner et al., 2011) in academic settings and reimagine meaningful written communication beyond English-only. This study sheds light on rethinking the pedagogical practices around implementing translingualism in English-medium higher education. It contributes to the scarce literature which adopts digital ethnography (Pink et al., 2016) to explore multilingual students' lived experiences in translingual writing and provides a preliminary investigation of an under-researched territory of "whether codemeshed writing would serve the students well in contexts outside the classroom" (Canagarajah, 2011, p. 416).
Reference
Canagarajah, S. (2011). Codemeshing in Academic Writing: Identifying Teachable Strategies of Translanguaging. The Modern Language Journal, 95(3), 401-417.
Creswell, J. W., & Miller, D. L. (2000). Determining validity in qualitative inquiry. Theory into practice, 39(3), 124-130.
Guest, G., MacQueen, K. M., & Namey, E. E. (2012). Applied thematic analysis. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications.
Pink, S., Horst, H. A., Postill, J., Hjorth, L., Lewis, T., & Tacchi, J. (2016). Digital ethnography: Principles and practice. Los Angeles: SAGE.
Tiostanova, M. V., & Mignolo, W. (2012). Learning to unlearn: Decolonial reflections from Eurasia and the Americas. The Ohio State University Press.
