Abstract
Abstract Writing research has yet to fully explore multilingual, transnational students’ literacies as negotiated across formal, informal, and digital spaces and as mediated by semiotic and identity resources mobilized across local and translocal contexts. This study draws on theoretical concepts of polycentricity and scale (Blommaert et al., 2005a, 2005b; Canagarajah & De Costa, 2016 ) to examine one Chinese international student’s (Morgan) literacies across an honors-designated first-year writing class and WeChat (a popular social networking smartphone application). Based on detailed tracing of Morgan’s literacies, this study examines her language and identity practices as mediated by local and translocal semiotic resources distributed across spaces and times. In connecting WeChat and the writing classroom as two centers of Morgan’s multilingual work, this study provides a nuanced account of spaces as semiotic resources that operate with normative values that legitimize certain language practices while constraining others. A scalar analysis of Morgan’s self- and school-sponsored literacies complicates current accounts of digital literacies as expanding opportunities for literacy learning by suggesting ways in which literacy mobility might be constrained by power differentials that position spaces and language practices in hierarchical orders.
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