Semiotic Repertoires Research Articles

‘Happy Loong Year”: translating festive language into English in Shantou’s coffee shops

ABSTRACT Temporal markers provide unique opportunities for a community to revisit traditions, construct identity, and negotiate solidarity. The linguistic landscape (LL) encapsulating the celebration of the Chinese New Year, a momentous festival for both the Chinese community and people worldwide, presents a distinctive avenue for exploring the contestation and negotiation of diverse values and viewpoints in envisioning the future in the public sphere. The paper investigates the use of multilingual and multimodal resources to commemorate the Chinese New Year in Shantou’s coffee shops, revealing a diverse textual and visual narrative of celebration. In this process, socially constructed linguistic borders dissolve, facilitating the meshing and fusion of languages and enabling the reimagination, reinterpretation, and rewriting of the New Year. The juxtaposition of elements in differing linguistic and semiotic repertoires opens a dialogue, wherein values and traditions associated with the New Year are negotiated and reconstructed within the context of the evolving social attitudes and beliefs in post-pandemic Shantou.

(Trans)languaging-for-learning: A perspective from the South

Background: While the concept of translanguaging has gained significant traction in education in multilingual contexts, it is also debated and contested. Claims are made about what translanguaging can and cannot do, how different it might be from code-switching, whether it arises from a single repertoire of language resources or from use of separate languages, and whether it is detrimental to or supportive of the development and inclusion of marginalised languages.Objectives: In this article we consider what these debates might mean in the South African context and how translanguaging might be different in South Africa with its particular racialised history of marginalisation of African languages. Drawing on epistemologies of the South, we align with the argument that there are multiple multilingualisms. We argue for (trans)languaging pedagogies that embrace both more fixed or monolingual uses of named languages as well as fluid, multilingual use of repertoires.Method: We will review early conceptualisations of translanguaging, showing how these are born out of different contexts as well as how translanguaging is taken up in South African research. We will draw on three examples of fixed and fluid pedagogical translanguaging to show what is possible within a South African classroom context.Results: The three examples show that (trans)languaging-for-learning goes beyond communicating bilingually in a classroom and involves planned meaning negotiation.Conclusion: In (trans)languaging-for-learning, the emphasis is on using one’s full linguistic and semiotic repertoire in order to develop and show understanding of learning, rather than to demonstrate mastery of the use of standard named languages.Contribution: The article expands translanguaging theory by theorising (trans)languaging-for-learning from a Southern perspective.

The semiotic repertoire of dairy cows

Abstract This article moves from the familiar—the human—to the very different in sociolinguistics—the dairy cow. Based on multispecies ethnography, the aim of this article is to advocate the animal turn in sociolinguistics (Cornips 2019). The guiding question is how do non-human animals, that is, dairy cows—mutually and with humans—imbue their intraspecies and interspecies interaction with meaning that makes sense for the two species. The concept of semiotic repertoire is invoked in order to investigate how dairy cows draw on resources to make meaning, and the concept of material-semiotic assemblage is applied in order to account for the different effects generated by the resources that come together at particular moments. The assemblage perspective does not take a ‘cow’ or ‘human’ as discrete and fixed but focuses on the distributed and emergent agency as a relational effect of all elements involved: humans, non-humans, and other. (Intraspecies and interspecies interactions, the semiotic repertoire, assemblage, dairy cows, practices)*

Responding to Children’s Semiotic Repertoires in Collaborative Digital Storytelling

Responding to Children’s Semiotic Repertoires in Collaborative Digital Storytelling

Sensescapes in multilingual environments

Abstract Sensescapes refer to the complex multimodal and semiotic assemblages that confer meaning to space as experienced by individuals and groups. The study of sensescapes seeks to understand the nature of these assemblages, how they shape meaning, and with them, individual and collective experiences. This article unpacks sensescapes as an expansive lens to meaning in space, underscoring its potential to investigate the nexus between language and culture. To that end, it integrates existing proposals in linguistic landscapes and translanguaging, and connects them to a working definition of sensescapes drawn from various social sciences and humanities fields. To illustrate the study of sensescapes and their relevance to applied linguistics, the article reports on a case study conducted in the Al-Kissaria district of Nador, Morocco through participatory ethnography. The study provides a phenomenological account of the experiences of two multilingual sisters from neighboring Melilla, Spain, as they navigate a market area. The data illustrate how the sisters’ sensory interactions with the environment interplay with their linguistic and broader semiotic repertoires, activating their previous experiences and shaping their conceptualizations and negotiation of language and culture in this space.

Brokering understanding: Canadian deaf interpreters’ role and practice

ABSTRACT This article reports findings from semi-structured interviews with twelve Canadian deaf interpreter (DI) participants as part of a three-year study of language ideologies related to DIs. DIs are professional or amateur sign language interpreters and translators who are deaf and who may often but not always work as part of a team with hearing interpreters. When working with a hearing interpreter who uses the same national sign language, the DI’s role is often seen as meeting the needs of deaf clients who are viewed as lacking proficiency in a named language and/or who are viewed as monolingual in a named national sign language. This reflects normative language ideologies and conceptions of interpreting and translation. DI participants described their role in terms of their enhanced powers of understanding that elicited greater information from other deaf individuals than was apparent to a hearing interpreter. In addition, DI participants characterized their work as primarily translation, in a manner that accords with translation as the creation of meaning and as translanguaging that extends beyond named languages and deploys the individual’s full semiotic repertoire.

Mouthing Constructions in 37 Signed Languages

Abstract The descriptive contribution of this paper is a typology of mouthing constructions in 37 signed languages and an analysis of the ideologies and resources that affect their documentation. The languages are divided into two categories labelled deaf (n=26) and rural (n=11), that are defined based on socio-historical/-cultural properties, but which have been problematised for their conflation of multiple linguistic ecologies (Kusters, 2009: 200; Nyst, 2012; Reed, 2019; Safar, 2020). The analysis is used to argue that phenomena like mouthing are marginalised in documentation, as opposed to marginal, and that the deaf-rural divide tracks differences that are more related to issues of documentation than contexts of language use and emergence. The Semiotic Repertoires approach (Kusters et al., 2017) is used to motivate the unit of analysis, the mouthing construction, and Uniformitarianism in Creole linguistics (Mufwene, 2000; DeGraff, 2005) is used as a lens onto signed language typology.

Signing songs and the openings of semiotic repertoires

Abstract This paper presents an interpretative interview study that explores a song signer’s motivations and language ideologies as they emerge in translanguaging between languages and modalities. In signing songs, the limitations and proficiencies of deaf artists’ and audience members’ particular linguistic and semiotic repertoires come to the fore. The artist mediates between the affordances of the asymmetrically shared visual and auditory channels, as well as across music, song lyrics, and sign language. In so doing, they produce a distinctive text whose appreciation may expose the partial and asymmetric repertoires of audience members, as well as the limitations of the text itself in crossing borders. These limitations and asymmetries render song signing an ethical event because the ethical possibilities of communication emerge in its fallibility.

(Im)possibility of ethical encounters in places of separation: aesthetics as a quiet applied linguistics praxis

Abstract What is the possibility of ethical encounters in places that are historically, spatially, and morally configured to avoid them? And what can applied linguistics do to create such a possibility? This study is located in a rural community in eastern Slovakia with a history of separation between Slovak and Roma ethnic groups and the systemic spatial, economic and linguistic marginalisation of the latter. This paper draws on relational ethics to foreground the perceiving subject’s ethical responsibility. I take up the scholarship on semiotic repertoires and exploit their performative power to affect the perceiving subject. Advocating for aesthetics as an applied linguistics research praxis, this article both documents and invites a sensory entanglement with others through a series of aesthetic invitations. I see such an embodied engagement as a way for applied linguistics to stage the ground for ethical encounters, even if never guarantee an outcome. I discuss what this research pathway might mean for doing applied linguistics research in social and educational settings with entrenched narratives about the other and how quiet applied linguistics – one which privileges sensory attending and epistemological indeterminacy – might be a form of activism that disturbs the realm of the impossible.

Post-Digital Connectivities: Framing Offline Encounters in a Digital Prospection Space

Abstract This paper explores the use of mobile technologies in facilitating offline encounters, through a post-digital lens which posits the digital not as new or disruptive but as a ubiquitous and accepted part of everyday social connectivities. In the paper, we explore ways in which migrants draw on jointly assembled semiotic repertoires, affordances, and constraints of the digital space, as well as cultural knowledge and spatial relating, to establish common ground and an interpretative framework for engaging in ensuing offline encounters. Drawing on an interactional analysis of data from a large linguistic ethnographic project, we focus on how a group of Polish immigrants who live in different parts of London bring their offline contexts and socially or culturally motivated expectations into their interactions to facilitate alignment in interactional frames in the context of limited familiarity with each other. Overall, our analysis points to the role of group messaging in creating a digital prospection space in which a joint frame of reference can be interactively constructed in anticipation of an offline encounter.

Diversifying “English” at the Decolonial Turn

AbstractIn this brief forum article, I draw from the disciplinary orientation of linguistic anthropology to discuss how a collection of linguistic and semiotic resources gets enregistered as the “language” for specific communicative activities. Enregisterment is an ongoing social and ideological process whereby a semiotic corpus gets identified as conventional for an activity or identity (see Agha, 2005). At a larger scale of consideration, it can also help explain what is identified as “English” in any given time and place. It is more appropriate to focus on communicative activity as the unit of analysis for the diverse semiotic resources constituting it, rather than assuming a labeled language as the starting point for our teaching or research. In place of relying on formal proficiency in English grammar, which might have variable relevance in communicative practices, we must prepare students for the diverse semiotic repertoires needed for their purposes and develop in them the dispositions to always attune to the mix of entangled resources in any activity.

“She did it!”: Meaning-making in interaction between deaf and hearing siblings in Peru

Abstract In this article, I argue that centering multimodal practices is important in the study of human communication and sociality, and becomes particularly relevant in the presence of asymmetries in language access. Using data collected as part of a two-year linguistic ethnography of deaf youth in Iquitos, Peru, I demonstrate how three siblings engage in extended dispute routines even in the face of sensory and communicative asymmetries. The microanalysis of video-recorded sibling interaction sheds light on their use of diverse multimodal resources to navigate the common interactional work of securing an interlocutor, coordinating attention, managing misunderstandings, and establishing shared references (Sidnell 2007, 2009). Not only do the siblings utilize multimodal resources to carry out the interactional project of making an accusation and building alliances, but they also ‘co-operatively’ engage in building a shared semiotic repertoire (C. Goodwin 2018). (Deaf, sign language, linguistic ethnography, multimodality, semiotic repertoire, Peru)*

Classroom interactional competence in an English medium instruction mathematics classroom: A creation of a technology-mediated translanguaging space

BackgroundSecond language classroom research has explored how teachers demonstrate their classroom interactional competence (CIC). CIC focuses on teachers’ ability to use appropriate language to mediate students’ learning and promote learning opportunities. Research on translanguaging has highlighted how teachers and students mobilise diverse multilingual, multimodal and spatial repertoires to collectively construct meaning in classroom interactions. Aims and samplesBased on a larger linguistic ethnographic project in a Hong Kong English-Medium-Instruction secondary mathematics classroom, this paper adopts a case study approach in order to examine how the teacher’s use of iPad expands his choice for using different multimodal repertoire to mediate and assist students’ learning of academic language and mathematical knowledge. MethodsMultimodal Conversation Analysis is deployed to analyse the classroom interaction data and it is triangulated with the video-stimulated-recall-interviews that are analysed using Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis. ResultsIt is evident in the findings that the construction of a technology-mediated space displays the English- Medium-Instruction teacher’s CIC, harnessing the available semiotic repertoires afforded by the iPad in order to achieve his pedagogical goals. ConclusionsI argue that the notion of CIC can be conceptualised through adopting translanguaging as an analytical perspective, which highlights the teacher’s ability in orchestrating technological affordances for creating an interactional space for student learning. Such a conceptualisation reinforces the need for teachers to draw on a wide range of available multilingual, multimodal, and technological repertoire to create a learning environment conductive to interaction and academic and language learning in English-Medium-Instruction classroom.

Low proficiency level learners' translingual and transmodal practices in teletandem: Challenging the separation of languages principle

Teletandem is a model of virtual exchange in which two speakers of different languages meet over videoconferencing tools so that they can learn each other's language and culture. Research and practice on teletandem draw on the principles of autonomy (each participant should make decisions about their own learning), reciprocity (each participant should assist their partner's learning), and separation of languages (each language should have its own moment of practice and should not be mixed). Some researchers, however, do not consider separation of languages to be a principle of tandem learning and few studies have challenged it from the theoretical perspective of code-switching (Picoli & Salomão, 2020) and investigated learner interaction using translanguaging (Canals, 2021; Satar, 2020; Walker, 2017). In this paper, data come from the MuLTeC teletandem corpus. Using social semiotics, we investigate six recorded videoconferencing sessions of a Brazilian/American dyad with low language proficiency level and explore learners' transformative engagement with signs (Bezemer & Kress, 2016). Results reveal that participants draw on all the resources in their complete language repertoire (García & Wei, 2014) through translingual and transmodal practices, which allows them to make meanings beyond what they can express within their target language proficiency, creating opportunities to extend their semiotic repertoires. The findings evidence the inappropriateness of the separation of languages principle which neither works in practice nor is useful within current perspectives in language learning and teaching. Therefore, we propose a reframing of the principle as the translanguaging principle: based on the notion of translanguaging as co-learning, each participant should play fluid roles of expert/learner and capitalise on opportunities to extend each other's semiotic repertoires within multilingual and multimodal interaction.

Translanguaging as a teaching practice for linguistically diverse students

ABSTRACT Translanguaging refers to the communicative practices that go between and beyond defined linguistic systems. In language learning, it can be applied by helping learners access their whole linguistic and semiotic repertoires, thus enhancing language acquisition. This paper draws on quantitative data provided by language teachers of both elementary and secondary education in Greece through an online survey, in order to study their attitudes and practices towards translanguaging in the classroom. A combination of convenience sampling and snowball sampling was applied. The findings indicate that the majority of participants found translanguaging beneficial. Moreover, participants incorporate translanguaging practices quite often, while they encourage students’ translanguaging slightly less often, and there is a small positive correlation between attitudes and practices.

‘I feel unbalanced’: bridging emotions, creativity, and translingual pedagogy with EMI students

ABSTRACT Recent research on stakeholders’ emotions in English-medium instruction (EMI) higher education settings has demonstrated the importance of engaging students with their emotions about the impact of EMI on their lives. This article presents a pedagogical intervention bridging emotions, creativity, and translingual pedagogy with EMI students in Qatar. Through a semester-long project, students engaged with translingual mentor texts, which served as models for ways of sharing perspectives and emotions about different named languages and through translingual practice. Students then crafted their own translingual literacy narratives, drawing upon their full linguistic and semiotic repertoires to explore their emotions about their relationship with English and Arabic. Lastly, they transformed their written narratives into a multimodal, multilingual video. This project enabled students to actively explore and understand how their emotions are influenced by broader sociohistorical discourses. Given the shifts in Qatar’s educational language policies and discourse surrounding language and identity, students expressed a complex array of emotions, especially pride and shame, which led to feelings of both belonging and alienation. This article contributes to a deeper understanding of the emotional landscape and tensions surrounding EMI and demonstrates how emotions research can be effectively applied in EMI higher education settings through pedagogical interventions.

Recent lexical expansion in New Zealand Sign Language: context, scope and mechanisms

ABSTRACT This paper examines recent lexical expansion in New Zealand Sign Language (NZSL) in the context of change in the status of the language and ongoing contact with other (spoken and signed) languages. We categorised 917 new signs documented in the past five years according to their source, semantic field, and sign formation mechanism(s), both language-internal and language-external (contact induced). Lexical expansion in NZSL uses known sign formation mechanisms with a high proportion of (iconic) depicting constructions but also a large number of contact-induced signs including loans, calques and bimodal loan-shifts. Differences were found between planned (curriculum-related) terminology and community generated neologisms both in semantic field and prevalence of sign formation mechanisms. Variation in neologisms and non-lexical paraphrases were common, suggesting that while the semiotic repertoires of signers are diversifying, acceptance and standardisation of neologisms are uncertain. Our findings indicate that lexical expansion reflects new contexts of NZSL use (including pressure to disseminate information through interpreting and translation, and use in education) and interaction with the culture of wider society.

Greek heritage language teachers as emergency grassroots policy makers: reconciling learner centred responses with textbook heavy pedagogies during COVID-19 lockdown

ABSTRACT This paper addresses the paucity of research on policy agents’ responses to the shift to teaching online during the first lockdown in heritage language education and pedagogy. Collected in the context of a small-scale exploratory study, it focuses on the reflective accounts of a group of heritage language teachers in a Greek school in francophone Switzerland. The paper builds on a translingual and transcultural orientation to language and language education (Lytra et al., 2022, Liberating Language Education. Multilingual Matters) and investigates language teachers’ emergency grassroots policy making through a critical ethnographic lens (Martin-Jones & da Costa Cabral, 2018, The critical ethnographic turn in research on language policy and planning. In J. W. Tollefson, & M. Pérez-Milans (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Language Policy and Planning (pp. 71–92). Oxford University Press). It demonstrates how teachers leveraged children’s developing digital abilities and expanded their semiotic repertoires. Concerned with delivering the curriculum, meeting language and literacy objectives and managing parental expectations, teachers simultaneously exploited children’s familiarity with established textbook heavy pedagogies which they adapted to different degrees. The acknowledgement and incorporation of children's digital abilities, and experiences to support Greek language learning did not encompass an integrative multimodal and multilingual approach.

Decolonizing Academic Writing Pedagogies for Multilingual Students

AbstractThis article discusses how academic writing pedagogies for multilingual students can be transformed by the literacy traditions that these students bring to North American classrooms. This is an embodied and personal rendition, situated in the author's South Asian literacies as illustrative of Global South traditions, and draws from his own empirical research and teaching practices for writing instructors in TESOL. Informed by developments in decolonization, the article highlights the principles of embodiment and relationality as significant for Indigenous and Southern communities, and contrasts them with texts being treated as autonomous and instrumental in the European tradition. It reviews the different pedagogical models in the disciplinary field of “L1 composition,” which also influence academic programs labeled as “L2 composition,” to demonstrate how recent revisions to accommodate social and material influences are still influenced by Eurocentric epistemological values of logocentrism, cognitivism, and individualism. After reporting from the author's study of scientific research writing to illustrate how its entextualization demonstrates the distributed practice of diverse social networks, material resources, and semiotic repertoires across expansive space and time, the article recommends an ecological writing pedagogy that draws from situated learning and embodied apprenticeship as practiced by Southern communities. (Translations of abstract in https://www.iris‐database.org/details/rV5zj‐95Z8L).

Exploring Indonesian Teachers' and Students' Perceptions and Practices of Translanguaging and Trans-Semiotizing in EFL Classrooms

The current trend of dynamic multilingualism in the field of applied linguistics has triggered the emergence of pedagogical approaches that aim to support and legitimate multilingual language practices. Translanguaging and trans-semiotizing are among the terms that have been widely used to describe the dynamic flows of discursive practices that involve one’s full semiotic repertoire to communicate and construct knowledge, which still remains unexplored in this context. This study aimed to investigate both university teachers and students’ perceptions of translanguaging and trans-semiotizing in English classrooms. Using observation, semi-structured interviews to five teachers and focus group discussion to seven students, the results of thematic analysis demonstrated that while the teachers seemed to expect the implementation of monolingual instruction, the students had a more positive view towards the utilization of multiple languages and semiotic signs in the classroom. It was also found out that translanguaging and trans-semiotizing served numerous pedagogical functions in enhancing students’ comprehension of the materials. Nevertheless, the ability to translanguage and trans-semiotize was not seen as a multilingual competence, but as a manifestation of one’s linguistic deficiency. This study suggests that translanguaging and trans-semiotizing should not merely be seen as a pedagogical tool, but these practices should also be legitimated and valued.