Transnational Language Research Articles

A transnational language teacher educator's autoethnographic pursuit of reflexivity in Hong Kong

A transnational language teacher educator's autoethnographic pursuit of reflexivity in Hong Kong

‘Round outside and square inside’: language teachers’ emotion regulation strategies in crosscultural teaching contexts

ABSTRACT With the expansion of transnational language learning and teaching, chances have increased for language teachers to work in crosscultural teaching contexts and regulate their emotions in the face of crosscultural emotional challenges. This study investigated the emotion regulation strategies employed by language teachers in crosscultural teaching contexts. Through a qualitative multi-case study with six Chinese as a second language (CSL) teachers in China, data collected from semi-structured interviews, class observations, and teacher reflective journals revealed seven emotion regulation strategies of three categories: restraining and pretending of surface acting; reframing, reconcentrating, and repositioning of deep acting; releasing and relieving of genuine expressing. These three categories reflected language teachers’ three experiences to cultural differences: deliberate minimisation, reflective acceptance, and communicative adaptation. The identified emotion regulation strategies also revealed two paradoxes existing in teacher-student interactions in crosscultural language teaching, which can be summarised as the Chinese idiom ‘round outside and square inside’. The study also proposed practical implications for language teachers’ emotion regulation and offered suggestions for institutions concerning teacher emotion in crosscultural teaching contexts.

Identities of Non-English-Dominant Teachers-In-Training: Alignments and Tensions

ABSTRACT This study examines how non-English-dominant English language teachers-in-training who undertake transnational language teacher education represent their language teacher identities (LTIs) in terms of four facets: claimed, assigned, practised, and imagined identities. It examines the alignments and tensions between and within these facets of LTI. Photo-elicitation data was collected from 10 non-English-dominant teachers-in-training who were international students undertaking language teacher education in Australia. Through a qualitative content analysis, seven representations of LTIs were identified across the four facets of LTI: knowledge transmission, learner-centredness, nurturing, teachers as learners, English experts, teacher dispositions, and professional uncertainty. Although alignments between these facets of LTI were identified, tensions within and between the facets of LTI tended to figure more prominently in the LTI representations of the teachers-in-training in this study. These tensions appeared to emerge from discrepancies between professional aspirations and external expectations. The study has implications for raising the awareness of teachers-in-training and their ability to reflect on teacher identities.

An Ecological Inquiry into Transnational English Language Teachers’ Emotional Vulnerability and Agency

ABSTRACT In this study, we propose an ecological model of teacher agency and emotional vulnerability that draws on epistemological roots of these two constructs to capture historico-personal, socio-organizational, and prospective levels of teacher professionalism. We then ontologically apply the model to exploring transnational language teachers’ agency and emotional vulnerability in the context of Turkey. Framing the study within a narrative inquiry methodology, we collected data from open-ended questionnaires, narrative frames, and semi-structured interviews. Data analyses revealed that the teachers’ personal emotions, embodied agencies, and vulnerabilities were profoundly shaped by individual histories, contextual discourses, and sociocultural particularities. The findings unpack novel dimensions of teachers’ agency and emotional vulnerability, attesting to their interconnection, especially within the context of transnationalism. We conclude the study with implications for teacher educators to reduce the pressure on transnational teachers and render their agencies as rooted in effective professional growth, rather than being defined by excessive vulnerabilities that in turn restrict teacher agencies.

Transnational language teaching activism for intercultural/bilingual education in elementary school settings

Language teaching activism is a political movement for educational transformation where the role of teachers and languages, as a medium of instruction and literacy, are fundamental for equity and social justice. This paper analyzes the reflections from elementary school teachers from Austin (Texas, U.S.) and Oaxaca (Mexico) during a collaborative symposium to exchange transnational classroom pedagogies from February to December 2022. Specifically, it analyzes three topics: (a) curriculum critique, (b) instructional strategies, and (c) the impact of standardized high-stakes assessment. Collaboration between educators in this transnational and multiethnic context fostered critical perspectives toward the curriculum, instructional strategies, status of languages, and the assessment processes. Despite bilingual teachers being in different linguistic, educational, and political contexts, there is a common thread evident in this transnational collaboration where educator strengths inform purpose of a social justice curriculum.

Translanguaging with gendered and racialized bodies: A duoethnography of two transnational Asian women teacher‐scholars

AbstractThis duoethnography traces two transnational woman teacher‐scholars' translanguaging pedagogies for equitable language and literacy education. Research on translanguaging has highlighted how lived experiences of transnational language and literacy educators crucially shape their language ideology, and professional identities and pedagogical practices (Motha et al., 2012). Extending this discussion, this duoethnography (Lawrence & Lowe, 2020; Norris & Sawyer, 2012) details how material and ideological conditions, along with our lived experiences, shape teachers' orientation to and enactment of translanguaging pedagogies. Through narratives and dialogue, the authors found that their translanguaging has intersected with their gendered and racialized positionalities in their own locale, and these experiences shape their translanguaging praxes. The authors argue that enacting translanguaging pedagogies necessitates teachers' reflexivity on their unequal lived experiences of varied language and literacies from their positionalities, and negotiation with material and ideological constraints. They conclude by suggesting implications for fellow teachers and teacher educators.

Theorizing Transnational Language Teacher (Educator) Identities: An Autoethnographic Study of a Border Dweller

This autoethnographic narrative inquiry explores the lived experiences and identities of a transnational English language teacher (educator). The aim of this research was to gain insight into my own transnationality, in order both to better inform my beliefs and practices as an educator, and to highlight the value of exploring transnationality as an important dimension in language teacher identity (LTI) construction. Drawing on autobiographical writing and art work as data sources, constant comparison and line-by-line analysis were employed to identify themes in the data, which were synthesized with relevant literature to further make sense of and theorize (my) transnational LTIs. Featuring theme-focused experiences from my life, findings are organized in a past-present-future structure, looking back at how my past identities can inform my present identities, and how these past and present identities are informing my future imagined identities. Major insights gained from this research into transnational LTI include: (a) social categorization, whether conferring high or low status, is a form of objectification, closely linked to the concept of (un)desire; (b) viewing emotions as signals of sites of growth can help to free us from emotional overwhelm; and (c) identifying and acknowledging our strengths can emancipate us from unjust power dynamics and empower others to do the same. Implications for language teacher education are discussed.

The effect of standardisation on collocations in Colombian and European Spanish translations of the work "Rootless"

The empirical study of syntactic, stylistic, and lexical patterns through corpora has frequently revealed a tendency towards standardisation, as Toury (1995/2012) defines it, in translated texts. In this vein, some studies have found that diatopy tends to become blurred in translations, particularly into transnational languages. In the case of Spanish, it has been stated that the enormous geographical richness of the language is not really reflected in translated Spanish. This paper argues that the translation of the work Rootless by Chris Howard into Colombian Spanish exhibits traits more typical of the European Spanish than of the Colombian Spanish variety. For this purpose, diatopic distribution of verb + noun (object) collocations extracted from a parallel corpus and a monolingual corpus of Rootless and its translations published in Colombian and European Spanish, is examined in a reference Spanish corpus.
 Keywords: parallel corpus; translated Spanish; Colombian Spanish; standardisation in translation; diatopic variation

Transnational language teachers’ emotional vulnerability and professional identity construction: an ecological perspective

ABSTRACT Despite the recent growth of attention to language teachers’ emotional vulnerability, little research has explored emotional vulnerability and identity construction among transnational teachers. Drawing on an ecological theoretical lens, we explored the emotional vulnerability and professional identity construction of transnational language teachers working in the context of Turkey. Data were collected from open-ended questionnaires, narrative frames, and semi-structured interviews. Data analysis revealed that across the three classroom (micro), institutional (meso), and sociocultural (macro) ecologies, the transnational teachers experienced contextually-invoked emotional conflicts that positioned their identities in a vulnerable state. Most notably, we found that transnational teachers need to become contextually adaptable to the three ecologies in order to develop professional coping strategies that safeguard them against the chronicle stressors of their profession and context. We situate such adaptability within implications calling for holding preparatory courses that facilitate transnational teachers’ transition to the new setting with the hope of positively contributing to their effective professional identity construction.

A Narrative Inquiry of Transnational Language Teachers’ Professional Identity Construction

ABSTRACT This study explores the professional identity construction of two transnational Chinese language teachers against a backdrop where multilingual and dynamic turns in language teaching and learning are taking place globally. Combining the complex dynamic system theory perspective with the multifaceted nature of language learning and teaching framework, and by adopting multiple sources of narrative data, it was found that both participants faced a downgrade in their professional identity due to the overpowering influence of English globally and locally, and the unequal transformation of cultural capital from the Chinese educational system to the English educational system also caused such a downgrade; the vulnerable identity of an ESL learner remained the most prominent aspect of their multifaceted teacher identity. As their English improved, they also made improvement in their career development, and it was the high-quality translanguaging practices enabled by the emergence of multilingual identities that empowered them to improve in their professions. The article ends with a call for actions to legitimize transnational language teachers’ professional identity from a translanguaging perspective and to build a balanced sustainable language ecology.

Transnational Language Teacher Identities in TESOL: Identity Construction among Female International Students in the United StatesHyesunCho, ReemAl‐Samiri and JunfuGao. New York: Routledge, 2023. ix+168

Transnational Language Teacher Identities in <scp>TESOL</scp>: Identity Construction among Female International Students in the United StatesHyesunCho, ReemAl‐Samiri and JunfuGao. New York: Routledge, 2023. ix+168

Resisting and creating alternatives to neoliberalism in ELT: a case study of three transnational language teachers in Saudi Arabia

ABSTRACT The effects of neoliberal ideologies in higher education (HE) today are manifested in different forms including self-reliance, intellectual fatigue, academic burnout, incessant competition, and constant frustration among teachers/students, and other precarious working conditions. Conceptualized through the arguments on creating possible alternatives to neoliberalism in relation to English language teaching (ELT), this article examines the ways in which three transnational TESOL teachers are negotiating, resisting, and creating alternatives to neoliberal ELT in their everyday pedagogical practices. The data emerged from two sources: (i) reflective journals and (ii) semi-structured interviews. The findings reveal that while the teachers were subverting neoliberal ELT in their workplace, they became embroiled in complex mental situations, including self-consciousness, tensions, ambivalent positions, strong emotions, and other negative states of mind. In this context, extensive reading as a means for subverting neoliberalizing practices in ELT; father–son conversations as resistance to fierce competition in ELT; and portfolio reflection letters as tools for solidarity in neoliberal ELT are all possible strategies used by the three participants at their workplace. The paper closes with reflections on the forms of alternatives that have been exhibited by each teacher and implications for ELT.

Toward an Ecological Understanding of Transnational Chinese Language Teachers' Professional Wellbeing in the United Kingdom.

Given the lack of reports of Chinese language teachers’ wellbeing in the literature, this study aims to investigate the professional wellbeing of eight teachers of Chinese as a foreign language in the United Kingdom based on in-depth, semi-structured qualitative interviews. Interview data provided a rich picture of the rewarding aspects and challenges that they experienced in their professional lives. The main findings revealed the complex interplay of their professional wellbeing and different levels of ecology (i.e., cultural, institutional, classroom, and personal). The study also identified the specific strategies that the teachers deployed for (1) coping with work-related stress and for (2) maintaining wellbeing alongside professional productivity. The paper calls for further research to apply a close-up lens to the wellbeing of foreign language teachers across timescales. The implications for transnational language teachers’ mentoring interventions are discussed.

The “Esperanto” of business... or how to be successful in life: A decolonial reading, using semiotics, of English language courses’ advertisements in Brazil

The present paper seeks to analyze, based on the decolonial perspective, how the epistemic and ontological elements of the coloniality of power that operates through the linguistic imperialism of English are made present in the hierarchies of knowledge in marketing. For this, we use the generative trajectory, a semiotic theoretical model of meaning, to analyze advertisements of a transnational online English language company operating in Brazil, which reinforces in its communications the importance of learning English as the only way to succeed in the business world and to overcome the backwardness of local culture and language. The semiotic analysis helped to analyze the manipulation path and strategies and the concretization of the narratives present in the communication made through the ads, unveiling epistemic and ontological elements that make up the coloniality of power and its association to English, which was, in turn, related to the hierarchies of knowledge in marketing.

Мир гуцулов глазами Сергея Параджанова: семиотический перевод, киноязык, бытийные инварианты

The article analyses Parajanov's reflections on semiotic translation, on the example of the life, traditions, and customs of the Hutsuls, as recorded in his article “Eternal Movement” about his film Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors. Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors became a stylistic and semantic invariant for Parajanov's subsequent films. In fact, it became a manifesto movie. Parajanov found his own thematic language and creative constants, such as rituals, traditions, customs, and sacraments. By focusing on the creative invariants of the lives of different peoples (Hutsuls, Armenians, Turks, Tatars, etc.), Parajanov began to aesthetically conjecture and reveal their inner worlds, customs, and more. Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors is based on a deep love of Hutsul culture, as well as I. Savchenko's “method” that assumes a direct cognition and absorption of the object-culture, nature, and the sensual world on different communication channels (visual, auditory, olfactory). Based on the deep knowledge of the Hustsul culture, Parajanov works with the world of values, by translating the text into a visual image, as well as fantasizing visual customs. Through the bearer of culture, an elderly woman, he began to look at the world of the Hutsuls and absorb their spirit for the correct reconstruction of the material in the transnational language of beauty and recoding denotative codes into connotative ones. Parajanov's reflection on the film showed the transition from the amorphous cinematic language of socialist realism to the language of auteur cinematography: the rejection of clear plot reproduction, photographic reproduction of everyday life, manners and customs, “notorious canons”, “old habits, and impressions”. The emergence of the author's cinematic language made his conflict with the Soviet cinematic system and nomendaturai “elite” even clearer. This is evidenced by the fact that Parajanov still had to defend his position and argue against dubbing his film, since in that case, the viewer would lose the authentic auditory world of the Hutsuls.

Tanty feminisms

A geneaology of Caribbean feminism is a geneaology of tanty feminisms. Occupying numerous articulations throughout the history of the Caribbean region and its diasporas, the figure of the ‘tanty’, or ‘aunty’ as they are known in non-Caribbean contexts, and the consequential amital social relations they produce have been indispensable to contemporary discourses and practices of Caribbean feminist thought and praxis. The tanty cannot be read as indebted to a singular person, figure or monolithic legacy but operates as a fluid and transnational force of Caribbean feminist knowing that instructs us through non-normative embodied transgressions, and pedagogies of free up. Yet, despite their presence of vital integrity to Caribbean popular culture, community organizing, history, politics and literature, discussions of the politics and pedagogies of tantyhood remain underrepresented in scholarly Caribbean feminist literatures. In this article, I reflect upon my creative practice as a drag artist and self-proclaimed tanty in an annual digital photography series I have produced over the last three years entitled ‘Coolieween’. In this work, I reference Indo-/Caribbean folklore and mythologies, and stories of horror, the grotesque and the paranormal as entangled with queer affects, embodiments and aesthetics. Drag artistry, which, like tantyhood, agitates the invisible boundaries of neo-colonial gender, racial and sexual binaries, provides a critical feminist terrain to metaphorize the institutional crossings of pain and pleasure held within historical and contemporary ontologies of Indo-Caribbeanness. Investigating the pedagogy of this crossing is central to understanding, as well as critiquing, long-standing attachments of pain, injury, pathologization and trauma that have been commonly scripted to Indo-Caribbean subjectivities, often in reference to genealogies of kala pani poetics and other diaspora narratives that have sutured ideas of Indo-Caribbeanness as always-already broken, fragmented and dislocated. In this article, I instead centre paradigms of erotics and pleasure as a transformative medium to turn our optics towards transformative reconfigurations of Indo-Caribbean feminist selfhoods. As I argue here, by thinking with and through tanty feminisms, we are provided with intergenerational and transnational languages of unsettling logic that continually instruct us through everyday modalities of Indo-Caribbean feminist living and being.

Transnational language survival: heritage language use and maintenance among first-generation Yorùbá-English Nigerian immigrants in diaspora

ABSTRACT This study is a sociolinguistic exploration into the survival of a transnational language in the United States-a multilingual and multicultural environment. Using an adapted General Ethnicity Questionnaire, it interrogates the social dimensions of heritage language use and the diverse linguistic experiences of 120 first-generation Yorùbá-English Nigerian Immigrants living in New York, Texas, and Maryland. It also conducts structured interviews with 30 of them. The study tests two hypotheses that examine the significance of age and length of stay on heritage language use. Findings reveal that first-generation Yorùbá-English Nigerian Immigrants report high frequencies of heritage language use with their co-ethnic peers as well as in their self-created micro-linguistic markets. Results also show that age and the length of stay are significant to heritage language use in the United States. Finally, these immigrants create enabling environments where the heritage language is used frequently, ensuring continued use and survival.

“Now it’s all upper-class parents who are checking out schools”: gentrification as coloniality in the enactment of two-way bilingual education policies

Bilingual education as a whole has been gentrifying, as more privileged students replace Transnational Language Learners (TLLs) in bilingual education spaces and policies (Valdez et al. in Educ Policy 30(6):849–883, 2016. https://doi.org/10.1177/0895904814556750 ). We argue this is an extension of coloniality (Mignolo in Local histories/global designs: coloniality, subaltern knowledges, and border thinking, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 2000/2012): as two-way bilingual education (TWBE) policies are enacted, they are shaped by globalizing, neoliberal, and monoglossic discourses that have a history of dispossessing and erasing minoritized peoples and languages. Taking a critical constructivist grounded theory approach, this study brings together three unique data sets from the US Midwest, Southeast, and Texas to question: How does gentrification manifest in TWBE across policy scales and contexts? And how are stakeholders responding to or resisting gentrification and its underlying coloniality? Regardless of the varying state policy and local contexts, each TWBE program in our study experienced gentrification. Specifically, TLLs and their Spanish language(s) were replaced or diminished as TWBE policy enactment intersected with district and state policies, particularly those shaping enrollment, transportation, course scheduling, and teacher and student recruitment. While the analysis focuses on gentrification processes through policy enactment, we also detail spaces of consciousness where stakeholders recognized and resisted them and conclude with a discussion on how coloniality is both manifested and can be challenged in language policy enactment.

Gestures as a Transnational Language through Woodcuts: Celestina’s Title Pages

Tras la publicación de la Comedia de Calisto y Melibea en 1499, La Celestina se convertiría en uno de los libros más profusamente ilustrados del siglo XVI. Este artículo analiza el lenguaje corporal y la gestualidad en las xilografías de las portadas de sus primeras ediciones, confirmando que la mayoría se integra en el marco iconográfico de la tradición teatral, orientada a la legibilidad de sus ilustraciones para ayudar a los lectores a comprender el texto. Tanto impresores como entalladores gozaban de flexibilidad al resumir el argumento o codificar emociones en la página impresa, lo que los llevaría a operar con tres programas iconográficos diferentes: el encuentro de los amantes en el huerto de Melibea, la representación de Celestina en el dormitorio de Melibea, y la condensación del argumento en un escenario teatral poblado por grupos de figuras y acciones sucesivas. En estas tres visualizaciones, los cambios en el lenguaje corporal de los personajes ofrecían diferentes lecturas de sus intenciones, sentimientos y motivaciones.

Standardisation in translated language

The law of growing standardisation (Toury 1995) appears to be particularly at play in diatopy, and more specifically in the case of transnational languages. Some studies have revealed the tendency to standardise the diatopic varieties of Spanish in translated language (Corpas Pastor 2015a, 2015b, 2017, 2018). However, to our knowledge, no work has studied this tendency in the Spanish translations of a literary work. This paper focuses on verb + noun (object) collocations of Spanish translations of The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde. Two different varieties have been chosen (Peninsular and Colombian Spanish). The techniques used to translate this type of collocations in both Spanish translations will be analysed. Further, the diatopic distribution of these collocations will be studied by means of large corpora. Based on the results, it is argued that the Colombian Spanish translation is actually closer to general or standard Spanish than to the variety of this country.