Chinese young people’s attitudes towards translanguaging in self-praise on social media

Abstract

Translanguaging practice has become increasingly popular in individuals' lives, particularly in online communication among young people. A body of existing research has described translanguaging practice and its potential functions, but few studies have systematically examined individuals' attitudes towards translanguaging practices. Therefore, this paper investigates the extent to which young people consider translanguaging practices appropriate, and how they judge the motivating factors and effects of translanguaging practices on social media. The study chose to focus on self-praise on social media as its research context, aiming to investigate Chinese young people’s attitudes toward translanguaging on Weibo and examine whether their gender influences their attitudes. The results showed that Chinese young people generally perceived the use of translanguaging strategies in self-praise on Weibo as appropriate. The participants rated multi-semiotic resources the highest, significantly higher than their ratings of multimodal and multilingual resources. They held a neutral-to-positive attitude towards translanguaging on social media, and the results also revealed consistent gender differences in attitudes towards translanguaging practices in this context.