Spatial Repertoires Research Articles

Peer interaction practices as part of a Sweden Finnish spatial repertoire

Canagarajah's (2018) notion spatial orientation presupposes that communication is the sum of semiotic resources being used in a material ecology by a social network. This collaboratively facilitated way of meaning making forms a spatial repertoire. Based on these tenets, the current study focuses on the social network and its role when a group of Sweden Finnish minority pupils with varying linguistic proficiencies interact during Finnish class in a bilingual Sweden Finnish school. The study proposes the term peer interaction practice (PIP) to describe the mechanism of variable peer interactions. The study uses appraisal as a method for identifying PIPs in class room observations.

Students’ multimodal knowledge sharing in school: Spatial repertoires and semiotic assemblages

In a world ‘flooded’ with data, students in school need adequate tools as Visual Analytics (VA), that easily process mass data, give support in drawing advanced conclusions and help to make informed predictions in relation to societal circumstances. Methods for how the students’ insights may be reformulated and presented in ‘appropriate’ modes are required as well. Therefore, the aim in this study is to analyse elementary school students’ practices of communicating visual discoveries, their insights, as the final stage in the knowledge-building process with an VA-application for interactive data visualization. A design-based intervention study is conducted in one social science classroom to explore modes for students presentation of insights, constructed from the interactive data visualizations. Video captures are used to document 30 students’ multifaceted presentations. The analyses are based on concepts from Pennycook (2018) and Deleuze and Guattari (1987). To account for how different modes interact, when students present their findings, one significant empirical sequence is described in detail. The emerging communicative dimensions (visual-, bodily- and verbal-) are embedded within broad spatial repertoires distributing flexible semiotic assemblages. These assemblages provide an incentive for the possibilities of teachers’ assessments of their students’ knowledge outcomes.

EFL Teacher’s Beliefs about Sociolinguistic Competence:

The research aimed to explore beliefs of sociolinguistic competence from Indonesian EFL (English as a Foreign Language) teachers. Two teachers were carefully chosen to participate in the research. Data were collected through semi-structured interviews, analyzed, and interpreted using the critical descriptive method. The research finds that EFL teachers express their beliefs in various terms, ideologies, and perspectives. The result indicates that the EFL teachers’ beliefs about sociolinguistic competence are equivalent to the concepts of spatial repertoire, principled-polycentrism, resourceful speakers, and sociolinguistics as mobility. It also indicates that EFL teachers’ pedagogical affordances in determining learning objectives, selecting materials and media for learning, implementing classroom strategies, and choosing appropriate evaluation for their teaching are influenced by their beliefs of sociolinguistic competence. The research suggests that Indonesian EFL teachers should be awarded the freedom to develop sociolinguistic competence based on their classroom context and learners’ heterogeneity. With the presence of a national curriculum (known as K13) that gives more spaces for sociolinguistic competence to take place, teachers should transform their paradigm of seeing classroom interaction in EFL classroom to be more sociolinguistically-aware to transform the static, pre-determined, and motionless definition of sociolinguistic competence to a more dynamic, fluid, and varying. These transformations can be made by imparting sociolinguistic competence in teachers’ education and teachers’ professional development programs.

Identités sociomatérielles et création d’histoires plurilingues et numériques

In the context of this special issue offering new materialist viewpoints in the field of language education, a sociomaterial perspective allows me to question an anthropocentric definition of learners’ and teachers’ identities in a school context. Looking at two moments of plurilingual and digital story production that occurred in an elementary school located in a major city in British Columbia, I trace the trajectories of sociomaterial agencements which involved learners, languages, spaces, researchers and other materials. I adopt a post-qualitative inquiry stance and go back and forth between concepts from posthumanist, new materialist, Deleuzo-Guattarian and Indigenous perspectives and narrative descriptions, screenshots and other figures. Thinking with theories, I follow unpredictable lines of flight which lead to the rhizoanalysis of two moments lived in a French immersion classroom, and I invite readers to come up with their own questions and to take part in the inquiry process. The following concepts – spatial repertoires, agencements, body materiality, excesses and flows of affect – demand that we widen our gaze in research and in practice so that we can better understand the dynamic identity agencements that gather diverse human and material elements.

Research trends in ‘trans-’ studies on writing: A bibliometric analysis

This study identifies the research trends of ‘trans-’ studies on writing by analyzing 165 journal articles from a bibliometric approach. The corpus consists of peer-reviewed journal articles published from 2011 to 2020, during which ‘trans-’ studies on writing experienced rapid development in its conceptualization and implementation. Our analysis concentrates on (1) the most highly cited authors and articles and (2) the most frequently discussed concepts and their changes over the past decade. The results reveal that translingual practice, a concept that is mainly developed by Suresh Canagarajah (2013a, 2013b, 2015, 2018), has been increasingly adopted to illustrate language practices in writing processes. Other concepts, such as translingual approach, spatial repertoires, translanguaging, and translingualism, have also been widely discussed in writing studies, which corroborates the central principles of ‘trans-’ studies on writing. With this growing interest, ‘trans-’ principles have been increasingly enacted in writing practices, which has been reflected in the increasing use of the word combinations, such as translingual pedagogy, translanguaging pedagogy, and translanguaging space. The results also show that some terms, such as translingual writing, code-switching, code-meshing, and monolingualism, have been decreasingly discussed due to some misunderstandings of those terms and the relatively stable conceptualization of ‘trans-’ terms.

Aphasia and labour inclusion: therapy, biopower, and encuentros

ABSTRACT Background: This is a qualitative case study of Sara, a 32-year-old black woman with nonfluent aphasia. Aims: Based on critical disability theory and poststructuralist approaches, we analyse the relationship between speech-language therapy and labour inclusion as founded in normalcy expectations. Methods and Procedures: The data were collected mainly at home and during therapy. The participants included Sara, her mother, her father, a speech-language pathologist, and a possible employer. Main Contributions: Sara’s interactions are structured in spatial repertoires that assemble diverse elements into communication and not only linguistic structures. However, these assemblages do not represent accepted adult ways of communication, and therapy is focused on repairing broken linguistic skills for normalization as a requirement for labour inclusion. Sara’s therapy is a biopower practice that limits her possibilities for labour inclusion and life projects. Conclusions: We reconceptualize the therapy as encuentros for collective dialogue and imagined communities’ emergence. This reconceptualization is a must for changing the field and participation patterns of people with aphasia in the society.

Da FALA à SEMIOSE

This paper explores the quest for an account of the ‘total linguistic fact’. Speech act theory, sociolinguistics, linguistic anthropology and social semiotics have all attempted, in various ways and at various times, to find a way to describe as much as possible that is going on around any speech event. While this search for the total linguistic fact will always be a chimerical goal, this paper proposes a framework based on the acronym SEMIOSIS as one way of grasping the complexity of what is at play, comprising social relations, emotional and sensorial engagement, mobility, Iterative activity, objects and assemblages, socio- and translingual practices, interactivity, and spatial repertoires. Looking at data from a small Bangladeshi-run store in Tokyo, the paper shows how bringing in this wider set of concerns at least allows for a more comprehensive account of sociolinguistic moments.

The affordances of iPad for constructing a technology-mediated space in Hong Kong English medium instruction secondary classrooms: A translanguaging view

Despite the widespread use of mobile digital devices such as iPads in teaching and learning, there is little research on the ways in which content teachers make use of the technological affordances of the iPad to achieve pedagogical goals in bilingual/multilingual classrooms. This article adopts translanguaging as an analytical perspective to explore how the use of the iPad extends the semiotic and spatial repertoires for enabling the English Medium Instruction (EMI) teacher to create a translanguaging space for supporting multilingual students’ learning of new academic knowledge. The data for this article is based on a linguistic ethnographic project in an EMI mathematics classroom in a secondary school in Hong Kong. Multimodal Conversation Analysis is used to analyse the classroom interactional data, triangulated with the video-stimulated-recall-interviews that are analysed using Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis. The article argues that the iPad provides opportunities for the EMI teacher to fully exploit the semiotic and spatial resources for creating a technology-mediated space in the classroom. Such a space in turn allows the teacher to accomplish content teaching and build a more engaging environment for learning.

Competence beyond language: translanguaging and spatial repertoire in teacher-student interaction in a music classroom in an international Chinese University

ABSTRACT Previous research on classroom interaction in international university contexts tended to focus on individual speakers’ language (in)competence. This paper adopts a translanguaging and spatial orientation to intercultural classroom interaction and highlights the role of situated assemblages of linguistic, semiotic and multimodal resources embedded in the environment of learning activities for successful communication. The study provides a close multimodal conversation analysis of the interaction between a Chinese instructor and an international student in a music classroom in an international university adopting English medium in China. The findings illustrate how diverse resources beyond the official language of instruction congregated at a particular time in the classroom, interacted with one another and worked collaboratively to allow the two participants, with language barriers between them, to communicate smoothly and accomplish the teaching/learning tasks efficiently. We thus call for an expanded conceptualization of communicative competence in intercultural (classroom) interaction in international higher education, which moves beyond the linguistic-centered view and incorporates the value of spatial repertoires in generating individuals’ situated ‘language ability’ for achieving communicative, teaching and learning goals. Implications for language policy and pedagogy in international universities are discussed.

Navigating the instructional settings of EMI: a spatial perspective on university teachers’ experiences

ABSTRACT While English as a medium of instruction (EMI) is becoming a global phenomenon across higher education contexts, little attention has been paid to the instructional experiences of EMI teachers. Informed by a spatial perspective, this study explored how a cohort of Chinese university teachers navigated their EMI instructional settings. Different from the conventional discourse that depicts EMI teachers as deficit due to their being nonnative speakers of English, this study shows that the teachers were able to capitalise on their spatial repertoires for alternative ways of meaning making in their EMI classrooms. Instead of reducing EMI into an English-only space, the findings show that the teachers constructed EMI as three major spaces, including a space for drawing upon local experiences as spatial resources, a space for redefining internationalisation, and a space for translingual pedagogy practice. Through the construction of these spaces, the teachers reclaimed their legitimacy of being EMI teachers. The findings lend further support to refute the monolingual bias in EMI practice and call for attention to how EMI teachers can act as agents in reconstructing EMI instructional settings as spaces for multilingual and multimodal meaning making.

Conceptualizing community translanguaging through a family literacy project

ABSTRACT This article examines translanguaging that occurs in and as a community. Expanding the notion of translanguaging, we conceptualize community translanguaging as collaborative meaning-making among children, their family and community members, and their collective semiotic resources. Using a family literacy project as the research site, this article showcases how participating families built (on) cultural and semiotic wealth beyond the individual’s and across diverse sign systems; this was demonstrated both in the process and as the product of family storybooks. Taking an ecological approach and drawing from the notions of spatial repertoires, assemblages, and distributed/collaborative agency, the analysis shows that languaging is inherently social, intertextual, multimodal, and contingent on the dynamic of the semiotic ecology. Families collaborated, cross-culturally, metalinguistically, multimodally, and across generations, to discuss, write, draw, and digitize their family stories. This expanded concept of community translanguaging counters the coded notion of language and resulting separatist paradigm of language education with pedagogical implications. Leveraging community repertoires provides new opportunities to create educational space(s) where more/various semiotic resources can be drawn upon to maximize creativity in teaching and learning. It also can engage families and communities from diverse backgrounds in ways that empower, rather than marginalize, diverse ways with words and beyond.

Metrolingualism in online linguistic landscapes

ABSTRACT The field of linguistic landscape has rarely engaged with the growing number of metrolingual practices brought about by online digital spaces. This paper examines the online linguistic landscape of social media platforms, which presents a spatial repertoire of innovative semiotic affordances. Adopting an online ethnographic approach consisting of screenshots of WeChat Moment posts and semi-structured interviews and drawing on the researcher’s ethnographic knowledge of the participants, the study examines how participants in this online space draw upon a complex array of semiotic resources from spatial repertoires to constantly negotiate their self-presentation and manage the effects of context collapse. The analysis shows that metrolingual practices have contributed to self-policing of content, manipulation of accessibility, and compensation for literacy in the online linguistic landscape. By tuning the analytical focus from offline to online spaces, the study expands the scope of linguistic landscape research and invites further examination of the relationship between language and space.

Text, talk, and body in shift handover interaction: Language and multimodal repertoires for geriatric care work

AbstractJapan's rapidly aging population and chronic labor shortages have led the country to consider increased reliance on foreign workers. The government promotes the cultivation of nihongo jinzai ‘Japanese language human resources’ (MOFA, 2013), that is, highly skilled foreign workers proficient in the de facto national language, but in reality, such ideal individuals are scarce. Workplaces thus must explore ways to accommodate workers with limited Japanese competence. By introducing a sequential and multimodal analysis of shift handover interaction between Japanese and foreign care workers at a geriatric facility, the current article critically evaluates the monolingual, logocentric ideology reflected in the ongoing national debate as well as in the institutional convention of information sharing. The examination of the ways in which these workers deploy multimodal semiotic resources for the fulfillment of their duty points to the need for reevaluation of conventional practices in favor of increased affordance of spatial repertoire.

Spatial repertoires in the disciplinary communication of international STEM scholars

ABSTRACT The overall goal of this special issue is to understand how bi-/multilingual STEM scholars navigate and deploy spatial repertoires for professional communication. The articles present contextualized, empirical cases from various genre contexts: instructional practices, scholarly writing, language proficiency tests, and research group meetings. While all the articles adopt a spatial orientation to understanding STEM communication, the authors draw from diverse theoretical concepts that include chronotope, new materialism, and stance analysis for their data analysis. The analyses to understand these genre-specific contexts broadly combine two approaches: (1) analysis of actual communicative practices; and (2) meta-discursive comments by the professionals on their practices. In analyzing the disciplinary practices, language ideologies, and textual products, the authors use the methodological tools of interaction analysis, document analysis, observation, and interviews. Several articles combine more than one methodological tool in order to capture various aspects of disciplinary communication in the given genre context. The six articles included in this issue were first presented as a colloquium at the annual conferences of the American Association for Applied Linguistics in 2019 in Atlanta, Georgia.

Materializing assessment: spatial repertoires and dialectic proficiency in oral English proficiency examinations for international teaching assistants in the US

ABSTRACT Various examinations are administered at universities across the US as a means of assessing bilingual/multilingual international teaching assistants’ (ITAs’) proficiency in spoken English before they are permitted to teach. While such exams are taken by students in a range of academic disciplines, recent research suggests that communicative success in academic disciplines such as STEM is more accurately understood through a materialist, as opposed to structuralist, orientation to competence. According to this orientation, communication is not contingent on autonomous competence in standardized English but instead on transcultural dispositions along with the strategic use of semiotic resources and spatial repertoires. In this paper, we provide a focused analysis of one university’s Test of Oral English Proficiency (TOEP), which was recently redesigned in alignment with a materialist orientation to competence (e.g. through greater consideration for materiality, embodiment, and performativity). Through an analysis of audio and video recordings from the TOEP, this article demonstrates that a materialist orientation to competence can be actualized through a paradigm of assessment that accounts for the mutual negotiation of proficiency between speaking and listening subjects, or what we refer to as materializing assessment.

Traveling through spatial repertoires and mathematics: chronotopes of physics discourse and instructional practices

ABSTRACT This paper examines the chronotopic nature of physics discourse and instructional practices that are mediated through the integration of disciplinary spatial repertoires and mathematical symbolic systems. The paper addresses how meanings are constructed during instruction between bilingual international teaching assistants (ITAs) and undergraduate physics students through the chronotopic (re)contextualization of prior physics reasoning and future applications in present discussions about a physics event. Instructional activities mediated by spatial repertoires and mathematical symbolic systems between ITAs and undergraduates were video recorded. Data were analyzed using a joint method of multimodal conversation analysis and the Bakhtinian concept of chronotope. Findings illustrate that the simultaneous chronotopes of physics discursive practices engaged student participation in ITA-led activities and maintained the sequential chronotopes in instructional practices, demonstrating joint attention between ITAs and undergraduates as co-contributors to meaning making. The chronotopic link creates a dialogic space in which multidiscursive practices of knowledge construction can be achieved through an integration of disciplinary spatial repertoires and mathematical symbolism and images. The present study suggests a spatial repertoire-informed chronotopic turn in analyzing the dynamic multiplicity of physics instructional practices by ITAs in academic contexts.

Beyond language fluidity: the role of spatial repertoires in translingual practices and stancetaking

ABSTRACT In Research Group Meetings (RGM) and other professional activities, sometimes positions are fluid, but stances illustrate international scholars’ bilingual competence in an RGM in Microbiology. In stances, people index sociocultural values by evaluating discursive figures in talk, proffering epistemic/affective assessments, and positioning each other [Jaffe, A. 2009. “Introduction: The Sociolinguistics of Stance.” In Stance: Sociolinguistic Perspectives, edited by A. Jaffe, 3–28. New York, NY: Oxford University Press]. I show how international scholars troubleshoot and problem-solve with senior colleagues as they enact stances to maintain relationships. Competence entails language fluidity and diverse semiotic resources, or translingual practices [Canagarajah, S. 2013. Translingual Practice: Global Englishes and Cosmopolitan Relations. London, UK: Routledge], in stances. While existing stance models stress verbal resources [Du Bois, J. W. 2007. “The Stance Triangle.” In Stancetaking in Discourse: Subjectivity, Evaluation, Interaction, edited by R. Englebretson, 139–182. Amstderdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company], they overlook the role of spatial repertoires. This micro-interactional analysis of RGMs demonstrates how diverse semiotic resources inform stances, and argues for stance methodologies and analyses which include multimodal, gestural, and semiotic repertoires. Findings indicate that power relations are managed through scholars’ use of verbal and semiotic resources in interpersonal stances. I argue that bilingual competence should acknowledge the role translingual practices play in stance taking, and the management of professional relationships in such meetings.

The processes of learning and doing writing in macrosocial spaces: understanding how international STEM graduate students deploy spatial repertoires

ABSTRACT Analyzing a segment of data from a larger study, this article discusses how international graduate students in the STEM fields deploy macrosocial spatial repertoires as they go about learning and doing graduate-level writing. Using a Constructivist Grounded Theory approach to theme-building analysis of interviews and drawing on relevant scholarship from Applied Linguistics and Writing Studies, it illustrates how the process of learning and doing graduate-level writing required these multilingual students an increasing ability to traverse and engage myriad physical, disciplinary/intellectual, and social and cultural spaces. It concludes by highlighting the benefits of understanding how these students utilize many and expansive spatial repertoires for enhancing writing and communication support for the students.

Monolingual ideologies versus spatial repertoires: language beliefs and writing practices of an international STEM scholar

ABSTRACT This paper explores language beliefs and writing practices of an international scholar in Biochemistry working at a large U.S. research university. Although the participant articulated monolingual ideologies and a desire to become like a ‘native speaker,’ he did not consider advanced writing skills in English a prerequisite for publishing in English in his field. Through ‘talk-around-text’ (Lillis 2008) and visits to his laboratory, we examine what resources the participant deemed valuable in the process of producing a scientific article. Adopting a spatial orientation to writing (Canagarajah 2018a), we pay particular attention to the spatial repertoires that shaped his recent first-author publication. We bring out the tensions between his language ideologies and actual communicative practices and discuss the theoretical and pedagogical implications of our research. Ultimately, we argue that a spatial orientation to communication expands the notion of bilingualism by urging us to consider people’s actual creative practices of meaning-making in particular spaces rather than focus on isolated cognitive abilities.

A new materialist perspective to studying L2 instructional interactions in engineering

ABSTRACT This article responds to a call for applied linguistics and bilingualism research from a spatial repertoires perspective informed by new materialism. It focuses on the ways international faculty members carry out instructional interactions in STEM using English as an additional language. Using video data, the analysis demonstrates how visual technology, material space and human bodies collectively shape instructional interactions in a structural engineering class in a university setting. The communication shows a complex entanglement of language with technology, visual representations of concrete designs and embodiment. The study details the characteristics of repertoires that are expected in the given instructional space for an effective practice, and it sheds light on what new members can learn and do in order to be competent in their profession. Additionally, the data corpus can be used as an authentic resource for the disciplinary socialization of bi-/multilingual STEM students and scholars for whom English is an additional language.