SATERNUS, JULIE, Ph.D., August, 2019 ENGLISH
MULTILINGUAL LITERACY PRACTICES IN ONE SCHOOL COMMUNITY: READING,
WRITING, AND BEING ACROSS JAPANESE AND ENGLISH
Dissertation Advisor: Derek Van Ittersum
Scholars writing in translingual studies view language boundaries as fluid, consider multilinguals to have options that include shuttling back and forth between languages in order to achieve their rhetorical goals, and argue that monolingual ideologies are harmful. Translingual studies is part of a movement away from structuralist conceptions of language, and within translingualism language is viewed as “flexible, unstable, dynamic, layered, and mobile” (Blommaert, 2016, p.
244).
This dissertation focuses on the translingual literacy practices of multilingual members of the
Japanese/English school community at this university. I analyze writing processes, speech, and media usage of members of this community (English L1/Japanese L2 and Japanese L1/English
L2) through the lens of translingualism. I find that the ways the participants move across English and Japanese is a dynamic and negotiable process. This study aims to contribute to the movement in translingual studies that changes the focus from mixed-language products to mixed-language processes. The movement to process, I argue, takes into consideration the goals of many learners of a second language, which is to gain a strong, native-like command of dominant varieties of foreign languages.
iv My dissertation demonstrates specific methods that writing studies researchers may use to document translingual literacy practices. In addition, this study discusses detailed ways in which the participants use both English and Japanese in their literacy practices through multiple case studies. I conclude with a turn that focuses on pedagogical applications of the translingual framework, which I argue benefits both monolingual and multilingual students in writing classrooms.
v MULTILINGUAL LITERACY PRACTICES IN ONE SCHOOL COMMUNITY: READING,
WRITING, AND BEING ACROSS JAPANESE AND ENGLISH
A dissertation submitted
to Kent State University in partial fulfillment
of the requirements for the
degree of Doctor of Philosophy
by
Julie Saternus
August 2019
Copyright
All rights reserved
vi
Dissertation written by
Julie Saternus
B.A., Kent State University, 2011
M.A., The University of Akron, 2014
Ph.D., Kent State University, 2019
Approved by
______, Chair, Doctoral Dissertation Committee Derek Van Ittersum
______, Members, Doctoral Dissertation Committee Pamela Takayoshi
______Keith Lloyd
______Judy Wakabayashi
______John Dunlosky
Accepted by
______, Chair, Department of English Robert Trogdon
______, Dean, College of Arts and Sciences James L. Blank
vii TABLE OF CONTENTS…………………………………………………………………………v
LIST OF FIGURES…………………………………………………………………….…….…..vi
LIST OF TABLES……………………………………………………………………….….……x
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS……………………………………………………………….……..xi
CHAPTERS
CHAPTER 1: BUILDING ON MULTI AND TRANS LITERACIES……………...……1
CHAPTER 2: METHODOLOGY……………………………………………………….31
CHAPTER 3: MULTILINGUAL READING AND WRITING PROCESSES…………60
CHAPTER 4: SPEAKING, STUDYING, AND LIVING ACROSS TWO
LANGUAGES…………………………………………………………………….……105
CHAPTER 5: TRACING LITERACY ACROSS SPACE: MOBILE MULTILINGUAL
PRACTICES……………………………………………………………………………152
CHAPTER 6: CONCLUSIONS AND MOVING FORWARD WITH TRANSLINGUAL
STUDIES……………………………………………………………………………….222
v LIST OF FIGURES
Figure 3.1. Screen shot of Rickert PDF and Evernote……………….……………………….….73
Figure 3.2. Rickert PDF with German and Evernote……………………….……………………75 Figure 3.3. Meldrum PDF with syllabus in background……….………………………………...76
Figure 3.4. Syllabus with Meldrum PDF in background…………….……………..……………77
Figure 3.5. Cover art for Japanese version of Translation Works of Murakami…………….…..79
Figure 3.6. Akari's Notes in Word...... 79
Figure 3.7. The book review Word document at the beginning of the writing process……….....80
Figure 3.8. Screen shot from notes Word document with notes about the Kuroko metaphor…...89
Figure 3.9. Screen shot of Apple Dictionary Kuroko entry……………….……………………..89
Figure 3.10. Google image results for “黒子”…………………….……………………………..90
Figure 3.11. Google image results for “黒子 舞台” (kuroko butai, or kuroko stage)………....91
Figure 3.12. Google image results for “黒子 歌舞伎” (kuroko kabuki)………………….…...91
Figure 3.13. Resource remediation flow chart for book review writing process………….…….97 Figure 4.1. Suzu's drawings for “paint brush,” “miss,” and “list”…………...…………………114
Figure 4.2. Suzu's drawing for “pitch”…………………………...…………………...………..115
Figure 4.3. Chart depicts both stroke order and importance of proportion when drawing kanji.
From Japan Activator, “Kanji”…………………………………………………………………116
Figure 4.4 “History of Chocolate” (page 1 of 2) reading marked up by Suzu to help her with standard American English pronunciation……………………………………………………...118
Figure 4.5. “History of Chocolate” (page 2 of 2) reading marked up by Suzu to help her with standard American English pronunciation……………………………………………………...119
Figure 4.6. List of TOEFL speaking prompts…………...…………………………………...…120
vi Figure 4.7. Oni apologizing………………...…………………………………………………..129
Figure 4.8. Coach Oni running with boy……………...... ……………………………………..129
Figure 4.9. Coach Oni rock climbing with boy.……………...... ……………………………...129
Figure 4.10. Boy swimming……………………………………………………………………129
Figure 4.11. Boy drinking protein………………………………………………………………129
Figure 4.12. Boy becoming strong from Oni's training………………………………………...129
Figure 4.13. Boy stands his ground…………………………………………………………….129
Figure 4.14. Alien preparing for battle…………………………………………………………129
Figure 4.15. Boy being struck by alien…………………………………………………………131
Figure 4.16. Boy gives up………………………………………………………………………131
Figure 4.17. Oni yells, “Ganbatte!”…………………………………………………………….131
Figure 4.18. Alien is defeated…………………………………………………………………..131
Figure 4.19. Oni admits that the boy was not wearing the strong pants………………………..132
Figure 4.20. How writing assessments are affected. Figure from Behizadeh and Engelhard Jr.
(2010), p. 205…………………………………………………………………………………...148
Figure 5.1. Michael’s notes detailing when and how to use the grammar point ない(nai, negative)………………………………………………………………………………………...192
Figure 5.2. The website Japanese.stackexchange.com on a smartphone detailing when to use the grammar point 〜ば (-ba)…………………………………………………………………...... 193
Figure 5.3. Michael’s notes about details of when and how to use Japanese conditionals…….194
Figure 5.4. Textbook that Michael uses outside of the classroom……………………………..195 Figure 5.5. Olivia’s graded Spanish essay……………………………………………………..197 Figure 5.6. Online Japanese to English translation test………………………………………..198
vii Figure 5.7. The notes that Olivia wrote while doing the online Japanese to English translation test………………………………………………………………………………………………199
Figure 5.8. Olivia’s workspace while taking the online Japanese to English translation test….200
Figure 5.9. Olivia’s manga, novel, and online manga………………………………………….201
Figure 5.10. Masamune scanning Famicom game boxes and pamphlets………………………203
Figure 5.11. Screenshot (1 of 2) from Masamune’s website http://playingwithsuperpower.com/...... 207
Figure 5.12. Screenshot (1 of 2) from Masamune’s website http://playingwithsuperpower.com/...... 208
Figure 5.13. Loading screen with manga panel...... 210
Figure 5.14. Main menu screen…………………………………………………………………211
Figure 5.15 Gotcha function………………………………………..…………………………..212
Figure 5.16. Example of menu items that are in English……………………………………….212
Figure 5.17. Unknown menu items……………………………………………………………..212
Figure 5.18. Character menu with little Japanese………………………………………………213
Figure 5.19. CK navigates to the “colleagues” screen………………………………………….213
Figure 5.20. Colleagues screen…………………………………………………………………213
Figure 5.21. A player’s profile in Japanese…………………………………………………….214
Figure 5.22. Player’s lounge……………………………………………………………………214
Figure 5.23. The idol communication screen…………………………………………………...215
Figure 5.24. Group events screen………………………………………………………………215
Figure 5.25. Character dialogue……………………………………………………….………..216
Figure 5.26. Choices during character dialogue……………………………………….……….216
viii Figure 5.27. Rapid-fire question………………………………………………………………..217
Figure 5.28. Rapid-fire question with cheat…………………………………………………….217
ix LIST OF TABLES Table 2.1. Audio Recordings of Suzu in Various Settings…………………..…….……………44
Table 2.2 Formal Interviews with Question Script Adapted from interview questions in Brandt
(2001) ...... 48
Table 2.3. English L1/Japanese L2 interview questions modified from Brandt (2001) ...... 49
Table 2.4. Material Semiotics Observation Notes.………………………………………………53
Table 3.1. Recorded Reading and Writing Tasks of Akari….……………………….…………..67
Table 3.2. Akari’s Workflow for Writing the Book Review….…………………….…………...77
Table 3.4. Example Tool Flows Listed by Task and Number…………………….……………..82
Table 4.1. Clarification Requested or Offered During That’s What She Said Game….……….110
Table 4.2. Suzu’s Multimodal and Multilingual Story Used in a Japanese High School
Classroom………………………………………………………………………………………128
Table 4.3. Classification of Suzu’s Code switching during Pictionary………………………...133
Table 4.4. Classification of Suzu’s Code Switching during TOEFL Study Session…………...134
Table 4.5. Suzu’s Code Switching Categorized by Scotton’s (1983) Negotiation Maxims……134
Table 5.1. First memories of the Japanese Language or Japanese Media……………………...162
Table 5.2. First memories of English or English-Language Media?...... 164
Table 5.3. Genre Ecologies in Intermediate Japanese Classrooms...…………………………...178
Table 5.4. Teacher and Student use of the Textbook as an “information resource” (Spinuzzi,
2013, p. 3)………………………………………………………………………………………179
Table 5.5. CK’s walkthrough of a Japanese cellphone game…………………………………..209
x ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I would like to thank my participants, advisors, and family. I owe this dissertation and my knowledge of the Japanese language to the teachers and students in this local Japanese/English community. Thank you, Dr. Van Ittersum, for the consistent and critical guidance throughout the entire research and write up process. Thank you, Dr. Newman, for helping me get started with my classroom research. Thank you, Dr. Takayoshi, for guidance throughout the program and with this dissertation. Thank you, Dr. Lloyd, for introducing me to the study of linguistics and encouraging my study of world rhetorics. Thank you, Eriko Sensei, Haruka Sensei, Yuki Sensei,
Aaron Sensei, Ashley Sensei, Haru Sensei, and Saku Chan, for teaching me the Japanese language. Thank you, Dr. Wakabayashi, for the line-by-line editing that resulted in the final product of this dissertation. Thank you, Thomas, Ella, and Renji, for keeping me company while
I wrote the dissertation. Thank you to the local Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu community for being an open and welcoming place to do language research. And thank you to my mom and dad for being supportive through my educational journey.
xi
CHAPTER 1
BUILDING ON MULTI AND TRANS LITERACIES
Introduction
This dissertation is concerned with literacy, as defined by the NLG (New London
Group), and aims to answer the research question, “What are the literacy practices of members of the Japanese/English learning community at this university?” Gee (1989) says, “the common- sense notion of literacy as ‘the ability to read and write’ (intransitively)” is “a notion that is nowhere near as coherent as it first sounds” (p. 21-22). This “common-sense notion of literacy” is encapsulated, for instance, by a billboard that says, “Fight illiteracy.” Using common sense, we can understand that the billboard is making an argument that people should learn to read.
When we see the billboard, and we use our “common-sense notion of literacy,” we think of illiteracy as the inability to read. To begin with, the inability to read what? The scholarship in the
New Literacy Studies (NLS) is concerned with unpacking the black box of literacy. Gee explains that reading is not simply “the ability to call out letters” (p. 21). He says, “Reading is at the very least the ability to interpret print…but an interpretation of print is just a viewpoint on a set of symbols, and viewpoints are always embedded in discourses” (p. 21). Discourses, Gee (2007) describes as:
distinctive ways of speaking/listening and often, too, writing/reading coupled with
distinctive ways of acting, interacting, valuing, feeling, dressing, thinking, believing with
other people and with various objects, tools and technologies, so as to enact specific
1 socially recognizable identities engaged in specific socially recognisable activities. (p.
166)
Literacy encompasses much more than reading, writing, and speaking—when we begin to unpack the black box of literacy, we see that literacy involves ways of being. Gee describes the
NLG’s position on literacy: “literacy is not primarily a mental ability, but a cover-term for a variety of different sociocultural practices. Literacy is tied up with socialization, enculturation and development in social and cultural groups and in schools and other institutions” (p. 45). Gee, and other NLS scholars, necessarily view literacy as more than a cognitive process of calling out letters and making meaning in one’s head.
With the expanded view of literacy that the NLG offers us, let’s take a quick look at literacy in one location, which happens to be a martial arts studio, where a participant featured in
Chapter 4, Suzu, spent her free time while she worked in a local high school as an assistant teacher in the Japanese program. An outsider may look through the large windows of the studio and see adults who appear to be wearing bathrobes sitting on top of one another or standing and gripping the strange outfits of the person next to them. The outsider may notice that the bathrobes have foreign writing on them. The bathrobes are in fact gis (a word derived from the
Japanese language, 着, gi, for clothing) the traditional martial arts uniform of BJJ (Brazilian Jiu-
Jitsu). BJJ is a practice that traveled from Japan, to Brazil, and then was popularized through
Royce Gracie’s performance at Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) and is now practiced extensively across North and South America, Europe, and Asia. The gis are only one small part of the Discourse that makes up the social practice of BJJ.
2 One of the black belts1 at the studio explained that the metaphor of a conversation is useful for understanding “rolling” (a term used for sparring in BJJ). He said rolling is like having a conversation in jiu-jitsu, and he said a promotion to a higher belt is proof of learning how to talk. This martial artist believed that the positions and the moves in BJJ are like the words and phrases of the language of the martial art, and he thinks that a conversation is the perfect metaphor for when two BJJ practitioners roll. I believe that this black belt’s observation of what he calls “speaking the language of jiu-jitsu” is an interesting way to think about literacy. Like the black belt explained, BJJ involves moves and positions that are practiced through drilling and live rolls. However, a practitioner who only learns the moves and positions would still be missing out on a large part of the Discourse. The clothing, how to compose one’s self, and an understanding of the context of the martial art in relation to other combat sports are just a few examples of the culture and “literacy” of BJJ.
The studio, located in Northeast Ohio, is a direct product of cultural and linguistic mashups that represent effects of globalization that have become a norm since the 1980s. Almost anywhere we look, we can find evidence that countries are connected, the most obvious being the products that Americans consume, from food to electronics and media. We can see globalization, as well, in the practices of Americans, from religion, to sports, to reading and writing. While there is a difference between purchasing an iPhone made in Shenzen, China, and adopting the practice of Zen Buddhism, both the iPhone and Buddhism affect the reading, writing, and ways of being for many Americans.
The state of college composition instruction, however, does not reflect the globalized nature of other American practices. As Horner and Trimbur (2002) argue, “... a tacit language
1 In BJJ, instructors are often referred to simply by their rank within the color-coded belt system.
3 policy of unidirectional English monolingualism has shaped the historical formation of U.S. writing instruction and continues to influence its theory and practice in shadowy, largely unexamined ways” (p. 594–595). This dissertation aims to contribute rich, textured, contextualized, and situated portraits of participants and settings, both in classrooms and out-of- classrooms, where translanguaging is taking place across English and Japanese. Through the presentation and extensive analysis of a wide variety of mixed language literacy across two languages, four levels of education, and thirteen locations, this dissertation is a response to
Matsuda’s (2014) call for translingual studies to “move beyond linguistic tourism” (p. 483), Lu and Horner’s (2016) invitation for researchers to detail “competing inflections” of translingualism (p. 207), and Canagarajah and Dovchin’s (2019) suggestion that “translingual scholars should base their data on socially situated practices” (p. 2). Translanguaging refers to multilingual communication, whether writing, reading, speaking, or listening. The “trans” prefix points to the theoretical belief that languages do not exist as separate entities but are part of the same communication system within multilinguals. Canagarajah (2011a) defines translanguaging as “the ability of multilingual speakers to shuttle between languages, treating the diverse languages that form their repertoire as an integrated system” (p. 401).
With careful, up-close observations of mixed language literacy, this dissertation will provide multiple angles with which writing scholars can understand situated instances of
Japanese and English translingual reading, writing, consuming, and being. The settings for this study span across Japanese undergraduate classrooms, the university library, the Japanese Coffee
Hour, and the homes of graduate and undergraduate students. I intend for the variety and multitude of data that I present in this dissertation to demonstrate that translanguaging is a much wider practice than the current scholarship shows and to begin the movement of the subjects
4 within translingual scholarship to “everyday social practices rather than theoretical discourses”
(Canagarajah and Dovchin, 2019). This dissertation also builds on the work that composition scholars have done to begin to answer Horner et. al.’s call to extend the Students’ Right to their
Own Language (SRTOL) to languages other than English within the field of translingual studies.
This dissertation asks, “What are the literacy practices of members of the
Japanese/English learning community at this university?” I ask this research question in reference to two distinct groups of participants: the first group is Japanese L1/English L2s who are teachers of Japanese in various contexts and who are, or who have been, students of English, and the second group is English L1/Japanese L2s who are students of the Japanese language at the graduate level and also teach Japanese or who are students of the Japanese language at an undergraduate level and are pursuing a minor in Japanese.
I chose the research site because I saw that the literacy practices in this community would add to the field’s understanding of multilingual literacy practices. After choosing the site, I found willing participants who offered me a wide variety of literacy practices to study. My data collection was also guided by interests in the field. Following the rich tradition of detailed studies of writing processes in the field, I chose data collection methods that would gather situated details regarding tools, discourses, and other resources used in multilingual writing. In summary, the originating research question led me to focus on digital writing ecologies
(Japanese L1/English L2, Chapter 3), appropriation of multimodal and multilingual resources in spoken communication (Japanese L1/English L2, Chapter 4), and the relationship between tool ecologies across classroom and home practices (English L1/Japanese L2, Chapter 5).
Literature Review
Translingual Studies Across Multiple Disciplines
5 In the first appearance of the term “translingual” in composition studies, Horner et. al.
(2011) describe the reason they call for compositionists to adopt translingual approaches in their classrooms. They argue, “Growing numbers of U.S. teachers and scholars of writing recognize that traditional ways of understanding and responding to language differences are inadequate to the facts on the ground” (p. 303). Horner et. al. describe the translingual approach as an argument for:
(1) honoring the power of all language users to shape language to specific ends; (2)
recognizing the linguistic heterogeneity of all users of language both within the United
States and globally; and (3) directly confronting English monolingualist expectations by
researching and teaching how writers can work with and against, not simply within, those
expectations. (p. 305).
They explain that the translingual approach that they propose is built on the foundation of the
Conference on College Composition and Communication’s (CCCC’s) 1974 “Students’ Right to
Their Own Language” that honors the systematic and rational nature of non-standard varieties of
English (p. 304). Horner et. al explain:
The translingual approach we call for extends the CCCC resolution to differences within
and across all languages. And it adds recognition that the formation and definition of
languages and language varieties are fluid. Further, this approach insists on viewing
language differences and fluidities as resources to be preserved, developed, and utilized.
(p. 304)
However, before Horner et. al. proposed a “translingual approach” to composition studies the notion that language is performative, open to negotiation, and unconstrained by official language boundaries was prevalent across various fields of study concerned with language. Hall (2018)
6 describes Horner et. al.’s tenets of the translingual approach as “a brief allusion to a complex of existing theories–not original to this translingual approach but rather building on decades of work in critical applied linguistics and other fields” (p. 30). As Hall explains, translingualism is not a new view on language but emerges from a variety of sociolinguistic, pedagogical, and critical language fields of study.
Canagarajah (2011b) explains, “As the notion receives increasing attention, scholars are documenting translanguaging in diverse social and educational contexts. The theorization of this practice is going on in different disciplines under different labels” (p. 2). Canagarajah names composition, new literacy studies, applied linguistics, and sociolinguistics as fields in which translanguaging is being studied under different labels. For example, in critical linguistics,
Pennycook (2006) describes hip-hop culture in Japan in which artists mesh English, Japanese, and African American English in songs, as well as in speech. He works within this scene of transcultural and translocal flows to discuss English. Pennycook describes English as a
“translocal language, a language of fluidity and fixity that moves across, while becoming embedded in, the materiality of localities and social relations. English is bound up with transcultural flows, a language of imagined communities and refashioning identities” (p. 5—6).
Translingual issues are also taken up in sociolinguistics, for example, in one study,
Blommaert et. al (2005) investigate a multilingual neighborhood. The authors argue, “Focusing upon neighborhood presents us with an opportunity, and an obligation, to confront the variegated nature of linguistic competencies. Confronting the diverse, changeable landscape of competencies displayed and attributed forces us, in turn, to explore the interplay of representations and practices, accounts and situated doings” (p. 223).
7 Horner and Link (2012) cite Garcia’s (2009) metaphor in the context of bilingual education, which illustrates the difference between bilingualism and translanguaging. Garcia argues that bilingualism is “not monolingualism times two” (qtd. in Horner and Link, 2012, p.
242). Garcia continues to explain that translanguaging is “not like a bicycle with two balanced wheels” (qtd. on p. 242). Garcia argues translanguaging is “more like an all-terrain vehicle
(ATV),” with wheels that can “extend and contract, flex and stretch, making possible, over highly uneven ground, movement forward that is bumpy and irregular but also sustained and effective” (qtd. on p. 242). Garcia’s ATV concept is particularly useful in understanding how multilingual practices offer rhetorical dexterity. The multilinguals in this study move between
Japanese and English in a fluid process across terrain that would appear, from a monolingual’s point of view, to be uneven and difficult to traverse. The participants’ ATVs in the study who are more proficient in the second language offer a less bumpy ride, but even the emerging users of
Japanese in Chapter 5 move rather smoothly across both English and Japanese to communicate.
Horner and Link continue to trace the term “translanguaging” to previous studies in bilingual education. Williams (1994) and Baker (2003) proposed the term to describe:
pedagogical practices where students hear or read a lesson, a passage in a book, or a
section of text in one language and develop their work in another. In this way, input and
output are in a different language and are systematically varied. Thus, translanguaging
can be seen not only as a language practice of multilinguals, but as a pedagogical strategy
to foster language and literacy development. (p. 242).
In this way, the same tenets of translingualism in composition, as described by Horner et. al
(2011), are also represented in the term “translanguaging” in the field of bilingual education. The translingual studies that I presented in this section have focuses on a variety of areas that differ
8 from observational studies in neighborhoods to pedagogical approaches. However, the scholars who use, explore, and adopt the term “translingual” into their own studies do so in an integrated way that builds on the work of those before them.
While this dissertation aims to add a particular kind of data to translingual studies
(everyday writing, speaking, and media usage) and to present translingual writing and speech in a way that is not exotic or to be appropriated by monolinguals, the definition and understanding of translanguaging is not radically changing from study to study. As translingual scholars find unexplored avenues to traverse, the understanding of what translanguaging means does not change. With more studies, scholars are able to offer more nuanced findings about translingual practice across a wider stage of communication.
Translingualism’s Foundation in the NLG’s Multiliteracies Approach
Canagarajah (2013) contextualizes translingualism within the scholarship by drawing from the first generation, second generation, and possibly third wave of New Literacy Studies (p.
41-42). Canagarajah argues that Street (1984), Heath (1983), Scribner and Cole’s (1981) scholarship provided an alternative to the autonomous view of literacy2 and focused on the situated “localized social relations,” which led to ethnographies of understudied literacies.
Canagarajah explains that Barton, Hamilton, and Ivanic (2000), Gee (1990), and Cope and
Kalantzis (2000) study “even more diverse” literacy practices. Canagarajah’s study, which investigates translingual writing in his classroom, responds more directly to the third generation of the NLS, which was initiated by Brandt and Clinton’s (2002) call to investigate the mobility
2 Street (2006) explains that the autonomous view of literacy appears commonly across schooling programs and “works from the assumption that literacy in itself—autonomously—will have effects on other social and cognitive practices” (p. 1). He continues, “Introducing literacy to poor, ‘illiterate’ people, villages, urban youth, etc. will have the effect of enhancing their cognitive skills, improving their economic prospects, making them better citizens regardless of the social and economic conditions that accounted for their ‘illiteracy’ in the first place” (p. 1).
9 of foreign literacies into local contexts. With NLS studies providing a theoretical background,
Canagarajah is able to situate his analyses of translingual writing in his classroom. Canagarajah suggest that studies that investigate translingual writing are part of NLS. He says, “The multidisciplinary research on contact zone interactions thus far reviewed suggests a model of negotiated literacy for the third wave of NLS” (p. 45). This dissertation builds on the work done in the first, second, and third waves of the NLS and, like Canagarajah suggests, also works to add expanded views of translingual literacies to the emerging third wave.
In the field of new literacy studies, an additive approach to language repertoires is a central tenet taken up by the New London Group (NLG) (1996) who argued for a
“multiliteracies” approach in education. While there are some differences between “multi” and
“trans” language theories, which I will describe in the following section, the multiliteracies approach is part of the research trajectory (Lu, 2004; Canagarajah, 2006; Fraiberg, 2010; Horner et. al., 2011) that led to the conception of translingual literacy. In their influential article, the
New London Group (1996) asked of educators: “What is appropriate for all in the context of the ever more critical factors of local diversity and global connectedness?” The NLG define multiliteracies as “significant modes of meaning making, where the textual is also related to the visual, audio, the spatial, the behavioral...particularly important in mass media, multimedia, and in an electronic hypermedia,” as well as “a way to focus on the realities of increasing local diversity and global connectedness” because “[d]ealing with linguistic differences and cultural differences has now become central to the pragmatics of our working, civic, and private lives”
(p. 64). In other words, teachers who implement the pedagogy of multiliteracies recognize technological literacies within their students, as well as cultural literacies, which include multiple languages and varying conceptions of reading and writing. Cope and Kalantzis (2009)
10 demonstrate that the multiliteracies approach, as proposed by the NLG, was an extremely influential ideology for teachers, both in the United States and in the UK, across various levels of education. Cope and Kalantzis say that ten years after the term “multiliteracies” was coined by the NLG, a web search for the term resulted in “more than 100,000 web pages” (p. 2).
Cope and Kalantzis (2009) explain that in “the old literacy,” “learners were passive recipients or at best agents of reproduction of received, sanctioned and authoritative representational forms. The logic of literacy pedagogy was one that made it an instrument of social design which buttressed a regime of apparent stability and uniformity” (p. 10). However, the multiliteracies pedagogy “requires that the enormous role of agency in the meaning making process be recognized, and in that recognition, it seeks to create a more productive, relevant, innovative, creative and even perhaps emancipatory, pedagogy” (p. 10). The emancipatory pedagogy that the authors describe is not possible in a monolingual teaching environment. In a monolingual educational environment, students are expected to uncritically adopt the mainstream variety of the language. Even in rare teaching environments where all of the students’ home literacies are identical to the literacy of the school, a monolingual educational environment that does not allow the monolingual students to critically view their privileged home language offers little opportunity for students to understand and develop sensitivities to language power dynamics. In monolingual educational environments, the mainstream language is unquestioned, regardless of its relationship and history with other dialects and languages. Cope and Kalantzis continue to explain:
Literacy teaching is not about skills and competence; it is aimed at creating a kind of
person, an active designer of meaning, with a sensibility open to differences, change and
innovation. The logic of Multiliteracies is one which recognizes that meaning making is
11 an active, transformative process, and a pedagogy based on that recognition is more
likely to open up viable lifecourses for a world of change and diversity. (p. 10)
A comparison of the pedagogy of multiliteracies to the tenets of translingualism shows both approaches treat language difference as a negotiation and a performance in a situated context.
The main difference, as I describe in more detail in the later sections of the literature review, between “multi” and “trans” literacies is the relationship between the different languages within the language user. In the multiliteracies view, the languages exist as separate areas of knowledge that the language user switches back and forth between. Within the translanguaging framework, the borders between the languages within the language user are more fluid and connected.
Instead of making space for multiple languages to exist, the translingual framework exemplifies ways in which multiple languages work together within written and spoken communication and highlights the process that multilinguals use to shuttle seamlessly between multiple languages during processes of communication.
Building on the work of multiliteracies, Sugimoto and Levin (2000) describe the differences between Japanese and American uses of text and technology. The authors found that young Japanese in the 1980s use pagers that display only numbers in unique ways by reading the numbers. For instance, “39” can be read in a non-standard way san kyuu, or “thank you.” The numerals “88951” on a Japanese pager can be read hayaku koi, or “hurry and come here.” The authors explain
The technology itself was not originally designed for this kind of literacy activity for
young people. Its original aim was to make business contacts more convenient. But
young people found a new way, quite different from the original intended purpose, to use
this technology and made it an integral part of their culture. (p. 138)
12 While writing under the umbrella of multiliteracies, Sugimoto and Levin demonstrate how the users of the pagers shuttle between numeric, English, and Japanese literacy, which are acts of translingualism. This study shows the obvious—fluid shuttling between literacies existed before
“translingual” was coined to describe the act.
Sugimoto and Levin (2000) point to an interesting difference in numeric literacy between
America and Japan: “This way of playing with numbers to make sense is well established in the
Japanese culture,” and “[t]he American culture does not have as strong a cultural practice of reading numbers to make meanings as in Japan” (p. 138-139). For instance, “seven” can be read as nana, shichi, nano(ka), or sebun. The multiple readings of the number seven do not affect its meaning, only its pronunciation. In addition, “seven” can be written in hiragana, kanji, romaji, roman numerals (VII), or with the Arabic number “7”. Japanese readers decipher meaning from the string of numbers by thinking about the various possibilities of sounds, and meanings, the numbers can make—just like reading letters in English to form sound and meaning, but with numbers.
Sugimoto and Levin (2000) argue that their observations of Japanese and English literacy practices demonstrate more than the unique intricacy of the Japanese number system. The authors point out that pager systems were not invented in Japan, but instead adopted as a technology from the United States. The Japanese adopted the pager in a way that is outside of its original intended use. In addition, the authors find the ways that the Japanese used pagers is not enforced from a top-down approach of instruction, but instead as a bottom-up emerging practice of young people. They say, “In many cases, different subcultures use the same technology in quite different ways, each of which is deeply grounded in the context of the subculture” (p. 140).
This study demonstrates how, in the Japanese language, the line between numeric and written
13 literacy can be blurry and also fluid. The fluid shuttling across once separate literacies is a main tenet of the translingual framework. Sugimoto and Levin’s study took place before translingualism began to gain traction, but their work demonstrates and exemplifies the “trans” relationship among separate literacies.
Sugimoto and Levin (2000) argue that, obviously, language is a barrier to understanding writing on the Internet. However, other barriers also include culturally grounded practices. They say, “Communications and literacy practices on the Internet have cultural ancestors. If we ignore these, then any mutual understandings are in danger” (p. 152). Through Sugimoto and Levin’s comparative research of Japanese and American literacy practices, they discover ways that culture, history, and technologies transform reading and writing. While Sugimoto and Levin did not have the groundwork of translingualism to work with, their study shows the fluid nature of communicative practices. The authors show the fluidity between numeric, English, and Japanese literacies and how those literacies are affected by the introduction of new technologies. The authors also show how users of technology perform literacy in unexpected ways and are not constrained by the intentions of the makers of the technology. The users of the pagers appropriated the technology in ways that were creative and addressed their own communication needs. The participants within this dissertation also appropriate technology to address their own needs. For instance, in Chapter 3, Akari uses Google search as a concordancer; in Chapter 4
Suzu uses board games to practice English pronunciation, and in Chapter 5, multiple participants appropriate Japanese media to use for their study of the language. The data from Sugimoto and
Levin that demonstrates mixing of literacies being enabled by technology is very similar to
Fraiberg’s (2018) discussion of how mobile literacies move across activity systems and how
“‘unofficial’ spaces, technologies, languages, and literacies brokers or sponsors” are “shaping
14 students’ language and literacies” (para. 1). Chapter 5 aims to contribute additional study and description of “unofficial” spaces, in the likes of Fraiberg’s project on mobile literacies.
Comparative Rhetoric and Translingualism
Using a multilingual lens in the field of comparative rhetoric, Mao (2006) theorizes the relationship between Chinese and English in a contact zone (Pratt, 1991) while wrestling with the paradox of the world becoming more connected but also becoming more tribal. Mao builds on Anzaldua’s concept of physical borderlands as being “vague and undetermined...in a constant state of transition...characterized by movement away from set patterns and goals and toward a more whole perspective, one that includes rather than excludes,” (qtd. on p. 20-21) with his concept of “rhetorical borderlands”. Like Anzaldua’s physical borderlands, Mao argues a similar case:
Rhetorical borderlands are no exception: they are vague and undetermined, not only
because they are in transition, in movement, but also because there is always, for each
discrete communicative act, an excess of meaning yet to be processed, yet to be fully
grasped. It is the excess of meaning, both in its production and in its consumption, that
further aggravates this sense of ambiguity, indeterminacy, and vulnerability. (p. 21)
The first part of Mao’s (2006) title, Reading Chinese Fortune Cookie, represents co-existing
Chinese and American cultures, as well as Chinese/English translingual (a term he did not use) lexicon and syntax. Mao explains that baked goods with hidden messages have been used in
China since the 14th century, but sweets at the end of a meal are an American tradition (p. 4).
Mao uses the omission of an article (either “the” or “a”) before “Chinese fortune cookie” to represent the mingling of Chinese syntax with English lexicon (p. 5). Citing Fairclough’s
15 explanation of critical discourse analysis as viewing language as a “socially conditioned process”
Mao argues:
At rhetorical borderlands, we border residents are deeply situated and our rhetorical
practices are intensely social. We therefore face enormous constraints, for example, on
what we say, on what relations we enter into, and on what subject positions we occupy.
In turn, such restraints exert structural effects on how we form our knowledge and
beliefs, on how we establish our social relationships, and on how we cultivate our social
identities. (p. 30)
From this quote, we can see that Mao is writing about the pressures of exhibiting multilingual practices in a community that holds monolingual ideologies. Because monolingualist ideologies are prevalent in reality, Mao’s work is valuable to translingual studies in that it shows the struggle of using multiple languages in real-life borderlands. The translingual approach, which places emphasis on the fluidity and performativity of language and counters a monolingualist view of language, is theoretically demonstrable, meaning there is no inherent value within the linguistic structures of the dominant variety of language that makes them better than the marginalized varieties. However, the translingual view of language does not yet mesh with common views of language difference. Studies done within a translingual framework often disregard the fact that most of the world operates within a monolingualist, autonomous view of literacy. Heng Hartse & Kubota (2014), for instance, asks if translingualism “glorifies language fluidity and hybridity in local social contexts, ignoring power relations at broader levels” (qtd. in
Canagarajah and Dovchin, 2019, p. 1). Therefore, studies like Mao’s that suggest the real consequences (misunderstanding and discrimination) of mixed language use are important for the field of translingual studies.
16 In one of his analyses, Mao (2006) suggests that a knowledge of Chinese rhetorical values offers a wider, more accurate representation of a graduate application letter. Mao compares two application letters: one from a Chinese American, and one from a European
American. The Chinese American applicant begins her letter with a description of her childhood, while the European American begins with a description of what she wants to do in the graduate program (p. 47-48). Mao brings the concept of “face” into the analysis of these application texts.
According to Hu, the Chinese conception of face consists of two parts: lian (脸) and mianzi (面
子) (qtd. in Mao, p. 38). Lian represents a respect of the group and is a “social sanction for enforcing moral standards and an internalized sanction,” and mianzi connotes “prestige or reputation, which is either achieved through getting on in life or ascribed...by members of one’s own community” (Hu, qtd. in Mao, p. 39). Mao demonstrates that an understanding of rhetorical values improves communication and explains why the Chinese graduate applicant chose to begin her application letter with a story from her childhood. Through a rhetorical analysis using concepts of face, Mao gains more insight into the graduate application letters. Without insight from Chinese culture and Chinese rhetorical values, Mao would not have been able to understand fully the position of the Chinese American applicant. Mao, again, demonstrates how mono- rhetorical assumptions can have negative outcomes in multilingual communicative events.
Translingual Tenets in Composition Before the Translingual Linguistic Turn
In the field of composition, a translingual approach to writing is not new either.
Compositionists (Smitherman 1986, 1997, 1999; Rickford and Rickford, 2000; Gilyard and
Richardson, 2001; Palacas, 2001, 2004; Canagarajah, 2006), before the linguistic turn towards translingualism, argued for the writing classroom to be a space where teachers respect the practices and languages that students bring to the classroom, exploring ways that writing in non-
17 standard English, and foreign languages, can add to the rhetorical situation, instead of subtract from it. For example, Palacas (2004) argues that teachers of English should treat non-standard varieties of English as rhetorics that add to students’ linguistic repertoires. Palacas says:
...Ebonics-speaking African American students are treated as students who come to
school, not with a deficit of language and culture, but with their cup linguistically and
culturally full. The idea that the student comes to school with a difference not a deficit
enables the student—and teacher—to adopt an additive, enlarging approach to school and
to proficiency in standard English rather than have to buy into the more usual subtractive,
eradicationist approach, according to which African American language and culture
aren’t worthy of the school environment and must be abandoned (in school, at least), in
favor of what the school has to offer (as if one has to “become white” to succeed). (p.
110)
Palacas, and other scholars focusing on language diversity issues in composition, uses a pedagogical approach in which multiple varieties of language do not interfere with students’ abilities to perform in their writing but instead are linguistic resources that they may draw from.
Fraiberg (2018) describes translingualism’s “shift away from monolingual ideologies,” and he explains that “undergirding these moves is a shift away from deficit models towards a conception of language differences and diversity as a resource” (para. 2). As I’ve demonstrated throughout the literature review, the changing attitude of teachers and scholars of writing that views language diversity as a resource is a key tenet of multiliteracies (New London Group, 1996), pre- translingual composition scholars writing about language difference (Sugimoto and Levin, 2000;
Palacas, 2004, Mao, 2006), and also translingual studies (Canagarajah, 2006, 2011a, 2011b;
Fraiberg, 2010, 2018). While this thread is strong throughout writing scholarship, students and
18 language users broadly speaking often do not view language difference as a positive resource.
For instance, when working with ESL students (discussed more in Chapter 6), I have found that many students do not want to acknowledge that they use their first language when writing in
English, even if their first language is part of their writing process. This makes the pedagogical application of anti-monolingual conceptions of language a critical function of translingual studies.
What is the Difference Between Multi and Translingualism?
As I have demonstrated, multiliteracies (New London Group, 1996) and translingualism
(Horner et. al, 2011; Lu and Horner, 2016) address language as situated and performative and view multiple languages not as interference to writing in standard English but as a larger linguistic repertoire from which writers may draw. One of the main purposes of this dissertation is to demonstrate how multilinguals use multiple languages to achieve their goals of standard language use. A multilingual’s languages do not interfere with the production of standard language. The multiple languages are a resource that the multilinguals use as part of an integrated, fluid communication process to achieve their communication goals, whether the goal is standard English or a non-standard code meshed3 variety between languages. The evaluation of surface level mistakes that occurs from second language interference is not the focus of this study. However, instructors who adopt a translingual framework will understand that it is necessary to work with students individually to help them address their writing goals and help them to achieve the writing that they are aiming to produce.
3 Canagarajah (2006) proposes the term “code meshing” for the purpose of presenting a “strategy for merging local varieties with Standard Written English in a move toward gradually pluralizing academic writing and developing multilingual competence for transnational relationships” (p. 586). Canagarajah notes that the term “code switching” has been used by “radical scholars” and refers to the same phenomenon as “code meshing” (p. 598).
19 There are differences between multilingualism and translingualism. According to
Canagarajah (2013), “While the term multilingual perceives the relationship between languages in an additive manner (i.e., combination of separate languages), translingual addresses the synergy, treating languages as always in contact and mutually influencing each other, with emergent meanings” (p. 41). This differentiation points mainly to the conception of language boundaries as fluid.
According to Hall (2018), the first differentiating aspect of translingualism is its “theory about relations between languages, especially about language difference, about language boundaries” (p. 30). This first difference can be seen in Matsuda’s (2014) list of “assumptions” that translingual scholars hold: “Languages are neither discrete nor stable; they are dynamic and negotiated” (p. 479). The second differentiation between multiliteracies and translingualism is
“an ideological imperative, because of the pervasive yet often-unconscious cultural assumption of monolingualism that must be countered” (p. 30). Simply put, “English monolingualism is prevalent and problematic” (p. 479). In other words, translingualism 1) offers a different conceptualization of the relationship between languages than multilingual theories do and 2) views monolingual ideologies as harmful.
Another difference between multiliteracies and translingualism is the answer to the question “what is normal language use?” Lu and Horner (2016) argue that translingualism is not to be conflated with “L2 writing,” “specific kinds of writers (the translinguals),” “or specific textual features (most notoriously code-meshing).” They do not want translingual writing to be viewed as mistakes or as only pertaining to certain types of writers. If we view translingualism in a dichotomy that includes “normal” and “translingual,” teachers and writers can ignore “anything other than what is supposed to be the norm, and therefore kept at a safe remove from what are
20 imagined to be the ordinary concerns of ordinary people” (p. 212). Dichotomies are often not the most realistic way to view the world. However, through a monolingualist viewpoint, language is broken apart and forced into a dichotomy of “normal” and “other.” The translingual approach works to dissolve the monolingualist dichotomy and offers a way to view language difference in a more naturalistic way.
Lu and Horner (2016) suggest instead that translingualism be opposed to “what monolingualist ideology would have us understand normal language use, users, and relations be”
(p. 212). In other words, instead of seeing translingualism as opposed to normal language use, we need to see translingualism as being opposed to the assumptions of monolingual ideologies.
Advocates of the multiliteracies framework, while viewing multiple language repertoires as additive to a monolingual repertoire, still operate within in a monolingual language ideology and work under the assumption that diverse linguistic abilities do not hurt one’s ability to operate in standard monolingual communication.
Where Translingualism has been and where it is going in Composition Studies
As the previous sections in this chapter suggest, studies that discuss the multi-contextual and multilingual negotiation of situated language use have been prevalent across various disciplines. However, Matsuda (2013) argues that there was a “decline of interest in language issues” in composition studies due to the “disciplinary division of labor between ESL and composition” and because of “the faulty assumption that students in the composition classrooms are already proficient users of privileged varieties of English” (p. 129). Matsuda explains that
“notable exceptions” of composition studies that take on language issues are “largely regarded as a special interest” (p. 129-130).
21 Matsuda (2013) describes translingualism as a “linguistic turn” in composition studies motivated by three reasons. The first reason is “[t]he synergy that powers the current linguistic turn stems from multiple exigencies and multiple lines of research and scholarship” (p. 130). As
I discussed in the previous sections, translingual studies builds on a wide array of language disciplines. The second reason the linguistic turn was initiated in composition scholarship is the
“continued effort to address the issue of language diversity for linguistic minority students in the
United States as well as second-language writers, including both resident and international students” (p. 130). The third reason, and “arguably most important” is an “intellectual movement to see languages not as discrete entities but as situated, dynamic, and negotiated…” (p. 130).
Matsuda (2014) criticizes Canagarajah’s (2013) ethnography of student writing for drawing unbalanced attention to the most foreign aspects of his students’ writing. Canagarajah describes the writing of a student who uses the characters, , to signal a new section (p. 51). Canagarajah says the student explains, “It is a familiar shape that one may find in Islamic art. Since I am a Muslim, and Islam influenced me, it also influenced my literacy experience. Thus, using this particular motif was a hint to the reader to my heritage” (p. 51).
Canagarajah theorizes about the unconventional choice: “What motivated these students to adopt such unconventional envoicing4 strategies? Many expressed a strong sense of ownership over their language and writing” (p. 51). In the next example, Canagarajah highlights an untranslated section of Arabic in student writing (p. 52). Canagarajah notes that the students were reluctant to read “norm deviations as envoicing...At times, it took some nudging” (p. 52). Canagarajah admits that his classroom ethnography was influenced by his own actions and use of code
4 Canagarajah (2013) describes envoicing as one of the strategies to help students understand how to incorporate code meshing into their own writing process. Envoicing specifically helps students to articulate “the attitudes and orientations that motivate writers to represent their voices” (p. 50).
22 meshing. He says, “My experience as a multilingual speaker enabled me to provide feedback that encouraged code-meshing, and it is possible that students felt comfortable code-meshing because of my translingual performance of self in my own writing” (p. 46). He further explains his influence on students’ code meshing practices: “Though I admit that my pedagogy, identity, and writings may have influenced students to adopt translingual writing, my position is that pedagogy is not neutral” (p. 46).
Matsuda’s (2014) criticism of Canagarajah’s (2013) article is that even though
Canagarajah admits that translingualism encompasses more than visibly codemeshed writing, the examples focus entirely on the most extreme codemeshed examples, leading readers to an unrealistic view of translingual writing (Matsuda, 2014, p. 481). Matsuda applauds Canagarajah for acknowledging nuances about translingualism—for instance, explaining how translingual writing applies to students who grew up only with dominant varieties of English and identifying
“macro strategies for negotiating language difference” (for example: envoicing) (p. 482).
However, Matsuda’s main criticism is that Canagarajah’s examples “feed” the audience’s
“intellectual curiosity...the more unusual, the better” (p. 482). According to Matsuda, the excitement that has begun to grow in translingual studies in compositions is problematic in a few ways. Matsuda explains:
The tendency to valorize language differences is problematic also because it can end up
feeding the naïve, feel-good liberalism—you are OK as long as you join everyone in
valorizing these terms. Even worse, the hunt for novel examples of language differences
can turn the whole discussion into a linguistic freak show. (p. 132)
In fact, multilingual students I have encountered in my own classrooms want to write in the discourse of the academy and are resistant to visibly codemesh in their final products. In every
23 class, I make sure to explain and give examples of code meshed writing and only a few students out of the hundreds that I have had in my classes have taken the opportunity to code mesh languages in their own writing. However, most students express through written reflections at the end of the semester that reading plays with characters who use African American Vernacular
English (AAVE) paired with in-class discussions about code meshing helped them to understand that AAVE is not a “broken” variety of English, but a language in its own right. While it is obvious that students can benefit from a critical look at language differences, for example, observing and studying the rule-governed grammar of AAVE, it is not beneficial for students to see a differentiation in language norms, without context or situation, as being worthy of praise in its own right. At various 2019 CCCC’s presentations, many of the comments from audience members focused around student resistance to translingual approaches in the classroom. Students are lifetime users of languages, and natural intuitions of language are important for teachers to consider. Translingual language usage should stem from natural language use. The world is filled with naturally occurring translingual communication. Therefore, there is no need for teachers to create artificial environments where students combine languages in ways that they are uncomfortable with.
Matsuda (2013) continues, “Language differences—or lack thereof—are not inherently good or bad; they just happen. While it is important to destigmatize language differences, valorizing those differences without substantive arguments makes the whole movement vulnerable to criticisms and could lead to its eventual dismissal” (p. 132). Mao’s (2006) work, as discussed in a previous section, is an example of situating language difference within both
Chinese and American rhetorical norms and answers Matsuda’s call for a “substantive argument.” He describes how the rhetorical expectations between the two cultures differ, and he
24 makes it evident that both letters from the Chinese graduate applicant and the American graduate applicant work for rhetorically different reasons and different audiences based on different histories of argument construction and reasoning.
Matsuda (2014) explains that the uncritical and enthusiastic adoption of translingualism has also led to “linguistic tourism,” in which composition teachers do not really have experiences with languages other than the dominant form of English but are asking their students to use multilingual approaches in their writing and are using the term “translingualism” in their scholarship uncritically. To avoid linguistic tourism, Matsuda urges composition studies scholars to take a more critical stance regarding the topic of translinguistic studies and approaches. He suggests, “The most important first step would be for the field to learn more about language—its nature, structure, and function as well as users and uses—as it pertains to the study and teaching of writing, especially translingual writing” (p. 483). He continues, “To develop a full appreciation for insights related to language differences and to incorporate these insights into scholarship and pedagogy, all writing scholars and teachers must develop a broader understanding of various conversations that are taking place—inside and outside the field” (p.
483).
Suresh Canagarajah has published hundreds of articles and books on the topic of multilingual writers and his scholarship has had an enormous impact on translingual writing.
While I agree with Matsuda’s critique of parts of Canagarajah’s (2013) article, it is important to acknowledge that the uncritical celebration of bizarre code meshed writing is not typical of
Canagarajah’s scholarship. However, there is a reason that Matsuda (2014) critiques this part of
Canagarajah’s article. Matsuda captures the reception of the translingual framework very accurately. He astutely captures the problematic way that well-meaning teachers of writing try to
25 implement translingual frameworks in their classrooms, and he used part of Canagarajah’s article to explain the problems that he saw happening in the field and in classrooms. As translingual scholars and writing teachers eager to implement translingual frameworks in their classrooms do more research and learn more about the writing processes of their multilingual students, we will be able to acknowledge and avoid linguistic tourism and instead find ways to implement translingual ideologies that more accurately represent how real writers and speakers work across multiple languages.
Conclusion
Past as Prologue: This Study’s Fit in Current Scholarship
In many ways, Matsuda’s (2013, 2014) critiques of translingual studies matches my experiences implementing critical language pedagogies in my own first-year, technical, remedial, and media English writing classrooms, being an emerging speaker of the Japanese language, and observing and taking part in the Japanese/English community at this university. I implement a critical language lens in my classrooms that has developed along with my teaching. Like
Matsuda (2014) points out, it does not go over so well when a white teacher who speaks the main variety of English asks her students to code mesh in their writing—I found this out first hand.
However, my students are receptive to reading plays where the characters speak AAVE
(Charles, 1972; Dayo-Aliya and Smith, 2014) and learning how AAVE is a language that is rule- governed and logical (as opposed to being a “broken” version of standard English). My students are open to writing various versions of cover letters and resumes for various audiences, but when a multilingual student explained to me that the human resources departments at the businesses he will be applying to in Saudi Arabia accept only English resumes, I did not push him to use
Arabic simply because I value any language difference. However, with that same student, I
26 support his use of multilingual dictionaries and online tools to achieve his own rhetorical goals of communicating in standard English. I also support this student’s use of Arabic speech and writing when doing group work with other Arabic-speaking classmates.
Students have natural language instincts, and as a teacher and language researcher, I want to support and explore how writers and speakers use multiple languages to achieve their communication goals. By researching real-life translingual writing, we are coming to a better understanding of how languages move across boundaries and work within rhetorical goals of speakers and writers. With empirical observations of communication that crosses language boundaries, we can better theorize how we can begin to dismantle pervasive and harmful outcomes that result from monolingual ideologies.
This dissertation aims to show that translingual scholarship that engages and investigates situations where participants use real-life mixed language across a variety of communicative tasks (Fraiberg, 2010; Fraiberg, 2018; Canagarajah and Dovchin, 2019) is only beginning to scratch the surface of the wide variety of ways that multilinguals appropriate mixed language use in a fluid manner that is not bounded within one language. Based on the existing studies and problems, as well as recent studies (Canagarajah and Dovchin, 2019; Fraiberg, 2018), I argue that translingual studies needs to be contextualized by grounded, empirical, and observational research that asks, “What are the literacy practices of multilinguals?”
This dissertation answers many of the current calls to continue to define and shape the field of translingualism (Lu and Horner, 2016; Horner et. al, 2011), to offer situated and contextual examples of translingual communication (Matsuda, 2014; Canagarajah and Dovchin,
2019), and to show a deeper level of understanding of foreign languages through informed and thoughtful analysis (Matsuda, 2013, 2014). In this study, I use my own knowledge and study of
27 the Japanese language as a way to understand more fully how my participants in Chapters 3 and
4 mix Japanese and English while writing, speaking, and participating in social events. I also use my experiences of being a student in a university Japanese language classroom to better understand how the participants in Chapter 5 use English and Japanese to do language work inside and outside of the Japanese language classroom. As Chapter 2 discusses, I bring together two post-cognitive sociohistorical theories, activity theory and actor-network theory, to make sense of the large amount of data that I present throughout the dissertation.
Cautions While Moving Forward with Translingualism
In a criticism of translingual studies, Gilyard (2016) suggests that translingualism is no different from other critical language pedagogies (p. 285). He finds the new turn towards the translingual may lead to undesired outcomes for students of color, and he argues that the SRTOL was not designed to address students’ “own idiosyncratic thing” (p. 285). He says that the
SRTOL was designed to address “the harsh penalizing of students who were firmly tethered linguistically to an institutionally discredited heritage...” (p. 285), and he asks “...if translanguaging is the unqualified norm, then by definition it is something that all students, including high achievers, perform. So what problem is there to address?” He then suggests:
If the answer is that every translanguaging student, regardless of educational success,
could stand to be better educated with respect to the inner workings of the discourses and
power dynamics that impact their lives, then the project of translingualism is
indistinguishable from other species of critical pedagogy. (p. 285).
For the purpose of combatting the erasing of differences that he sees occurring within translingual studies, he argues that “specific hardships” be “detailed,” instead of making a “linguistic everyperson, which makes it hard to see the suffering and the political imperative as
28 clearly as in the heyday of SRTOL” (p. 285). In order for translingualism to avoid the flattening of differences across languages, it will be important for translingual scholars and teachers implementing translingual ideologies to recognize the situated nature of each language and to avoid painting languages with a broad brush.
Another possible problem with pedagogical adoption of translingual strategies in the classroom is an unrealistic expectation for instructors, especially monolingual instructors, to expect a visibly code-meshed text in multilingual students. Matsuda (2014) says monolingual teachers asking multilingual students to codemesh in their writing “would not go over well” (p.
483). That is because the social, material, and historical reality of the college writing classroom does not lend itself well code meshed texts. Matsuda explains, “...imagine someone who grew up speaking the dominant variety of English trying to speak African American English; the result would likely be embarrassing, if not offensive” (p. 483).
Curry (2019) suggests the term “swag jackin’” to encompass forms of linguistic appropriation of AAVE. Curry, like Gilyard (2016), is worried about the translingual turn erasing differences between language relationships. She says, “the difference as sameness is problematic for speakers of AAVE, and possibly other indigenous languages.” Curry also laments that the
English-only movement was started and fueled at the beginning with scholars of AAVE, and now AAVE is no longer a main focus of translingual studies. Curry suggests that depending on the context and situation of the contact zone, what could be considered code meshing in one context could be considered “swagger jackin’,” a form of linguistic appropriation of minorities of speakers of the dominant language.
Chapter Breakdown
29 The research in this dissertation takes into careful consideration the literature previously discussed and attempts to avoid the troubling aspects of translingualism and answer the need for contextual, situated examples of “everyday” translingualism (Canagarajah and Dovchin, 2019).
Chapter 2 discusses the post-cognitive and cultural historic methodological lenses that I used to guide my data collection, coding, and analysis. Chapter 3 discusses screen recordings of scholarly reading and writing from a multilingual Ph.D. student. Chapter 4 focuses on speech and social interactions of a multilingual high school teaching assistant. Chapter 5 highlights translingual literacy from an English L1 perspective through discussions of two Intermediate
Japanese classrooms and a variety of literacy portraits that span multiple languages and modalities (Fraiberg, 2010; Horner, Lockridge, and Selfe, 2015). Chapter 6 suggests pedagogical implications that have emerged from the data and offers further studies in the field of translingualism.
30
CHAPTER 2
METHODOLOGY
Introduction
Canagarajah (2013) situates his study on translingual writing in the classroom within the third generation of literacy studies, which he argues began with Brandt and Clinton’s (2002) call to pay attention to the materiality of literacy practices that travel from distant locations (p. 41-
42). Brandt and Clinton (2002) explain that first- and second-generation NLS scholars (Street,
1984; Barton and Hamilton, 2012) studying local literacies had no way to account for global literacy practices that traveled and became incorporated into local practices. Brandt and Clinton asked scholars to revive only a very specific notion from the autonomous model—to acknowledge the ability of literacy and literacy practices to travel, integrate, and endure. I aim for this dissertation to be a contribution to third-generation NLS research. Therefore, I have looked to existing scholarship in third-wave NLS scholarship (Spinuzzi, 2008; Fraiberg, 2010,
2018; Roozen and Erickson, 2017; Prior and Olinger, 2018) for appropriate methodologies to treat the diverse range of literacy practices that I present in order to answer my research question,
“What are the literacy practices of members of the Japanese/English language learning community?”
Fraiberg (2010) investigates the multiliterate, multimodal practices of tech workers in
Israel and utilizes “framework mashes” as a way to methodologically capture a large amount of data streams from his participants, whose “flows or scapes are co-constituted in everyday reading, writing, speaking, and design practices” (p. 104). Fraiberg’s “framework mashes” bring
31 together research from multilinguality, multimodality, genre theory, activity theory, actor- network theory, and literacy studies (p. 104). Fraiberg argues, “disciplinary border crossings are key to remixing composition in the context of globalization” (p. 104).
While Fraiberg’s “framework mashes” support investigation of specific multimodal and multilingual practices across networks, Prior and Olinger’s (2018) framework for studying literacy practices as “complexly dialogic, embodied and laminated chronotopic worlds” is a useful framework for bringing together the compilation of mixed methods and various participants throughout the dissertation, including literacy portraits, classroom observations, screen recordings, interviews, and spoken analysis. Prior and Olinger suggest:
Literacies, disciplinarity, and acts of semiosis are purely historical, dialogic phenomena,
which means we need dynamic, emergent, embodied, messy notions like laminated
assemblage and semiotic becoming to grapple with them. It is past time to fully recognize
the radical implications of those early studies of literate practice and to finally put to rest
the dominant metasemiotic and metasocial ideologies of autonomous models of literacy
and becoming. (p. 137)
Laminated assemblages capture how literate activity is enacted through “fluid chains of places, times, people, and artifacts that come to be tied together in trajectories of literate action along with the ways multiple activity footings are held” (Prior and Shipka, 2003, p. 2). The notion of chronotopic laminations is useful for this study in particular because the participants work across
Japanese and English in multiple locations, with a variety of technologies, for a wide array of purposes and goals. Metasocial and metasemiotic ideologies group together social groups
(metasocial) and characterize signs based on values (metasemiotic). In this study, if I were to only study classroom activity, in the case of the undergraduates or graduates, I would have been
32 excluded from most the of the literate activity discussed in this dissertation. By using the framework of laminated chronotopes and assemblages, we can see how the typical scripts of what we imagine Japanese or English learners to be only begins to scratch the surface of the deep and complex literate practices that the language learners engage in throughout various times and places. Through the research process, the participants in this study have presented me with an extremely wide range of data streams: multilingual and multimodal literacy practices as answers to my research question.
As I continued to gather data, I began to realize that the range of literacy practices was much larger than I had imagined, and it became paramount for me to be able to showcase the wide range of practices that I found in response to my research question. The multitude of literacy practices that I found within the community brings attention to the lack of multiliteracy portraits in translingual studies broadly. While the data that I collected, coded, analyzed, and present within this study may be an extremely diverse and wide range of practices across education levels and languages, these literacy portraits give a detailed look into the specific practices within this multilingual community.
Post Cognitive Socio Historical Paradigms
From a literacy researcher’s standpoint, I saw the Japanese language classrooms as impressive assemblages of global and local human and non-human actors. As Spinuzzi (2008) argues, “competence in actor–network theory is seen as a property of the assemblage of humans and nonhumans” (p. 191). An actor-network theory account of the Japanese language classroom suggests that the foreign literacies act upon the human actors in a symmetric manner, the non- human actors being actors in their own right (Spinuzzi, 2015). ANT is useful for understanding complex social practices because it requires researchers to deliberately trace each actor that plays
33 a role in the activity, regardless of whether these actors are conventionally regarded as important, influential, or active. While some methodologies might focus their attention firmly on people,
ANT encourages this focus on people but also considers other non-human materials, like textbooks or songs, as actors capable of shaping and directing human activity. ANT is not limited to only looking at textbooks and songs. For instance, in an interview with an Intermediate
Japanese student, she described how her family often went to a hibachi restaurant for her birthday and other special occasions. Most theories do not have a framework with which to consider the restaurant, the parts that make up the restaurant, or how the restaurant became part of the Intermediate student’s actor network. Any kind of actor, whether it be a human, location, item, or idea holds equal weight in an actor network.
However, as my research took me closer and closer to the level of human action, the terms, frames, and ideas from actor-network theory became less helpful in the coding and understanding of the relationship between humans and non-humans. For instance, I found that precise descriptions of reading and writing among my participants was more valuable to the field of composition. I also found that these precise accounts of reading and writing led themselves to specific kinds of analysis relevant in my field. Yes, the idea of the hibachi grill being in the students’ actor network was interesting, but there is little use in that information to writing studies, and the tools to code and analyze the data from an ANT perspective were not as relevant to writing studies as other theories and frameworks.
At the level of human action, I found activity theory (Russell, 1997, Kaptelinin, 2009,
Prior et. al, 2007; Prior and Olinger, 2018; Fraiberg, 2010, 2018; Roozen and Erickson, 2017) to be a useful framework to use for coding and analysis of human actions. The impressive nature of the relationship between the global and local actor-network assemblage in the Japanese/English
34 community is what drew me to the research site in the beginning. However, with activity theory the human actions taking place in and across multilingual tool ecologies are more fruitful for writing studies. Activity theory is a broad term used to represent a variety of methods stemming from the psychological theories of Vygotsky that view human action as socially situated and systematic. Specifically, by investigating the tool ecologies, I can focus on learners working in specific, grounded, and routinized portraits of literacy. Tool ecologies refer to groups of items that are part of a person’s writing process, for example: specific software programs, pens, paper, notes, PDFs, etc.
As Spinuzzi (2008) does, I use both activity theory and actor-network theory to compensate for the other’s weaknesses (p. 66—67). Actor-network theory can help to answer the question of “what,” specifically, what kinds of cross-language materials the students and teachers use in and out of the classroom. In comparison, Spinuzzi explains that activity theory offers “a materialist theory of knowledge, an account of development in all its forms” (p. 66). I use activity theory extensively in Chapter 3 and Chapter 5 as a way to understand the actions of the participants in relation to translingual literacy practices. I use actor-network theory in Chapters 4 and 5 as a way to bring attention to the flow of global actors within the community and as a way to answer the question “of what is the learning community comprised?”
In the remainder of this chapter, I describe the methods I used to study the literacy practices of members of the English/Japanese learning community at and around this university.
I first describe how my originating research question developed into specifying research questions for the different sets of data that I present in Chapters 3, 4, and 5. Next, I give a description of the site, the participants, and my position as a participant observer. Then, I describe the reasoning for a multi-method study, which consisted of interviews, screen
35 recordings, and recorded observations across a variety of settings. I conclude the chapter with a detailed description of the process of data collection, reduction, and analysis, which is based on
Smagorinsky’s (2008) call for developing a robust methods section.
Research Questions, Methods, and Participants
Each data chapter (Chapters 3—5) presents a wide range of textured literacy practices.
As I grew increasingly familiar with the literacy practices of the community, I began to see how each set of data led to different areas of inquiry. I gathered the data in Chapters 3, 4, and 5 to answer my originating research question (which remains the same throughout each chapter) and through the process of working with each data set, I developed specifying questions for each set of data.
The following questions are divided by research question (and correspondingly by chapters). I use “originating” and “specifying” (Bazerman, 2008) to describe my research questions. The “fundamental” question “form(s) basic curiosities and motivations for inquiry” (p.
302); whereas, “Specifying questions define empirically verifiable phenomena or processes for confirmation or elaboration” (p. 302-303).
Originating research question (Chapters 3, 4, and 5)
1.) What are the literacy practices of members of the Japanese/English learning community at this university?
Specifying research questions for Chapter 3: Screen recordings of mixed-language
scholarly reading and writing
1. What are the tool ecologies that make up Akari’s translingual writing and reading
processes?
36 2. How does Akari use English and Japanese in her writing and reading processes
within the tool ecologies?
3. In the context of Akari’s digital tool ecologies, what kinds of actions make up
high-turn tool flows?
The difference between “tool ecologies” (in the first and second questions) and “digital tool ecologies” (in the third question) shows a switch in attention from the entire composing area, which includes paper books, notes, and sticky notes, to the digital composing environment.
Participant
Chapter 3 focuses exclusively on the literacy practices of one participant, Akari,
Japanese L1/English L2, who is a commanding speaker and writer of both English and Japanese.
Akari is a teaching fellow in the Ph.D. in Translation program and as part of her duties in that position she teaches undergraduate Japanese courses (taught mainly in Japanese), took Ph.D.- level graduate courses in English, passed comprehensive exams in English, and is currently writing and defending a prospectus and dissertation in English. Akari’s background will be discussed more fully in Chapter 3. The decision to include her in the study (since she is a teacher) was based on my goal of attempting to represent multiple perspectives from the same learning community. Akari’s level of proficiency in English is much higher than the undergraduates studying Japanese, and therefore Akari takes part in different kinds of literate activities. Her inclusion in the study is intended to help paint a broader but also more detailed picture of the learning community.
Setting
The setting of this particular study began within an undergraduate Japanese course called
Voices of Japan. Within this classroom, I was a student, and the participant, Akari, was the
37 sensei (teacher). After obtaining IRB permission5 and discussing with Akari the best way for her to share her writing and reading processes, Akari suggested that she record the screen of her
MacBook Pro while reading and writing for graduate coursework at her apartment, using
QuickTime Player. During the screencasts, she completes various assignments for graduate coursework in the classes Terminology Studies, Corpora in Translation, and Seminar in Literary
Translation.
Method: Screen recordings of scholarly reading and writing paired with an
interview
The data in Chapter 3 includes screen recordings from Akari, as well as a modified think aloud protocol in which she speaks aloud when she wants to explain or point something out, and an interview with Akari in which she explains the context of the screen recordings. In the interview
Akari also describes her history of learning English.
Transcription and Coding
For the purpose of transcribing, coding, and analyzing the screen recordings, I used themes from activity theory in order to orient myself in a meaningful way towards the data and also to develop my findings (Geisler and Slattery, 2007). After receiving the videos, I transcribed each movement on the screen in Excel by describing the following: an audio transcript and a description of what is appearing on screen. I use the word “transcription” to refer to the process of turning all actions on the recording (spoken words and actions on the screen) into written words. This process included first notating the “first-order phenomena” (p. 194-195) in the screen recordings, in the order in which they occurred, using Excel worksheets. For the purpose of transcription, I used the categories “application being used” and “how application is being
5 The IRB granted permission to record audio and video of the participants in the case studies and in group settings to record those around the participants.
38 used.” I focused on the various applications that Akari used on multiple desktop screens, which included: book review Word document, notes Word document, Apple Dictionaries, and Google
Chrome (with various websites). These codes are what Geisler and Slattery argue are first-order phenomena (p. 194). They explain, “First-order phenomena address the question of how the writer is doing what she is doing rather than higher-order questions of what she is doing or why”
(p. 194). While looking through the data during the transcription process, I color-coded each instance of the applications’ uses to better see the relationships between the data. Throughout the data analysis process, Microsoft Excel allowed me to easily sort the data in a variety of manners in order to understand Akari’s writing process in different ways.
After transcribing the video, I began to place codes on the data. According to Miles and
Huberman (1994), “Codes are tags or labels for assigning units of meaning to the descriptive or inferential information compiled during a study” (p. 56). They also say, “Coding is analysis,” and “Codes are used to retrieve and organize the chunks...The organizing part will entail some system for categorizing the various chunks, so the researcher can quickly find, pull out, and cluster the segments relating to a particular research, hypothesis, construct, or theme (p. 56-57).
During the first pass of coding, I used “descriptive coding” (Miles & Huberman, 1994, p.
57-58). Miles and Huberman explain, “descriptive codes...entail little interpretation. Rather, you are attributing a class of phenomena to a segment of text” (p. 57). In this pass, I used the video footage to add more details to the initial transcription process, adding, for example, details to the ways that Akari used the dictionaries, websites, and Word Documents. This first coding pass focused on the codes “application being used” and “how application is being used.”
In a second coding pass, I used open coding (Corbin & Strauss, 2008) based on what I saw in the data, as well as from ideas that I was reading about in scholarship that I had begun to
39 see within the data. This second set of codes included: “discussing own writing process,”
“referring to assignment,” difficulty,” “discussion of texts,” “evaluation of tool,” “disciplinary discussion,” “writing in English,” and “East to West/West to East.”
On the third coding pass, I used an axial code, “to articulate the relationship” between two codes (Spinuzzi, 2010, p. 373), which I called a “translingual tool flow,” to represent the movements between the book review Word document (the application where Akari wrote the assignment) and the other applications. An axial code is a code that articulates the relationship of two codes that consistently appear together. The transition between the book review Word document and other tools is significant to this study because it can be used to answer my research questions and gives specific examples of what translingual writing processes look like.
The “translingual tool flow” is a type of transition. Using activity theory, Geisler and Slattery
(2007) say that “transitions” can be a way to analyze screen recordings (p. 196).
After the axial code of translingual tool flow emerged from the data, I completed a fourth coding pass where I standardized what counted as a “turn” and what kinds of actions would be included in each flow. For instance, with this last phase of coding, I was able to more clearly see where one tool flow ended, and another began. I used the level of words to designate new tool flows. When Akari began working with a new word, one tool flow ended, and another began.
Every time Akari moved from the Word Document where she was writing to another application, I counted the number of actions that show different content on the screen (a “turn”) before she returned to the Word Document. An action that shows different content includes: scrolling down, clicking on a different tab in the Apple Dictionary, clicking on search results, clicking on a link, typing a different word into the same application, or hitting the back button.
For example, she moves from the Word document to her notes file (1), pauses and then scrolls
40 down in the notes (2), visits the Apple Dictionary and types in a word (3), and then returns to composing in Word: 3 turns. From these counts, I was able to determine an average number of turns while writing the book review: 266 turns over 64 tool flows (4.156); while reading
Heinrick Rickert’s “Theory of Definitions”: 26 turns over 6 tool flows (4.33); and while reading
Yukari Meldrum’s “Translationese in Japanese Literary Translation in English”: 6 turns over 5 tool flows (1.2).
While the average turn per flow is higher during the Rickert reading by .174 turns than the writing of the book review, the number of total turns in the book review (266) and highest- turn flow (22) are much higher than total number of turns of the Rickert reading (26) and the highest turn flow (8). After arriving at these calculations and then returning to the data, I saw that the higher-than-average turn flows were particularly interesting because they showed screen time of a writer who was looking for an answer to a question about word choice, a reference, or an idea that was more complicated, harder to find, or in some way more involved than the other questions that she answered by using applications outside of the Word Document.
According to Geisler and Slattery (2007), second-order phenomena include “duration,” which I measure not as time, but as “turns” (p. 195-197). I measured her actions in “turns” instead of time elapsed because through measuring turns, I can capture and represent the dynamic tool ecologies, in which Akari moves quickly among tools. High-turn flows are contiguous segments of the screen recording in which she spends more turns away from the book review Word document than average. By discussing a high-turn flow, I shine light on the artifact ecologies, transitions between actions, and focus on where breakdowns occur.
In the findings, I discuss what kinds of on-screen actions constitute translingual tool flows in Akari’s writing process. I will focus specifically on what I call a “high-turn flow,” a tool
41 flow with a higher than average turn rate, as compared to other tool flows in Akari’s screen recordings. A high-turn flow is a place in the writing process where Akari used higher-than average turns in applications when searching for specific ideas or words using digital tools. The higher-than-average tool flows are found only in Akari’s writing and reading processes within the limited set of videos. This study does not compare Akari’s tool flows to the tool flows of other writers. However, future studies could compare Akari’s tool flows to the tool flows of other writers. Within the context of Akari’s writing and reading processes in these videos, I argue that the high-turn flows show “knotworking” (Engestrom, Engestrom, and Vahaao, 1999), or the “continual tying and untying of genres, objects, texts, and people” (p. 105, cited in
Fraiberg, 2010). Knotworking signifies places where writers struggle and work through problems. With Vygotskian theories, we can understand that this struggle leads to development.
Specifying research questions for Chapter 4: audio recordings and photographs of
spoken mixed language use
1. What does spoken Japanese and English code switching look like?
2. In what way does Suzu use multimodal and multilingual communication
practices?
Participants
Suzu is a Japanese L1/English L2 who was a J-LEAP teaching assistant at a high school near the university where this study takes place. J-LEAP is an exchange program that surfaced after a 2010 dialogue between former President Barack Obama and former Prime Minister Naoto
Kan, where both leaders “shared the view that further enhancement of mutual understanding among wide range of people between Japan and the U.S. is necessary for deepening the Japan-
U.S. Alliance” (J-LEAP). Suzu earned her bachelor’s degree in English from a university in
42 Japan, and she is currently working on a Master of Arts in Teaching English as a Second
Language at a university in Florida. I include Suzu within the study of this learning community because, like Akari, Suzu adds a different perspective to the learning community. At the time of the study, Suzu was in a transitional period in her life and was unsure if she would attend graduate school in the United States or return to Japan. Both of these options however entail her leaving the current community in which she had grown used to. The literate activities that she participates in during this study are part of her preparations to enter a new community of learners. Her case study is important because many of the learners in this community, like most university communities, often leave to join other communities.
Throughout the study, Suzu interacts with members of the local BJJ community, who became her friends while she was teaching in the area. These friends of Suzu include Clyde
(purple belt), Scott (brown belt and instructor), Sasha (blue belt), Riley (white belt), Philip (blue belt), and John (blue belt). Suzu is a black belt in judo and a white belt in BJJ. Judo and BJJ are related historically as well in terms of the shared techniques between the two martial arts.
Setting
I met Suzu through Ryota, who worked through a different government program in the same university Japanese program. I invited him to a Memorial Day cookout at my house, and he brought Suzu with him. Suzu and I became friends quickly, and because she lived close to me, we were able to spend a lot of time together practicing BJJ, watching movies, studying, talking, playing board games, and attending parties. I received IRB approval and participant permission for the recording of three social events: a party where people are playing That’s What She Said
(a card game with similar rules to Cards Against Humanity) that took place at Scott’s home, a 5- person get together where we play Pictionary and eat Okinawan Taco Rice that takes place at
43 Suzu’s apartment, and a study session focused specifically on pronunciation and answering the speaking prompt for the TOEFL that also takes place at Suzu’s apartment.
Method: audio, video, and photography recordings of social gathering with games
involving literacy and of a TOEFL study session
Below are the events where I recorded audio and took photographs that I have coded and analyzed.
Table 2.1 Audio Recordings of Suzu in Various Settings
That’s What She Said game and party 54 minutes
Pictionary and Okinawan taco rice 65 minutes
Study session for speaking portion of TOEFL 140 minutes Transcription, coding, and analysis of That’s What She Said game and party
Since Suzu spoke only five times (totaling 44 seconds) throughout the 54-minute recording during the That’s What She Said game and party, I transcribed and focused my attention only around those five speech events. In Chapter 4, I present and discuss those five instances of Suzu’s speech through the use of a chart and discussion.
Transcription, coding, and analysis of Pictionary and Okinawan taco rice
I fully transcribed the audio recordings for the Pictionary and Study Session events into
Excel worksheets. After transcribing the Pictionary gameplay, I used a combination of descriptive coding (Miles and Huberman, 1994, p. 57-58) and open coding (Corbin and Strauss,
2008) to create the codes: code switching, multimodal usage, and compliments received. By coding for code switching and multimodal usage, I was able to see the frequency and manner in which Suzu used both Japanese, English, and multiple modes in speech in various settings, helping me to directly answer my research questions. The “compliments received” code pointed
44 to times when Suzu’s multimodal communication was described as effective by interlocutors and gives insight into how her communication was received, which helps to build a fuller picture of what Suzu’s literacy practices are. This variety of coding helped me to capture and analyze a variety of occurrences. To create the first two codes, I turned to my research questions for this chapter (What does spoken Japanese and English code meshing look like? and In what way does
Suzu appropriate multimodal and multilingual communication in practices?) and read the transcripts. From these two sources, the codes “code switching” and “multimodal usage” emerged. After the passes of the coding in which I placed the first two codes on the data, I used descriptive coding to represent when the Pictionary players received compliments from one another. While there was a plethora of codes that I could have attached to the transcription of the game play regarding social dynamics and game play, I used the research questions as a way to analyze my information in a way relevant to the purpose of the dissertation. Other social dynamics, for instance, how the rules were decided on, were excluded from the analysis because
I found little relevance to writing studies. However, the compliments received were directly related to what was during gameplay viewed as effective communication.
Photographs that depict the multimodal game play are also shown in Chapter 4. The code
“multimodal usage” refers to two main events that took place: when Pictionary players use drawings to communicate a word to other players and when Suzu shares the illustrated story that she created for the high school Japanese class that she taught.
Transcription, coding, and analysis of study session for speaking portion of TOEFL
After fully transcribing the speech during the study session, I used a combination of starter codes and descriptive codes to begin my analysis. I began with the same two starter codes
“code switching” and “multimodal use” that I generated from the coding of the Pictionary
45 session in order to answer my research questions. The codes were not applicable to the recording of the That’s What She Said Party because Suzu spoke minimally and there were no opportunities for drawing during the game. In addition, I also used the descriptive code of
“pronunciation detailing” to notate the common occurrence of the participants going back and forth between to find a “native-sounding” pronunciation. I also coded the conversation based on the activities that we do throughout the meeting: “history of chocolate reading,” “speaking prompts,” and “multimodal/multilingual story.” In Chapter 4, I present data from all three events for the purpose of expanding the modes of study in translingual studies to include verbal and pictorial communication.
Specifying research questions for Chapter 5: classroom observations and out-of-
class literacy practice walkthroughs
1. What tools do students use in the Japanese language classroom? How do the tools
interact with other tools and with the students? What kinds of disruptions occur
within these activities?
2. What tools do students use in their home study of the Japanese language? How do
the tools interact with other tools and with the students? What kinds of disruptions
occur within these activities?
Literacy practice walkthroughs refer to when participants “walk me through” how they read, translate, and generally interact with various media. In specifying question 1, the focus on tools interacting with other tools stems from an activity theory lens in which groupings of tools
(ecologies) are significant.
Participants and setting
46 In order to answer the research questions in this chapter, I recruited a variety of participants through different avenues, which included inviting observation participants to take part in interviews and literacy portraits (Tom, Nino, Olivia and Michael) and recruiting a classmate to share his literacy portrait (CK). Tom and Nino were part of the first round of interviews that I conducted. Tom and Nino did not partake in a literacy practice walkthrough, but instead offered rich details during the interview about a variety of literacy practices that they had become very familiar with during their study of the Japanese language. I asked Olivia and
Michael to walk me through their use of textbooks (Michael) and manga (Olivia), and during the walkthrough, I asked questions to clarify how they worked with the books and manga and how they thought about their reading processes. In the case of one participant, Masamune6, because I was attuned to Japanese literacy practices during the research-gathering process, I noticed
Masamune scanning Japanese game booklets in the library and invited him to participate in the study as well.
Nino and Tom were the English L1/Japanese L2 instructors of the Intermediate Japanese classrooms that I observed. Nino and Tom were both graduate student teaching assistants in the translation master’s program. Within Nino’s classroom, I recruited two participants, both English
L1/Japanese L2 undergraduates, Olivia and Michael, to share their literacy portraits. Olivia was a
Spanish Translation major, and I got to know her more through taking two Japanese courses with her. Michael was a business major who is now currently in an English-language master’s program in business in Tokyo. While Michael was initially in a course level below me during the classroom observations, he tested into a higher level of Japanese courses, and then we became members of the same Japanese course cohort. Consequently, we took four courses together. He
6 Masamune is an English L1, Japanese L2. His pseudonym is Japanese and is derived from his username on his Nintendo fan website.
47 shared his literacy portraits with me during the Japanese Coffee Hour, which is a weekly extra- curricular meeting opened to all university students but is mainly intended for international undergraduate students from Japan studying English and undergraduate and graduate students studying Japanese to meet one another and speak. CK was also a member of my Japanese course cohort. We took five courses together, and he shared his literacy portrait at the Japanese Coffee
Hour.
Method: Interviews with TAs, teachers, students
In 2016, in addition to classroom observations, I interviewed all undergraduate Japanese
L2 students who expressed interest in participating in an interview when I visited their classroom. I sent interested participants (117) an email, and I interviewed those who responded to the email about their experiences with the Japanese language. I also asked both TAs whose classrooms I observed, as well as both of the teachers with whom I have taken classes with (a
Lecturer of Japanese, as well as a Teaching Fellow) to participate in the interview. In addition, I interviewed Suzu, a J-LEAP teaching assistant.
Table 2.2 Formal interviews with Question Script Adapted from Interview Questions in Brandt (2001)
Four teachers including: two TAs (Tom and Nino), one Lecturer of Japanese (Mari), one TF (Akari)
Three Elementary Japanese students
Five Intermediate Japanese students
Three Advanced Japanese students
One J-LEAP teaching assistant (Suzu)
48 Total 16 interviews In the following table are the interview questions for the English L1/Japanese L2 participants.
For Japanese L1/English L2 participants, I used the same questions but about the English language.
Table 2.3 English L1/Japanese L2 interview questions modified from Brandt (2001)
Pre-university study of Japanese earliest memory of seeing other people speaking, writing, reading in the Japanese language earliest memories of using media from Japan--whether translated or not earliest memories of self listening to, speaking, writing, reading (experiencing) Japanese earliest memories of direct or indirect instruction in the Japanese language memories of places where experiencing Japanese language/culture occurred occasions associated with experiencing Japanese language and culture organizations/groups associated with experiencing Japanese language and culture materials available for listening, watching, speaking, writing, reading in Japanese/experiencing Japanese culture ways Japanese materials entered household kinds of materials used in Japanese/associated with Japanese culture role of technologies experiencing Japanese language and culture Writing and reading in school earliest memories of experiencing Japanese in school memories of experiencing Japanese in school memories of direct instruction memories of self-instruction in Japanese memories of peer instruction in Japanese memories of evaluation of Japanese skills use of assignments/other school writing and reading in Japanese audiences of your Japanese language use knowledge drawn on to complete Japanese language assignments resources drawn on to complete Japanese language assignments kinds of materials available for school-based experiences in Japanese kinds of materials used in experiencing Japanese in school role of technologies in learning Japanese at school Writing and reading with peers memories of sharing experiences (watching, listening, reading, writing) in Japanese memories of writing and reading to/with friends in Japanese memories of writing and reading in Japanese in play memories of seeing friends experiencing Japanese memories of reading friends’ writing in Japanese Extracurricular writing and reading
49 organizations or activities that may have involved experiencing Japanese language/culture, writing or reading, writing contests, pen pals, and so forth Self-initiated writing or reading purposes for experiencing, writing and reading Japanese language/culture at different stages genres experienced in Japanese language audiences/uses for Japanese language/culture teaching/learning involved in above uses of Japanese language/culture Writing on the job same as above Civic or political writing Influential people Memories of people who had a hand in one’s learning to write or read in Japanese Influential events Significant events in the process of learning to listen to, read, and write in Japanese and participate in Japanese culture Purposes for writing and reading overall in Japanese Values Relative importance of writing and reading, experiencing Japanese Motivations for learning Japanese language and culture Consequences to learning Japanese language and culture Current uses of reading and writing All reading and writing done in Japanese the six months prior to interview Sense of literacy learning Interviewee’s own sense of how he or she learned to read and write/experience Japanese sense of how people in general learn to read and write/experience Japanese Interview Rationale
While Brandt’s (2001) main thesis revolves around her goal to “understand better what sharply rising standards for literacy have meant to successive generations and how--as students, workers, parents, and private and public citizens--they have responded to rapid changes in meanings and methods of literacy learning” (p. 3), I have found that her interview questions also help to describe the material realities of both groups of the multilingual participants. By material realities, I am referring to the non-human collection of actors that are involved with the participants’ literacy practices. As described earlier, within both activity theory and actor- network theory frameworks, the ways that learners assemble tools into ecologies is significant for tracing patterns, development, and literate activity.
50 Brandt (2001) investigates how “ordinary people have learned to read and write” during the twentieth century. Brandt uses focused interviews and also longer autobiographical interviews to discover more about the literacy practices of Americans. Using Brandt’s book as a step-off point, I investigate the literacy practices and experiences of American college students learning Japanese as a foreign language and the experiences of Japanese students and teachers who have learned English.
Coding of Interviews
The majority of the interviews (12 out of 16) were of English L1 undergraduate students of Japanese. My intent for the interviews was to be able to answer the question what are the literacy practices of the English/Japanese community? The participants’ answers to the interview questions allowed me to begin to build an understanding of the community through an actor- network theory lens. Because the purpose of the interviews is to add depth and to triangulate data with the case studies and observations, I used the interviews to attempt to show a wider view of how the participants first began to enroll foreign language literacies into their actor networks.
Enroll is a term used by actor-network theorists that captures the fact that humans bring, or enroll, a variety of non-human and human actors into their own actor networks. All of the participants were able to recount “first memories” of their second language use. I coded interviews in a way that would answer my research question about the literacy practices of members of the community. I coded and pulled out “introductory literacy practices” throughout all of the interviews and present those findings in Chapter 5.
As my research questions for Chapter 5 emerged, I saw that Nino and Tom’s experiences could be used to further understand the English L1/Japanese L2 literacy portraits, specifically that of CK and Masamune. I coded Nino and Tom’s interviews for “genre,” “motivation,” and
51 “literacy practices.” After coding the interviews, I returned to the literacy snapshots and to the scholarship on remediation and genres, and then once again returned to the interview data and used the codes to write an analysis.
Method: observations of two classrooms
I began my research in Fall 2016 by observing two Intermediate Japanese-language classrooms. The observation form reflects my interest in the material semiotics of the classroom.
Brandt and Clinton (2002) explain:
Objects are animated with human histories, vision, ingenuity, and will, yet they
also have durable status and are resilient to our will. Our objects are us but more than us,
bigger than we are; as they accumulate human investments in them over time, they can
and do push back at us as “social facts” independent and to be reckoned with. We find
this an accurate description of literacy in its historical, material, and especially
technological manifestations. (p. 345)
Initially, my focus was to use actor-network theory to more fully understand the literacy practices of the community. Through my observations, I found the tools that the students and teachers used guided the activity and the discussion. I documented how materials interact with speech, and I found that materials are extremely prevalent and influential in the Intermediate classrooms. Even simple formalities, such as asking students how their weekends had been, were dictated by pages in the textbook and the whiteboard because the teachers focused their discussions around relevant grammar points. I found that the action of the actors “was bound up in the use of equipment” (Dourish, 2001, qtd. in Kaptelinin, 2009). I worked abductively, moving from the observations to theory and back to observations (Tavory and Timmermans,
2014). According to Kaptelinin (2009), “In activity theory, consciousness is seen as a result of
52 practical activity with other people and with tools, so mind necessarily goes beyond the individual” (p. 196). The observation focused on the material and the human interaction with the material allowed me to describe the Japanese-language classroom in terms of activity theory in
Chapter 5. I took notes by filling in the following chart for each class period.
Table 2.4 Material Semiotics Observation Notes
Materials used in class for instruction by instructor:
What the material is and how it is used:
Materials used in class by students:
What the material is and how it is used: When coding the classroom observations, I used my research questions to guide my coding: What tools do students use in the Japanese-language classroom? How do the tools interact with other tools and with the students? What kinds of disruptions occur within these activities? In order to answer these questions, I isolated the tool that the students or teachers were using and the way it was being used into a separate Excel spreadsheet. The final product from the coding is a list of materials in one column and a list of the way each material was used throughout the classrooms.
Method: audio and video recordings of literacy practice portraits
Part of my decision to choose to collect case study data was influenced by the work of
Fraiberg (2010). Fraiberg performs an ethnography of a high-tech start-up company in Israel. His data consists of field notes, as well as what he terms “a portrait of the literacy practices” of his informants. He uses literacy practice portraits, or more broadly, case study data, to make a case for “code mashing,” a mixture of code meshing (Canagarajah, 2011) and transmedia practices.
His literacy portraits include close readings and evaluations of websites in group settings and
53 online chats in an office setting, for example. I employ literacy portraits, in the likes of
Fraiberg’s portraits. In addition to literacy portraits, I also collected data in a similar method to
Roozen and Erickson (2017), who collected photographs and interviews of literacy practices inside and outside of the university—for instance by looking at practices such as online journalism, fan fiction, and art.
The literacy portraits in Chapter 5 give the reader a wide array of rich examples of students doing language work in and out of the classroom. The portraits are an attempt for this dissertation to begin to remedy the lack of specific attention to actual mixed language writing, reading, and being (Matsuda, 2014). By focusing on discrete literacy activities across participants, languages, and spaces, I am suggesting that translingual studies would benefit from the incorporation of case studies grounded in sociohistorical activity theory (Roozen and
Erickson, 2017; Fraiberg, 2018; Prior and Olinger, 2018.) Roozen and Erickson (2017) explain,
“From the perspective of mediated discourse theory, the concrete histories people trace through the world, and the heterogeneities those histories produce, are central to understanding social action and the production of persons and social worlds” (2.03, para. 3). Specifically, this chapter brings to translingual studies English L1 interactions with Japanese, English, and mixed language literacies.
Limitations of Participant Group
While I initially planned to interview and gather data from Japanese L1 undergraduate international students as well, I realized that the data that I had already collected was growing to be unmanageable for one dissertation project. In addition, I had few opportunities to speak with
Japanese L1 undergraduates outside of Japanese Coffee Hour. During the Coffee Hours, the
Japanese L1 undergrads were mainly spending time with their English L1 undergraduate
54 colleagues. I did not want to take time away from the little time that the undergraduates had to speak with one another. I could have made time outside of the coffee hour, but I did get the impression that the time of the Japanese undergraduate students at the university was so limited,
I didn’t want to take that time from them. I also did not gather data from English language classrooms for international students. Japanese L1 undergraduates and English language learning classrooms are an important part of the Japanese/English learning community at this university from which I did not gather data, so this is a major limitation of this study and an area where future projects may certainly begin.
Distinctions Between “L1” and “L2”
Canagarajah (2018) suggests that the terms “L1” and “L2” are confining, and he suggests the use of categories of “entering, emerging, transitioning, expanding, and commanding” for describing “new language” study (p. 161). While I agree that the specific case that Canagarajah makes regarding the distinction between “native” and “non-native” speakers in Sri Lanka (where many people grow up with diverse language repertoires) is not a useful or accurate description, in the case of this language-learning community, the distinctions between L1 and L2 are still useful classifications. In addition, I was not in a position to judge or test participants’ language proficiencies, so if I were to try to implement Canagarajah’s suggestion to use categories of proficiency in their “new language” study, I might most likely be mistaken in my categorization.
It would have been possible to ask faculty members to judge the participants’ proficiencies in
Japanese and English. However, this may have caused problems through hurt feelings if the participants feel like they identify their language skill with a higher category. In addition, I would not feel comfortable asking a faculty member to tell me the level of proficiency of other students or teachers. Because the first language and second language distinctions are relatively
55 clear in this community and because I did not have access to participants’ varying levels of proficiency, I will use the terms L1 and L2 throughout the study.
Participant Observer
As I have mentioned, I am a member of the Japanese/English learning community, making my position a participant observer within this study. I began my study of the Japanese language with the computer program Rosetta Stone in March 2014 and completed the undergraduate minor in Japanese in May 2018. My position as a participant researcher allowed me to understand my participants and what they were going through with the language study because I was going through a similar journey. The classroom observations would have been very different if I had not already taken Intermediate Japanese. I would not be able to read, transcribe, analyze, or understand much of the screen recording data in Chapter 3 in Japanese if I did not also study the language. In addition, the conversation data in Chapter 4 between Suzu,
Philip, and I might have completely changed if I would have had no command of Japanese. With understanding of the Japanese language, I am able to avoid Matsuda’s (2014) warning against
“linguistic tourism” in translingual studies. I use my experiences with the Japanese language and my time spent as a student of the Japanese language to add a level of detail and understanding that would have not been available without having those linguistic experiences.
The pairing of my own journey of earning a minor in Japanese and the researching of the
Japanese/English community, of which I am a member, did have its own difficulties to overcome. Silverman (2001) points out various cautions of which participant observers should be aware. The participant observer may be unaware of occurrences before her arrival, and her confidants might be unrepresentative of the population. I have supplemented my observational
56 research with other forms of research, including interviews. Of course, this does not address the problem of representation, which I have already addressed as a limitation of the study.
For the purpose of being transparent about my participant observer research process, I will disclose that I found difficulty in what Silverman (2001) calls going “native” (p. 234).
During the recursive research process that involved reading and responding to existing scholarship in the fields of Composition, TESL, and Japanese as a Foreign Language, observing and recording participants, and writing findings that combine both of these aspects, at certain points, I had a difficult time discerning what aspects of my research would have value in my own field of Composition. Specifically, there were parts of me that wanted to write on the topic of how successful learners use resources, and I wanted to describe what successful learners did in their multilingual practices for the sake of interest in foreign language acquisition. However, these topics are not framed within the conversations in composition studies. Silverman (2001) warns that a participant observer may “go native” and be unable to “articulate the principles underlying what (s)he is doing--a perennial threat in naturalism” (p. 234). Naturalism, or “going native,” refers to the problem of when a researcher in a specific discipline becomes so entrenched within the community she is studying that she is no longer able to relate to the discipline’s concerns and conversations, which she was originally aiming to enrich by studying the specific site. Why should English studies care about this biliterate community? By continually resituating myself within relevant composition studies, especially translingual scholarship, I have consolidated my own competing viewpoints (as a member of the learning community and as a composition researcher) with discussions of the English/Japanese community through the lens of translingual scholarship.
Rationale for Multi-Method Study
57 As I mentioned at the beginning of the chapter, this dissertation utilizes a variety of methods of research: written, video, and audio-recorded observations of classrooms and social gatherings; interviews; screen recordings of scholarly reading and writing; and video and audio recordings of literacy practice walkthroughs. In the data analysis, I used the process of
“triangulation,” in which I looked for “relationships in codes...supported by multiple data sources” (Spinuzzi, 2010). I triangulated data across participants and data sets (observations, interviews, case studies). The mixed method study that I employed resulted in a wide variety of rich and textured literacy practices for me to analyze.
Conclusion
This chapter describes the methodologies and methods that I have used to collect, code, and interpret a wide range of accounts of multi-language literacies. The breadth of artifacts and methods of collections signal my goal of describing the literacy practices of a community engaging in translanguaging. As I became closer to each of the participants and their literacy practices, I found that each set of practices was contextualized as part of a whole community but also individualized to that participant and their goals and experiences with the multiple languages, including mainly Japanese and English, but also Spanish and Chinese.
While the data discussed within this dissertation may emerge from varying streams of data, the literacy portraits, which take into account viewpoints from both English L1 and
Japanese L1, shows that the process of cultural influence is not occurring in a straight line, as in the Eurocentric narrative that Baca (2009) exposes, but is realistically more like a continual process of cultural osmosis through imaginary geographical borders.
In each of the following data chapters, I present a more specific methodology that applies to the data under discussion in that chapter. Within each chapter, I appropriate Fraiberg’s (2010)
58 “framework mashes” in various ways that are specific to the mode of the data I present in that section. Because of the wide range of answers that I have found to my research question, “What are the literacy practices of members of the Japanese/English language learning community,” like Fraiberg (2010), I use a variety of methodologies specific to the types of literacy portraits under investigation.
In Chapter 3, I present screen recording data in an attempt to answer Matsuda (2014) and
Canagarajah and Dovchin’s (2019) calls for more first-hand accounts of translingual writing. The literacy practices in Chapter 3 are focused around scholarly reading and writing required in
Ph.D.-level graduate work.
59
CHAPTER 3
MULTILINGUAL READING AND WRITING PROCESSES
Introduction
This chapter presents case study data from Akari Sensei (Japanese L1/English L2 with commanding English) who is a Teaching Fellow and Ph.D. Candidate in Translation Studies and also teaches undergraduate classes in Japanese. The data presented in this chapter aims to contribute to translingual studies by presenting Akari’s “code mashed” writing and reading processes (Fraiberg, 2010). Akari’s reading and writing processes demonstrate Garcia’s (2009) description of how translanguaging is “more like an all-terrain vehicle,” (ATV), with wheels that can “extend and contract, flex and stretch, making possible, over highly uneven ground, movement forward that is bumpy and irregular but also sustained and effective” (qtd. on Horner and Link, 2012, p. 242). The participant in the spotlight in this chapter is doing work that is not possible with command of only one language. Overall, this chapter aims to document the “ATV practices” of translanguaging (Garcia, 2009) through empirical data as expressed through screen recordings of scholarly reading and writing.
Lu and Horner (2016) remind readers that the term “translingual” was first used in
Horner et. al (2011) as “a point of entry with no predefined, predetermined outcome” and that it
“is subject to competing inflections” (p. 207). The approach to translingualism in composition studies is often focused on a bilingual writer meshing two languages in a final product to produce a rhetorical purpose that is unachievable with only one language. However, the field’s focus on final products that are visibly codemeshed leaves writing processes that move across two or more
60 languages and result in monolingual products understudied within translingual studies. Non- visible translingual writing poses a challenge to writing researchers because it becomes necessary for the researcher to investigate the writing processes of multilingual writers in order to gain access to how the multilingual writer used resources across languages. In order to gain access to writing processes, researchers must move to more intensive methods like screen recordings and think aloud protocols when investigating translingual writing.
It may not seem like writers have much choice to write in a non-standard variety of
English when composing within standard discourses. However, Lu (1994) argues that multilingual students must negotiate codes continually during the writing process. Lu describes various ways to interpret a Chinese L1/English L2’s use of “can able to” in order to explain her position that multilingual writers are constantly writing in “contact zones7” (p. 451—452). She cites cultural and grammatical reasons for the student to adopt the non-standard English “can able to.” However, Lu explains that most of her students work with the aim to adhere to the dominant codes of English because of their own drive to write in standard academic discourse and from professor’s “red pen” grading. Lu concludes:
Therefore, although the process of negotiation encourages students to struggle with such
unifying forces, it does not and cannot lead them to ignore and forget them. It
acknowledges the writer’s right and ability to innovate ways of deploying the codes
taught in the classroom. It broadens students’ sense of the range of options and choices
facing a writer. But it does not choose for the students. (p. 457—458)
7 Contact zone (Pratt, 1991) is a term used to explore the power dynamics in situations where people with different languages, cultures, and educational backgrounds meet.
61 While multilingual students must make choices while they write, translingual studies tends to focus on rhetorical choices that lead the writer to choose a non-dominant code. Ultimately, Lu recommends evaluating student work as the result of choices, rather than unintentional errors.
Matsuda (2014) says that little attention has been paid to translingual processes that led writers to choose the dominant form of discourse in a standard language. The effect of a lack of study of non-visible translingual writing has led composition instructors who are wanting to employ translingual lenses in the classroom in a distorted direction. A problematic assumption that composition teachers may hold is that translingual writing produces a visibly translingual product. As this case study shows, Akari works across English and Japanese in various source texts, paper notes, online tools, in her own writing in Word documents, and while notating PDFs.
However, Akari’s goal, as a graduate student in translation, is to create a monolingual English document. Akari is not attempting to push boundaries between languages or evoke a sense of the exotic unknown from readers, as Canagarajah’s (2013) students reflected that they experienced during their code meshing writing exercise (p. 56).
However, as we will see, through Akari’s actions on the screen, she expends the most energy on trying to translate the word kuroko, which is a term from Japanese theater that has no direct English equivalent. But is a translator doing her job if she translates the word croissant into crescent-shaped roll? Or, drawing on example from my childhood media, in the animated series Pokémon, when Ash Catchum eats an onigiri (rice ball), the translation describes the food as a jelly donut, which avoids addressing the fact that different cultures sometimes eat foods that
Americans may be unfamiliar with. Much ink has been spilled in translation studies over the issue of how to translate culture-specific items, and I am not attempting to suggest a solution to the problem within this chapter. However, Akari does deal with this problem herself during her
62 translation of the word kuroko, and therefore I will discuss the issue briefly. Drawing from the area of untranslatability in translation studies, I use the term “culture-specific items” to discuss
Akari’s use of the words kuroko, bunraku, and kabuki that remain in her final product. However, the words bunraku and kabuki both appear in English dictionaries such as Merriam-Webster, so the words are no longer separate from the English language.
In Poshi’s (2013) review of “cultural-specific items,” he concludes:
Culture-specific items are a bulk of independently cultural structures which evolve in the
course of historical, political and traditional development of a society; they enrich the
language and therefore the texts where language is used; they help overcome linguistic
and aesthetic boundaries between languages and nations; they make people come out of
strictly-framed formations and help them communicate and emphasize remarkable ideas
about ways of accepting one onus: interrelate and procreate words, feelings… cultures.
(p. 5)
As we will see with Akari’s use of the term kuroko, she is able to bring a metaphor from a cultural-specific item in Japanese to readers of English. In this process, I argue she accomplishes what Poshi describes as overcoming “linguistic and aesthetic boundaries between languages and nations” (p. 5). In Akari’s writing process, she works with three cultural-specific items: kuroko, bunraku, and kabuki. Akari adds bunraku and kabuki to puppets and theater, respectively, during the last editing session that she does with a friend, and the process is not recorded. However, her on-screen process of translating kuroko is captured and is a main focus of this chapter because of the number of “turns” that she uses working with the word using online tools.
Akari’s writing process is an example of what Fraiberg (2010) calls “code mashing,” which is “the complex blending of multimodal and multilingual texts and literacy practices” (p.
63 102) throughout her writing and reading processes. In the screen casts, Akari code mashes with
Japanese and English and various modes in her writing and reading process by using a combination of image searches, scholarly articles, Google searches, print books, Wikipedia, academic blogs, note-taking, and an assortment of translator’s tools including corpora and various digital dictionaries. Code mashing, as Fraiberg (2010) proposes suggests a turn of attention to process as opposed to product (p. 103). Code-mashed products could appear monolingual, or, could also appear clearly as a mixed language and/or multimodal text. In addition, code mashing is not limited to including working across multilingual resources but could include interpreting photographs, video, gestures, or other non-print phenomenon through writing. In a simple pedagogical application, code mashing could include writing about a photograph or a film.
Matsuda (2014) argues that if students are capable in more than one language, all of their texts are translingual, even if they appear monolingual. Matsuda uses logic, and his own experiences living through multiple language, to argue, “...wherever there are multiple languages in an individual or in a communicative situation, negotiation and change are inevitable” (p. 480).
For multilingual writers, through the drafting process, negotiations across the languages and language choices may lead the writer to the “apparently dominant” code (p. 480-81). Akari’s writing and reading in this chapter, while the final products appear to be monolingual (with the exception of the culture-specific items), are examples of translingual writing and reading because as her screen recording shows, she moves between English and Japanese in her processes.
Matsuda explains that when composition instructors, eager to teach translingualism, ask for examples of translingualism, “the assumption in this demand is that translingual writing is visible—that negotiation is only acknowledged when it results in mixed language use, leaving
64 out the possibility that negotiation may have led the writer to adopt the apparently dominant code” (p. 480-481). For instance, this could look like instructors asking multilingual students to leave portions of their writing untranslated for “rhetorical effect.” I discuss pedagogical opportunities for implementing a translingual lens to multilingual and monolingual students more fully in Chapter 6.
The data in this chapter aims to bolster Matsuda’s argument by providing empirical examples of the process that Matsuda proposed theoretically. Broadly, this chapter aims to give composition teachers and researchers an example of code mashed writing processes and reading processes and examples of scholarly translingual writing and reading with final products that may not appear translingual from an outsider’s perspective.
By investigating closely the writing practices of writers who know more than one language and compose in digital environments, in addition to learning about translingual writing, researchers are also given an opportunity to continue to learn about writing processes (Murray,
1972; Elbow, 1998; Kent, 1999), knowledge work (Slattery, 2005), and multimodal digital composition (Kress and van Leeuwan, 1996; Kress, 2000, 2009). In other words, the study of multilingual writing processes not only benefits teachers of multilingual students but teachers of monolingual students as well. Studying multilingual students’ writing is not a roundabout way to study monolinguals’ writing practices, but instead offers a way to investigate writing processes from a new angle, offering findings that would have not been as obvious from first-language writers. For instance, in Akari’s screen recordings, her process of finding “the right word” is externalized through the use of dictionaries, while most likely a monolingual speaker wouldn’t externalize her search for the right word with dictionaries, but might write a word, and then change it after reading the sentence for a second or third time. Also, it might be true that much of
65 the writing process is the same for multilingual and monolingual writers, but until we do more research on the writing process of multilinguals, we can only make assumptions.
While Akari’s composition of the scholarly book review included translingual tools and writing flows that monolingual writers would not use (for example: Japanese/English dictionaries and writing in Japanese and English), monolingual students may perform similar recursive writing processes (Flowers and Hayes, 1981; White, 1988) or use dictionaries and thesauruses looking for a specific word in a digital composing environment. Similarly, to
Hawisher and Selfe (2010), I asked my research participant to record her writing practices in order to capture “the increasingly rich representation of language and literacy practices in digital and nondigital environments” (p. 56). Through the videos and her think aloud protocol, I will share detailed findings of her translingual writing process.
Method
Following Smagorinsky’s (2008) urging that methods sections be robust, I will describe my research questions, my research participant, and also discuss the process that I used to gather and analyze the data.
Research Questions
Originating research question
1. What are the literacy practices of members of the Japanese/English learning
community at this university?
Specifying research question
1. What are the tool ecologies that make up Akari’s translingual writing and reading
processes?
66 2. How does Akari use English and Japanese in her writing and reading processes
within the tool ecologies?
3. In the context of Akari’s digital tool ecologies, what kinds of actions make up
high-turn tool flows?
The Participant and Site
Akari is a teaching fellow in the Ph.D. in Translation program, and as part of my participant observer research, she was the instructor in the Japanese class Voices from Japan that
I was enrolled in. Akari was, at the time of the study, 29 years old and had been studying English for 22 years. She explains that when her older brother began his study of English in sixth grade, their parents hired a native English speaker as a home tutor to help her brother begin his study of
English. She says that she listened as her brother and the tutor worked in the same room as her.
Akari’s parents began studying English when they were in seventh grade. She describes the first time that she remembers hearing English as a time when her parents spoke English on a family vacation in Hawaii. She remembers it seeming natural to hear other people speaking a foreign language, but when her parents spoke a foreign language and she didn’t understand what they were saying, she remembers feeling strange.
Akari explains that during high school she took “as many English classes as possible.”
She took every elective English course that she could, and she was also involved in the English conversation circle (ECC). Outside of school, she attended gakushu juku (also known as cram school) twice a week to study English “grammar, reading, and writing” and attended English conversation school once per week “to practice speaking.” In addition to studying English in
Japan, she joined a home stay program and stayed with an American family in Sacramento,
California.
67 At a university in Osaka, Akari earned a bachelor’s degree in English linguistics and
English education. As she did in high school, she took “all the English courses available at that time.” She explains, “Most required courses were taught in Japanese, but I took all the courses that were taught in English in another department as well.” As an English major, she was also required to write a graduation thesis in English. She explains, “I spent a big portion of my time on that.” Although study abroad was not required, she says, “I was eager to do so because I really wanted to be able to use English, not just know about English language.”
Akari earned her master’s degree in linguistics from a university in Japan. According to
Akari, linguistics programs in Japan mainly focus on Western linguists and the English language, although a small percentage of linguists in Japan specialize in theories from Japanese linguists and the Japanese language. The fact that the English language is studied in Japanese linguistics programs is interesting in its own right because it demonstrates the influence of the English language in Japanese linguistics programs. However, it also demonstrates Akari’s experience working with the English language in a graduate-level scholarly context. The screen recordings that Akari provided me with are from writing and reading that she did for the classes
Terminology Studies, Corpora in Translation, and Seminar in Literary Translation.
Data Collection
The data in this chapter includes screen recordings, a modified think aloud protocol in which Akari speaks aloud when she wants to explain or point something out, and an interview from Akari in which she explains the context of the screen recordings. In the interview Akari also describes her history of learning English.
Geisler and Slattery (2007) explain that screen recordings are not new to digital composition, but stem from an older process-tracking methodology called “the event log” (p.
68 187). The authors argue that compared to other process-tracking methodologies, like think aloud protocol, screen recording is a less problematic method for tasks “if consciousness during a given activity is not normally verbal” (p. 187). The authors claim, “Video screen capture does not raise issues of distortion” (p. 187).
Below are the activities that Akari performs in the videos with a modified think aloud protocol:
Table 3.1 Recorded Reading and Writing Tasks of Akari
Task Session length and total time
1) Writing a book review in English on a text in Japanese a) 1 hr. 37 min, b) 1 hr. (Translations of Haruki Murakami) 53 min, c) 43 min, d) 34 min, e) 2 min Total 287 minutes
2) Reading and taking notes on an academic article (Yukari Meldrum’s “Translationese in Japanese Literary Translation,” in a) 39 min English) for a reflection essay in English (one session)
3) Reading and taking notes on a scholarly reading (Heinrich a) 1 hr. 28 min b) 29 min Rickert’s “Theory of Definitions,” mainly in English but includes Total 117 minutes German) for class preparation in English Transcription and Coding
In Chapter 2, I describe how I used starter codes and an axial code to categorize what I have termed a “translingual tool flow.” Translingual tool flows are periods of time in the screen recording where Akari leaves the main Word document and uses digital tools. As the chart below describes, a one-turn tool flow could be, for example, leaving the Word document to search for a definition of a word in a digital dictionary. However, the tool flow becomes longer the more clicks that Akari spends in the dictionary. For instance, Akari uses the Apple Dictionary, which has multiple tabs such as “thesaurus,” “English to English,” “Japanese,” “all,” and “English to
69 Japanese.” When Akari looks at multiple tabs within the dictionary, the number of turns in the tool flow increases. If Akari types a word into the Apple Dictionary, tabs to the thesaurus, and then types the same word in a concordancer website, each moment and transition on the screen is measured as a turn. The tool flow begins when Akari leaves the Word document.
The following are examples of “turns”: typing of the word into the dictionary; clicking on a different tab in the dictionary; opening Chrome, clicking a bookmarked website, and typing in a search; and pausing and scrolling down. I measure tool flows as beginning and ending when
Akari changes the word or idea that she is investigating with the digital tools. By focusing on the tool flows, which can be measured by turns in further studies of different writers, I am producing findings about multilingual writing processes that are reliable, repeatable, and aggregable. While
I cannot make arguments about translingual writing processes in general, or even about Akari’s writing process outside of the confines of this limited video set, I suggest that this method of using screen recordings and coding the recording in terms of turns outside of the main composing document leads to a method that other writing researchers can use and adopt to suit their own focus and the needs of their participants’ own writing processes.
As the chart listing the various tool flows describes, during the writing process the most common tool flow was three-turns long. For reading, the most common tool flow was one-turn long. For instance, in the screen recordings of reading, it takes Akari only one turn to find a definition for the word “genus,” but it takes her 7 turns when looking for an answer to what Plato and Socrates say about definitions, and she uses 8 turns when looking for Rickert’s definition of language. Similarly, in the writing process, the longest tool flow (22 turns) was spent translating kuroko, a culture-specific word, which I describe earlier as notoriously difficult to translate. I argue that the higher-turn flows tend to illustrate more complex tasks. It would be interesting for
70 further studies to compare tool flows among writers of various levels of proficiency working across different languages.
I argue that the high-turn flows in these recordings are an example of what Geisler and
Slattery (2007) call a “breakdown.” Geisler and Slattery say:
Breakdowns are of theoretical interest in activity theory, because they can be the site of
development as an individual struggles in the face of conflicting goals, inadequate tools,
and so on...breakdowns occur at the level of action as users engage in unexpected
sequences of operations to achieve their goals. (p. 196)
The “breakdowns” in the high-turn flows are not breakdowns in the sense of tools literally breaking down. Akari’s computer, Internet, and websites were reliable and stable throughout her recorded writing process. In one breakdown, after the 11-turn tool flow (see the chart below for precisely how she spent her time on screen) attempting to choose between two words “mediate” and “interject,” Akari decides that she will have to ask a native speaker which word is best. In this sense, the tools in this tool flow were “inadequate tools” (Geisler and Slattery, 2007, p. 196).
In the kuroko flow, the highest-turn flow in the screen recordings, Akari encountered unexpected
Google search results when she typed in a Japanese theater term and the results were flooded by images from anime and live-action anime adaptations.
For instance, after a five-turn flow in the Apple Dictionary, where Akari 1) searches
“challenge” in the English/English tab, 2) tabs to English/Japanese, 3) searches “楽しさ”
(tanoshisa, enjoyable) in the English/Japanese tab, 4) clicks on “楽しみ” (tanoshimi: enjoyment) within the entry, 5) and then clicks on “pleasure” within that entry, Akari returns to the main
Word Document for one turn, and she returns to the dictionary and again types “challenge” in the thesaurus. Because she returned to the same word that began the dictionary flow, I coded it as
71 having 7-turns in the flow because the central lens through which I am looking at the data is activity theory, which values transitions, artifact ecologies, breakdowns (Geisler and Slattery,
2007, p. 196). In order to focus on measuring transitions, artifact ecologies, and breakdowns, I did not count the turns in the book review Word document as part of the count for the number of tools and turns. While the book review Word document is the place where the final product is being composed, activity theory values movement and time spent among tools. Also, if I were to count the Word document, I would simply be adding turns to every flow because by the nature of the axial code, each flow starts and ends in the book review Word document.
Data Discussion
To begin the discussion of the data, I will show screenshots of the beginning stages of each reading and writing activity. Then, I will discuss screen recordings in which Akari is reading assignments for the graduate classes. This will be followed by a discussion of the writing assignment.
Screen Recordings of Translingual Reading
I will first discuss the screen recordings where Akari’s main actions are reading. While the main action in the recordings is reading, Akari is reading for a purpose beyond the text itself.
I will draw on activity theory (Kaptelinin and Nardi, 2006; Geisler and Slattery, 2007; Spinuzzi,
2008) to answer the question “what does translingual reading look like?”
Reading Heinrich Rickert’s “Theory of Definitions” for a class discussion.
72
Figure 3.1. Screen shot of Rickert PDF and Evernote. Akari reads the “Rickert_Definitions” PDF and takes notes in order to prepare for a class discussion for the course Terminology Studies. In the pre-screen recording interview, she explains that Terminology Studies is a “half practical/half theoretical kind of course,” where they use tools that translators use, like Wordsmith and Trados. The students access these tools through a remote login system on Amazon Spaces. There are no screen recordings of Akari using the remote login system. However, she explained that the system allowed her to access tools that were only on the computers in the lab at the building on campus. The remote login system allowed for her to be more mobile in her literacy practices, like many of the digital tools that replace spending physical time in the library (such as the online article databases and dictionaries). The students also read scholarly articles and chapters from the course textbook and
73 write weekly responses to questions posted by the instructor on the university's course management system.
The main action in this specific screen recording is 1) scrolling in the PDF and 2) note- taking in English in Evernote. Akari also uses the Apple Dictionary and Google searches. She reads in English and takes notes in English, uses Google three times with searches in Japanese, and uses the Apple Dictionary three times with searches in English.
She apologizes for minimal think aloud and explains at the end of the recording the reading took longer than she thought it would. She says, “This kind of reading...written by a philosopher is always difficult for me to read because, I don't know, I feel like I have to follow their logic very neatly in order to understand their argument, so I cannot really skip things.” The difficulty that Akari expresses while she reads Rickert is reflected in the number of turns that she uses outside of the main PDF. Compared to reading of Meldrum, which is a contemporary translation study that systematically analyzes the differences between an English novel and its
Japanese translation, she uses more turns while reading Rickert’s 19th century philosophical text
(26) than the 2009 translation study (6).
The only time Akari speaks during the recording of the reading Rickert is when she expresses frustration at text in the article being in German. She says, “This is very annoying.
This is German, and I can’t read German.” In the pre-interview, Akari says in this course, “I have to read different kinds of text. I might have to, you know, read something like Spanish, but...I cannot read or speak Spanish, so what I'm going to do is just, you know, use Google
Translate bits and bits. Try to understand what the text is about.”
74
Figure 3.2. Rickert PDF with German and Evernote.
Reading Yukari Meldrum’s “Translationese in Japanese Literary Translation” to
write a reflection essay.
75
Figure 3.3. Meldrum PDF with syllabus in background.
76
Figure 3.4. Syllabus with Meldrum PDF in background. Before the recording begins, Akari prepares an outline in Microsoft Word using the assignment requirements from the syllabus. During the recordings, she reads an article that she has chosen based on her own interests, Yukari Meldrum’s “Translationese in Japanese Literary Translation.”
During the recording she uses 1) the underline, highlight, and text tool in Preview for the purpose of writing a reflection and 2) uses Google one time to search the title of the book (in Japanese) that the author of the article is analyzing. This reading (and writing) assignment is for the course
Corpora in Translation.
Book Review
In the interview before Akari begins the recording the assignment, she says:
...it could be interesting because what I'm going to do is to read a Japanese book and
basically, I have to write a book review on that, but since that's a Japanese book, and I
77 have to write it in English, it's going to be a little complex task for me. Probably I'm
gonna put some important parts in Japanese text, and then, I'm gonna write, maybe
translate some of the parts into English and write a paper in English.
Akari was correct in her forecast of the complexity of the writing task. Writing the book review,
Akari used the most turns outside of the main task, 266 turns, over 64 flows, averaging 4.156 turns per flow. While reading the article “Translationese in Japanese Literary Translation in
English” by Yukari Meldrum and taking notes for the purpose of writing a review, Akari used 6 turns, over five flows, averaging 1.2 turns per flow. While reading Heinrich Rickert’s “Theory of
Definitions” for the purpose of class discussion, Akari used 26 turns over 6 flows, averaging 4.33 turns per flow. Akari’s average turn-rate is higher per flow during the reading of Rickert than the other reading and writing tasks. However, the number of total turns for writing the book review
(266) and the highest-turn flow (22) is significantly greater than the total number of turns while reading Rickert (26) and the highest-turn flow (8). In addition, the number of tools Akari used while writing was more, 12, versus 2 (reading Meldrum), and 5 (reading Rickert).
In a set of five videos, Akari writes a book review for a scholarly audience on a book written in Japanese, 村上春樹 翻訳(ほとんど)全仕事 (Translations Works of Murakami).
Before she begins recording her screen, she has done the following reading and writing:
Table 3.2 Akari’s Workflow for Writing the Book Review 1) She read Translation Works of Haruki Murakami
78
Figure 3.5. Cover art for Japanese version of Translation Works of Murakami.
2) She used sticky notes on the physical text to describe parts of interest
3) She spoke Japanese to Siri on her iPhone to transcribe her Japanese sticky notes. She pasted Siri’s transcription into a Microsoft Word Document that resulted in a digital Japanese transcription of the sticky notes she took while reading. (only showing 2/5 pages of notes)
Figure 3.6. Akari's Notes in Word.
4) She used the highlighter tool in Word to differentiate categories of sections of interest. She names specifically the following categories: How Translation Should Be, Writing Styles, Unknown, Learning Translation
79 5) She thought about which sections of highlighting would be most useful for a scholarly book review. 6) She created a Word document, which would end up being the document of the final book review.
7) She created an outline, which consists of the categories: “General topic, goal,” “Summary of each section,” and “Strengths, weaknesses.”
80
Figure 3.7. The book review Word document at the beginning of the writing process.
81 8) Akari described in the think aloud that these categories are based on what the syllabus described that the book review needed to do, what she read in the book that she is reviewing, and what she knows about scholarly book reviews. The main action in the videos is writing (mainly in English, but at times in Japanese) in the book review Word document. Akari also used notes that she has taken on the text she is reviewing (the notes are in Japanese). In addition, Akari used one PDF from class, class notes (paper), Google searches (in both English and Japanese), and the Apple Dictionary (in both English and
Japanese).
Discussion and Findings
In the following section, I discuss the data from the tool flows within each of the recordings.
Akari’s Actions on Screen and Activity Theory
I worked from Geisler and Slattery’s (2007) activity theory framework for analyzing screen captures, which breaks down activity into two main categories: first-order phenomena (p.
194-195) and second-order phenomena (p. 195-197). First-order phenomena include
“operations” and “artifacts” (p. 195). Within Akari’s screen recordings, the various software applications that she uses are artifacts, and the manner in which she uses the software are what
Geisler and Slattery call operations (p. 195). Artifacts include: the book review Word document, the Notes Word Document, scholarly articles in PDFs, Evernote, Google Chrome, the webpages on Google Chrome, and the Apple Dictionaries. Akari’s speedy and efficient usage of the tools should not undermine their importance in the analysis. If I were to simply compare how long a particular tool is active, Microsoft word would be disproportionately represented, even though it is not dramatically more important.
Geisler and Slattery (2007) also include “actions” (tool flows), “breakdowns” (high-turn tool flows), “artifact ecologies” (for example: swiping to the Notes document throughout the writing process), and “transitions” (for example: tool flows happen when transitioning from the
82 main Word document) as second-order phenomena (p. 196). The following discussion focuses on second-order phenomena that I call high-turn flows. By discussing a high-turn flow, I will be able to shine light on the artifact ecologies, transitions between actions, and focus on where breakdowns occur.
Below is a representative list of the tool flows, divided by which screen recording they appeared in.
Table 3.3 Example Tool Flows Listed by Task and Number
Writing task 1 List of actions in example flows Writing a book review in English on a text in Japanese
There were 14 One-Turn Flows Example flows
1-turn flow, example A 1) types “von humbolt” into Google
1-turn flow, example B 1) types in “対話形式” (conversational style) into Eiji Kun Online
1-turn flow, example C 1) types “contribution” into 英英 (English/English)Apple Dictionary tab
There were 11 Two-Turn Flows Example flows
2-turn flow, example A 1) types in “きゅうきょく” (ultimate) into 英和 (English/Japanese) in Apple Dictionary, 2) clicks on “ultimate” in the 英和 tab and immediately tabs to 英英
2-turn flow, example B 1) types in “師匠” (teacher) into Eiji Kun Online, 2) scrolls down
2-turn flow, example C 1) types “import” into 英和 (English/Japanese) in Apple Dictionary, 2) tabs to シソーラス (thesaurus)
There were 12 Three-Turn Flows
3-turn flow, example A 1) types “せきらら” (naked/unvarnished) into 英和 (English/Japanese) in Apple Dictionary, 2) clicks on
83 “frank” in 英和 (English/Japanese), 3) tabs to シソーラ ス (Thesaurus)
3-turn flow, example B 1) types “dryden” into Apple Spotlight, 2) Opens dryden.pdf, 3) Scrolls through previously annotated PDF
3-turn flow, example C 1) types “フィッツジュラルド” (Fitzgerald) into Google, 2) copies and pastes English spelling, 3) scrolls down on Wikipedia page
There were nine 4-turn flows
4-turn flow, example A 1) types “文体” (stylistics) into Eiji Kun, 2) pauses and scrolls, 3) types “stylistics” into 英和 (English/Japanese) in Apple Dictionary, 4) tabs to 英英 (English/English)
4-turn flow, example B 1) types “researcher” in COCA, 2) types “researcher” into シソーラス (thesaurus) in Apple Dictionary, 3) tabs to 英 和 (English/Japanese), 4) tabs to 英英 (English/English)
There were six 5-turn flows
5-turn flow, example A 1) types “inspite of” into 英和 (English/Japanese) in Apple Dictionary and shows no results, 2) adds space to “in spite of,” 3) tabs to シソーラス (thesaurus), then swipes Word doc, 5) swipes back to “in spite of” entry in シソーラス in Apple Dictionary
There were four 6-turn flows
6-turn flow, example A 1) types “schleiermacher” into Google, 2) waits for auto- fill, 3) chooses “schleiermacher methods of translation” from autofill list, 4) scrolls through results, 5) clicks on Translationista academic blog, 6) scrolls
6-turn flow, example B 1) types “translation secondary” into Google, 2) scrolls, 3) types in “translation secondary to original,” 4) scrolls 5) types in “translation less value than original,” 6) scrolls
6-turn flow, example C 1) types “favor” into 英和 (English/Japanese) in Apple Dictionary, 2) clicks on “favoritism” from word list on side of dictionary entry, 3) hits back button returning to “favor” on 英和, 4) scrolls all the way down on entry, 5) tabs to シソーラス (thesaurus), swipes to Word document and types, 6) swipes back Apple Dictionary “favor” entry in シソーラス
84 There was one 7-turn flow 1) types “ターゲット層” (target audience) into Eiji Kun, 2) scrolls down, 3) scrolls up, 4) opens google tab and types wide target audience, 5) scrolls down, 6) opens new Chrome tab with COCAE and types “Wide Audience” (shows results of frequency 167), 7) types “broad audience” (shows results of frequency 98)
There was one 8-turn flow 1) swipes to Notes, swipes to Word Doc, composes 2) swipes to Notes, swipes to Word Doc, composes 3) swipes to Notes, swipes to Word Doc, composes 4) swipes to Notes, swipes to Word Doc, composes 5) swipes to Notes, swipes to Word Doc, composes 6) swipes to Notes, swipes to Word Doc, composes 7) swipes to Notes, swipes to Word Doc, 8) swipes to Apple Dictionary, types “academism” into 英英 tab (English/English)
There was one 9-turn flow 1) types “challenge” into 英英 (English/English) in Apple Dictionary, 2) tabs to 英和 (English/Japanese), 3) types “楽しさ” in 英和 (English/Japanese), 4) clicks on 楽しみ within 英和 entry, 5) clicks on “pleasure” within entry 英 和, 6) tabs to シソーラス (thesaurus), 7) clicks on “joy” within シソーラス entry, 8) tabs to 英和 tab of “joy” entry, swipes to Word Doc, 9) swipes to Apple Dictionary and types “challenges” into シソーラス tab
There was one 11-turn flow 1) types “Interject” into 英和 (English/Japanese) tab in Apple Dictionary, 2) tabs to 英英 (English/English), 3) tabs to シソーラス (thesaurus), 4) types “intermedicate” [sic] in 英和 tab, 5) types “mediate” in 英和 tab, 6) tabs to 英英, 7) tabs to シソーラス, swipes to book review Word doc and discusses the difficulty of knowing which term to use, 8) types “mediate” into シソーラス tab, 9) hits back button six times to “interjected” on the 英英 tab, 10) clicks the forward button to the 英和 tab, 11) clicks the forward button to the シソーラス tab
There were two 14-turn flows
14-turn flow, example A 1) types “insight” into シソーラス (thesaurus) in Apple Dictionary, 2) tabs to 英和 (English/Japanese), 3) tabs to 英英 (English/English), 3) tabs to 英和, swipes to Word document, 4) opens COCA with toolbar bookmark and types “insight on,” 5) shows freq 259, 6) types “insight
85 into,” 7) shows freq 3924, 8) types “insight about,” 9) shows freq 152, 10) types insight about, 11) shows frequency 152, 12) types insight into, 13) clicks “insight into,” 14) scrolls down
14-turn flow, example B 1) swipes to notes, swipes to book review Word document, 2) swipes to notes, swipes to book review document, 3) swipes to notes, swipes to book review Word document, 4) swipes to Notes, swipes to book review Word document, 5) swipes to notes, swipes to book review Word document, 6) swipes to Notes, 7) swipes to Apple Dictionary and types “バランス” in 英 和 (English/Japanese) tab, 8) clicks on “balance” in the 英 和, 9) tabs to 英英 (English/English),10) tabs to シソー ラス (thesaurus), 11) references paper class notes while in the book review Word document. Speaks about moving on from summary to incorporation of scholarly ideas. 12) swipes to Notes, swipes to book review Word document, 13) swipes to Notes, swipes to book review Word document, 14) swipes to Notes
There was one 19-turn flow 1) types “retrospect” in 英和 (English/Japanese) in Apple Dictionary, 2) tabs to シソーラス (thesaurus), 3) types in "reflect" on 英和 tab, swipes to Word document, 4) types “回想”in 英和, 5) clicks on “reminisce” within the entry, 6) types “reminiscing” into Google and waits for auto-fill, 7) finishes typing “reminiscing essay,” 8) scrolls through results, returns to Word document, 9) swipes to Apple Dictionary entry for "reminisce" on 英和 tab, 10) hits back button to 英和 entry for "回想,” 11 ) clicks on link to “reminisce” 英和 tab again, 12) tabs to 英英 (English/English), 13) clicks back to 英和 entry “回想,” 14) tabs to 英英; entry says “何も見つかりません,” 15) tabs back to “回想” on the 英和 tab, 16) clicks on “reminisce” 英和 again, 17) tabs to 英英, 18) clicks on "reminiscer" within entry, but the word only turns blue, 19) types “reminiscence” into 英英
There was one 22-turn flow 1) Notes Doc, Word document 2) swipes to Notes, 3) types “黒子” in 英和 (English/Japanese) in Apple Dictionary, swipes to Word document 4) swipes to Apple Dictionary and types “flow” into 英和 tab 5) tabs to シソ ーラス, swipes to Word document 6) types “黒子” into 国語辞典(Japanese Dictionary) in Apple Dictionary 7)
86 types “黒子” into Google (shows anime results) 8) scrolls 9) types “what is kuroko Japanese culture” into Google 10) types “stagehand” into 国語辞典 in Apple Dictionary 11) tabs to 英和 12) tabs to 英英 (English/English) in Apple Dictionary 13) swipes to “what is kuroko Japanese culture” Google results 14) scrolls down in results, swipes to Word document 15) types “黒子” into Google 16) clicks images tab (images flooded with anime results) 17) adds “舞台” after “黒子” to Google search (results flooded with live-action anime), 18) deletes “舞台” and adds “歌舞伎” to Google search, 19) scrolls down, 20) clicks on kurokos operating dolls, 21) swipes to notes, swipes to Word Doc (uses picture to write description of kuroko- “who hides his/her whole body clothes and controls the puppet” [sic] 22) swipes back to Google image results, swipes to Word document (types “or assists some important elements in traditional Japanese performing art”).
Reading Task 1 Reading and taking notes on an academic article (Yukari Meldrum’s “Translationese in Japanese Literary Translation,” in English) for a reflection essay in English (one session)
There were four 1-turn flows
1-turn flow, example a 1) In Preview types “欧文直訳体” (European writing style) on document next to romaji equivalent (oobun choku yaku tai)
1-turn flow, example b 1) writes "longer paragraph?" next to section where author is claiming there are longer paragraphs in translationese
There was one 2-turn flow 1) Types "マディソン郡の橋 (Bridges of Madison County) into Google, 2) pauses and scrolls
Reading Task 2 Reading and taking notes on a scholarly reading (Heinrich Rickert’s “Theory of Definitions,” mainly in English but includes German) for class preparation in English (two sessions)
87
There were two 1-turn flows
1-turn flow, example a 1) types “genus” in 英英 (English/English) in Apple Dictionary
There was one 2-turn flow 1) types in “jurisprudence” in 英英 (English/English tab) in Apple Dictionary, 2) tabs to 英和 (English/Japanese) entry
There were two 7-turn flows
7-turn flow, example a 1) types in “プラトーソクラテス定義,” (Plato Socrates Definition) into Google 2) scrolls down, 3) clicks on PDF that downloads while she continues to browse 4) clicks on プラトン (Platon) link, 5) scrolls down, 6) clicks on PDF that downloaded ドウルーズ哲学と言語の問題 (Deleuze philosophy and the problem of language) 7) scrolls down in PDF
There was one 8-turn flow 1) types "rickert 定義言語” (definition language) into Google 2) scrolls down 3) deletes "言語” from search 4) clicks on ハインリヒ・リッケルト (Heinrich Rickert) Wikipedia 5) scrolls, hits back button to return to results 6) scrolls down 7) adds “判断” (judgement) to end of search phrase 8) scrolls down The average number of turns per tool flow is relatively low in comparison with the highest-turn flows, all of which are in the videos for writing a book review. The high-turn flows are the
“kuroko” flow (22 turns), “a reminiscing essay” (19 turns) flow, the “balance and scholarly incorporation” flow (14 turns), and the “mediate” flow (11 turns), in which Akari says she needs to ask a native speaker for the best word. In the following section, I discuss one specific tool flow, which is the highest-turn tool flow in the series of videos that Akari captured. This high- turn flow is complex and presenting it helps to answer the calls in translingual studies that ask for more examples of everyday translingual processes (Canagarajah and Dovchin, 2019). The chart above helps to contextualize the high-turn tool flow, not as a one-off, but as a long series of normal actions that she takes to work across the two languages. In addition to describing the
88 highest-turn flow, I will also share the findings that emerged from the data within the specific tool flows.
The kuroko flow overview
In this tool flow, which takes place across the Book Report and Notes Word documents and various online applications, Akari deals with translating a set of metaphorical phrases that
Murakami (the author of the book she is reviewing) uses in the Japanese language about
Japanese theater. In her final draft, she uses italics and romaji (Romanized spelling to represent
Japanese writing) for three words: kuroko, bunraku, and kabuki. Each of these terms from
Japanese are followed with noun phrases explaining what the terms are for an audience unfamiliar with the words and terms used for Japanese theater. The final sentence that she composed is as follows: “Murakami believes that the translator should be a kuroko, a person who hides his/her face and whole body in black clothes and controls bunraku puppets or assists kabuki actors, and that they must not boast about their work.” As discussed earlier in the chapter, these are instances of culture-specific items that can pose translators with possibly difficult translations. To explain bunraku to an audience unfamiliar with Japanese theater, Akari writes a definition that is relevant to the metaphor of the translator being the kuroko puppet operator in an appositive clause. When using bunraku and kabuki (both words are a specific type of Japanese theater) she combines the Japanese noun and the English noun to make noun phrase that makes it clear to an English reader that bunraku is a type of puppet for bunraku theater and that kabuki is a type of actor for kabuki theater. The example is long and detailed, but because one of the objectives of this chapter is to give examples of translingual writing, the length taken up by the following sections is justified.
Kuroko flow step-by-step
89 To compose this sentence, Akari first looked at the notes that she wrote about the text.
Figure 3.8. Screen shot from notes Word document with notes about the Kuroko metaphor. (Honyaku to iu no wa aku made kuroko desu kara gen bun no nagare no jyama o shicha ikenai,
Because the stream of the sentence must not be hindered, the translation ultimately is a kuroko.)
After looking at the magenta-highlighted notes above, Akari uses the Apple Dictionary
(English Japanese/Japanese English) to look up 黒子 (kuroko).
Figure 3.9. Screen shot of Apple Dictionary Kuroko entry. She returns to the book review Word document and begins to compose the beginning of the sentence, writes a phrase and then deletes it and writes a different introductory clause. She then looks up “flow” in the English Thesaurus. She returns to the book review Word document and continues writing the sentence; she includes the word kuroko, but she stops before writing the
90 appositive noun phrase that defines the word. She transitions to the desktop screen with Google
Chrome and looks up the term “kuroko.” Instead of results about stagehands showing up, the results are flooded with a basketball anime called 黒子バスケ (Kuroko basuke). From here, she refines her search to “What is kuroko Japanese culture.” She uses the information from those results, transitions to the Apple Dictionary and types in “stagehand” in the English to English dictionary. She returns to the book review Word document, begins typing, deletes what she writes, and then transitions back to the Google Chrome page where she types “黒子” again and goes to the image results. Again, the results are flooded with images from the basketball anime.
Figure 3.10. Google image results for “黒子.”
She refines her search to “黒子舞台” (kuroko butai, or kuroko stage). The results are flooded with photographs from the live action photos of the same anime.
91
Figure 3.11. Google image results for “黒子 舞台” (kuroko butai, or kuroko stage).
In the next Google image search, she types “黒子歌舞伎” (kuroko kabuki) and she is presented with the image she was looking for: the stagehand wearing black.
Figure 3.12. Google image results for “黒子 歌舞伎” (kuroko kabuki).
92 She transitions to the book review Word document and writes, “...a person who hides his/her whole body in black clothes and controls or assists some important elements in traditional
Japanese performing art, and that they cannot.”
After the kuroko flow, she continues to use the Apple Dictionary, write in the Word Doc, and reference her notes. She performs a word count with Word and finishes her session with the following sentences:
In order to maintain the flow of the original, Murakami believes that translators should be
a kuroko, a person who hides his/her whole body in black clothes and controls or assists
some important elements in traditional Japanese performing art, and that they must not
boast about their work. However, Shibata, adding to what Murakami said about the flow
of the original, supports the idea of fluent translation. He suggests that fluent translation
is what publishers want and that the academic discourse in western world which puts
emphasis on the “otherness,” although may be right, would not make anybody happy.
Around five and a half minutes into her next writing session, Akari revises the paragraph above.
In the book review Word document, she adds italics to “kuroko,” deletes “some important elements,” and then she transitions to the English Japanese/Japanese English Apple Dictionary tab and types in “人形” (ningyou, doll) in the search bar. She returns to the book review Word document and writes, “controls puppets or assists kabuki actors.” She switches back and forth between her book review Word document and her notes Word document a few times, and then starts writing a new paragraph. She starts the new paragraph, and then goes back to revise sentences in the middle of another section.
She returns to the new section and starts to write again about the metaphor of the kuroko.
On the second mention of kuroko, she writes, “Although the metaphor of kuroko may indicate
93 his view of translation having secondary status, his idea...”. It is noteworthy that on the second mention of kuroko that she no longer needs to mention anything regarding theater, wearing black, or puppets. Because she has done the work of explaining and translating the idea of how a kuroko is related to translation, she can refer to the entire idea as “the metaphor of kuroko.”
After the screen recordings, Akari explained that she worked with her friend, and she added the Japanese word bunraku to specify the kind of theater in which the puppets are used by the kuroko. Her friend was a native English speaker, so it is not likely that she was an expert in kabuki theater but was more likely familiar with the practice of using foreign nouns as adjectives in conjunction with the English noun. By doing this Akari adds more information about the
Japanese theater, where the kuroko metaphor emerged from. The final sentence with the kuroko translation is as follows: “In order to maintain the flow of the original, Murakami believes that the translator should be a kuroko, a person who hides his/her face and whole body in black clothes and controls bunraku puppets or assists kabuki actors, and that they must not boast about their work.”
The picture of kuroko, its resistance to translation, and its semiotic remediation
The image of the kuroko in the Google images search is an example of reading a photograph and using that reading to move between two languages. She looked at the picture of the kuroko and wrote what she saw, “a kuroko, a person who hides his/her whole body in black clothes and controls or assists some important elements in traditional Japanese performing art.”
Akari spent 22 turns (8 minutes and 57 seconds) trying to find a translation for kuroko but decided to keep the Japanese word. She typed, “黒子” and “stagehand” in the Apple Dictionary, and she also typed “What is Kuroko Japanese culture” before she switched her Google search to images. Because I interviewed Akari at the beginning of the screen recordings, we can’t know
94 exactly what Akari was thinking during the Google image search. However, we can clearly see that Akari wasn’t looking for a textual answer as to what a kuroko is. Akari used the Google image search to describe what a kuroko looked like from her own interpretation of a photo of a kuroko. Possibly because Akari was not entirely sure what a kuroko was, Akari used the image search to translate a Japanese word that she wasn’t entirely familiar with to English writing. Her writing process for the description of the kuroko demonstrates why Horner, Lockridge, and Selfe
(2015) urge researchers to consider both transmodal and translingual lenses in tandem. Often times writing is both translingual and transmodal, especially when the writing is taking place digitally with multilingual authors.
Textual Remediation Throughout Akari’s Academic Reading and Writing
Writing, while a tool for idea generation, accomplishes mediation work (Prior et. al.,
2006). The notion of “mediation work” is shaped by both Vygotsky and Voloshinov’s influential work in psychology and semiotics, respectively. Mediation captures the production and reproduction of history and social artifacts across culture, communication, and identities (p. 734).
Because Akari was writing a book review, we can strongly see the remediation of texts throughout her writing process. Prior et. al. (2006) explain, “Theories of mediated and distributed activity…highlight the constant recycling of such diverse cultural-semiotic artifacts as hammers, languages, computers, narratives, and interpretable texts, recycling that is critical to the (re)production of society and the development of individuals” (p. 742). To explain further, artifacts that exist in society affect the use of other artifacts and work to create new artifacts, to rework old artifacts, or to simply see old artifacts in a new light. When investigating writing specifically, we can see how a book review is a clear example of remediation—the original text of the book is remediated into a book review. Because Akari chose a Japanese text, we can see
95 how the remediation process is complicated by translation. In this specific case, we can see that while Akari was remediating the text for a different audience, various words and ideas resisted translation (as measured by high-turn tool flows). The kuroko metaphor caused Akari the most resistance. This suggests that when writers are remediating metaphors, words, and concepts that need to be translated for audiences of a different language and culture, the writer may encounter more knots to work through. In another way to understand remediation across languages and cultures, we can view the kuroko metaphor from another angle. The metaphor of the kuroko was put into motion in Akari’s book review by the writer of the book she was reviewing, Haruki
Murakami. From Murakami’s point of view, he is also reusing the kuroko metaphor from traditional Japanese theater and applying it to his views on translation. When writers are able to incorporate documents from languages and cultures other than English, the remediation process allows English language readers an opportunity to gain a glimpse of how ideas and words are used in non-English-speaking language-scapes. The work that multilingual writers do to remediate ideas from one language to another allows the reader to gain access to the ideas of the language otherwise foreign to them.
Taking a wider view of Akari’s remediation process, we can see how Akari remediates the assignment requirements and the Murakami text to achieve her goal of writing the book review that her professor wants. Akari begins the writing process for the book review by reading two documents. The first document is the syllabus for the course, which has the description for the scholarly book review assignment; this document is in English. From this assignment description, she creates headings with phrases in both English and Japanese, in what will become the final version of the Book Review Document. She elaborates on these headings by writing (in
96 English) throughout the video, and she eventually deletes the header phrases that she used as section headings.
The second document that she is working from is 村上春樹 翻訳(ほとんど)全仕事
(Translations Works of Murakami), which is in Japanese. From this document, she begins her remediation process with paper sticky notes with Japanese writing as a way for her to make note of the portions of the text that she can use in the book review. Akari transcribes her the notes into
Microsoft Word with Siri in Japanese. She color-codes these notes. Akari uses the notes, color- coded and in Japanese, throughout the remediation process. She refers to the notes five times in video 1, fourteen times in video 2, ten times in video 3, and once in video 4. Twenty-nine out of the thirty times that she referenced her Notes Word document, she came from the book review
Word document and also returned it. The one time that she moved from the Notes Word document to a screen other than the book review Word document is the high-turn kuroko flow that I discuss above.
The figure below shows the remediation steps with the tool ecologies that Akari used to move from the two source documents to her final product of the book review Word document.
97
Figure 3.13. Resource remediation flow chart for book review writing process. The figure is to be read from top to bottom. Akari begins with the syllabus and then chooses the
Murakami text for the assignment. From there, she remediates simultaneously across the two texts within her writing process. The figure above shows the actions that stem from the two texts
98 that Akari worked from to write the book review: the book that she is reviewing and the description of what the assignment should include from the course syllabus.
Akari also uses a similar process in the article reflection assignment. For the article reflection assignment, she works from an assignment description and a scholarly text of her choice. She writes the required portions of the review in a Word document before she begins to read. As she reads the article, she underlines, highlights, and makes boxes around information that she will need to write the assignment. Like the chart above for the writing of the book review, Akari also uses the assignment description to mediate her reading of the article.
Building a Textual Assemblage Bridge Across Languages
As I watched Akari write from her source texts, I could clearly see Akari as an orchestrator of information. The words that Akari employs are her own, but she also does much work as an assembler of sources, tools, texts, dictionaries, articles, and requirements across
Japanese and in English. While all of the sentences that Akari wrote were original, she works directly from the two originating texts (the book she is reviewing and the assignment). Without the notes that Akari took directly from the book, she would not have been able to write the same book review. Without the outline that Akari wrote from the assignment description in the syllabus, she would not have been able to write the same book review. Johnson-Eilola and Selber
(2007) suggest that writing teachers should value “assemblage” and “emphasis on problem- solving” over originality (p. 380). Akari’s writing process is an example of multilingual textual assemblage. Johnson-Eilola and Selber explain, “...assemblages are texts built primarily and explicitly from existing texts in order to solve a writing or communication problem in a new context” (p. 381). Porter (1986) argues:
We are constrained insofar as we must inevitably borrow the traces, codes, and signs
99 we inherit and which our discourse community imposes. We are free insofar as we do
what we can to encounter and learn new codes, to intertwine codes in new ways, and to
expand our semiotic potential--with our goals to effect change and establish our
identities within the discourse communities we choose to enter. (p. 41)
Akari’s multilingual writing process utilizes her high proficiency two languages in order to assemble information in English that was previously only available in the Japanese language using code intertwinement and expansion of “semiotic potential.” She is able to help bring
English readers closer to culturally Japanese metaphors, Japanese writers, and the Japanese language. Akari assembles and builds resources for English readers that can allow those readers to access Japanese materials that they would not have had access to without her assemblage bridge.
Johnson-Eilola and Selber (2007) continue:
To participate productively in culture, we must recognize that previous discourse
always-already shapes and constrains the activities of writers, that there is no neutral,
non-related space from which to begin a writing activity. We must also acknowledge that
productive participation involves appropriation and re-appropriation of the familiar often
in ways that accommodate audiences by speaking to shared values and working with
discourse conventions. (p. 381)
Johnson-Eilola and Selber suggest that textual remixes and assemblages be more explicitly discussed in composition classrooms. Instead of leaving room for students to imagine that successful writers are springs of creativity and originality, the authors suggest that teachers be more straightforward about the amount of choice writers have after they choose a conversation and genre to enter. Specifically, for teachers of multilingual students, teachers can pose the task
100 for multilingual writers to build bridges for their English-reading audiences to foreign-language materials.
The screen recordings show that Akari enlisted various actors, including texts, dictionaries, corpora, academic articles, and Google searches, in order to present a successful assemblage of words and ideas. For those coming to English as a new language (or any student of writing), when teachers of writing make explicit what makes a successful text, they are demystifying the process of writing by showing the student that writing is more like a collage than an original painting.
Varying Levels of Difficulty in Assemblage
At the beginning of the book review recording, Akari says, “I’ll start with summary because it’s basically what I have to do…, which is not difficult.” Around an hour into video 2,
Akari says that she is going to go get her class notebook to find a scholarly idea that sounds similar to what Murakami is arguing in the book she is reviewing. She says:
I just finished summarizing each section in the book, and from here, I want to make this
review more theoretical because it's targeted at knowledgeable, intelligent audience. So, I
want to add something theoretical. I feel like what he does with the balance, the balance
of the original. It is called something else by someone else.
Akari acknowledges that summary is easy. While she does not say that scholarly incorporation is difficult, she has to enroll more sources in her writing processes to connect the book she is reviewing to scholarly ideas. She enrolls her class notes, a PDF from class, and Google searches in order to find materials to satisfy her scholarly audience. She incorporates two scholarly authors into her book review. In the final version, the scholarly incorporation is:
By pointing out that Murakami has translated the works he genuinely appreciates and that
101 his works always manifest the exquisite quality of the original by using his reading experience and skills as a novelist, Tokō argues that Murakami’s language are the most important element to preserve in translation, just as Schleiermacher and von Humboldt pointed out in the early 19th century. Murakami also argues that translation is an ultimate reading, whereby he walks up to the author to view the world from the author’s eyes. Interestingly, because Japanese novels are often written from the top to the bottom, he expresses this process as “making the horizontal into the vertical”. Despite the uniqueness of the expression, his idea is clearly very similar to what Schleiermacher called “bringing the reader to the author”. Part of this writing is assembled from Murakami’s text and other parts are assembled from class notes and supported by Google searches and an academic blog. While the assemblage process does not seem much different from the other textual assemblages that Akari does, Akari notices a higher level of difficulty with the scholarly source incorporation.
Conclusion
What does a translingual writing processes look like? As I’ve shown, Akari works from existing texts (the assignment description on the syllabus and the book she is reviewing). Using the syllabus to guide her reading and note-taking, she writes down notes on sticky notes in
Japanese, on the Japanese text. She transfers the notes she wrote on the sticky notes into a Word
Document using Siri (in Japanese). She writes, in English, headings in an outline describing what she needs to write; the outline comes from the requirements for the assignment on the syllabus.
Akari utilizes the multiple desktop screens feature on IOS, swiping between multiple desktops, which include screens with: the Apple Dictionary, Chrome, the notes Word Document, and the book review Word document.
She works from her outline and filters and assembles relevant information from her notes for the book review. While writing, Akari uses a variety of digital dictionaries (searches both in
English and Japanese), an online concordancer (English), Google (searches both in English and
Japanese), Wikipedia (searches in Japanese), paper notes (language unknown), notes written in a
102 Word Document (Japanese), PDFs (English and Japanese), a scholarly blog (English), and websites (English and Japanese).
By using Geisler and Slattery’s (2007) activity theory framework for analyzing screen recordings, I have isolated and analyzed “flows” that occur outside of the book review Word document where Akari composes. Like Geisler and Slattery suggest, by focusing on artifact ecologies, breakdowns, transitions, and duration, we can see where Akari spent the most energy writing (measured through turns), how she succeeded (through using tools like dictionaries,
Google, and a concordancer), and can have a lens through which to see her translingual writing process.
Akari’s translingual writing process is different from a writer who knows only one language in multiple ways. For instance, she uses bilingual dictionaries and she types searches into Google in two languages. Akari is able to assemble information in both Japanese and
English and she is able to choose which language suits her best for the given action. Because of this, Akari is able to assemble Japanese-only content for the purpose of an English-reading audience.
What does a translingual reading process look like? Akari’s reading process is similar to her writing process. She uses digital dictionaries, Google, Wikipedia, websites, and PDFs, just as she does while writing the scholarly book review. However, Akari uses fewer turns within those tools in the reading screen recordings. Because she does not have to produce English, she has no need for a concordancer to compare which phrases are used more often than others.
While translingual studies works towards perpetuating multilinguality as a resource, there is much work to be done. Hartse et. al (2018) quote a Chinese L1, English L2 student who says,
“Despite being multilingual, I never think that this could be helpful in an academic setting” (p.
103 95). In addition, transfer studies also does not view multilinguality in such a positive light.
Hendricks (2018) says, “the common focus on negative transfer—or the absence of transfer— can perpetuate narrow and even unrealistic goals for academic writing instruction” (p. 53). While the deficit model views English as second language speakers as deficient from native speakers in their English literacy skills, this study attempts to show through Akari’s screen recordings that she has many more sources available to her, online, in print, and cognitively, than a speaker who only knows English (or only knows Japanese).
Therefore, Akari is able to assemble sources in Japanese that without her remediation work would be otherwise inaccessible to an English audience. While it is true that she would not have “needed” to use many of the Japanese translation sites if she were a native speaker of
English, Akari had access to multiple publications about Deleuze and Plato that were written in
Japanese. In addition, she was able to bring a book review of a Japanese text without an English translation to an English-reading audience. Looking outside of the specific writing context, we can see that Akari is able to use more resources than a monolingual speaker of either language would be able to.
However, if we look to erase the false binary of deficit and surplus (Matsuda, 2014), we can see that Akari’s English may not be exactly like that of a native speaker because of interference from her first language (for instance, non-standard article usage), but we can also see that the resources that she can understand and use and the audiences that she can reach with two languages are astoundingly larger than a monolingual writer. Being multilingual allows the writer to utilize and assemble more sources and more rhetorical choices.
104
CHAPTER 4
SPEAKING, STUDYING, AND LIVING ACROSS TWO LANGUAGES
Introduction
While Chapter 3 focuses on the “mashing” (Fraiberg, 2010) of language, sources, and semiotic remediation in writing and reading, this chapter focuses on the speech, social events, and test preparation of another participant, Suzu. Building on the foundational social turn in literacy studies (Barton, 1994; Gee, 2007; Street, 1984, 2014; Heath, 1983) that emphasizes the importance of contextualizing reading and writing within social practices, focusing on the turn to the transnational (Hesford, 2006) in composition studies, and adding to third wave of new literacy studies (Canagarajah, 2013), this chapter attempts to capture and describe Suzu’s experiences with literacy in social environments and expand the scope of translingual studies to include discussion of the spoken and the social. Suzu, like Akari, wants to achieve “native- speaker like” communication. While the data that Akari recorded focuses on the translingual process of scholarly writing, the data that I have collected with Suzu focuses on translingual speech performance, which includes data from study sessions as well as social gatherings.
The purposes for turning the gaze from writing to speech and the social are multiple. To begin with, translingual studies has focused almost exclusively on writing processes (Matsuda,
2014; Canagarajah, 2013, 2016; Hartse et. al., 2018; Horner et. al, 2011). In order to enrich and expand translingual studies, this chapter aims to present evidence on speaking and listening for communication, among speakers of English and Japanese, in social events. In addition, this dissertation chapter aims to complicate the narrative of acquiring second language literacy.
105 Second language literacy acquisition is more complicated than choosing a language, going to language classes, and studying. While most scholars in the field would immediately reject such a simplistic view, we have little information regarding the kinds laminated chronotopes (Prior and
Shipka, 2003) that make up acquiring a second language. By looking at specific moments of
Suzu’s literacy, we can see how learning takes place through “the dispersed and fluid chains of places, times, people, and artifacts that come to be tied together in trajectories of literate action”
(p. 3).
Suzu demonstrates ways to use the Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL) preparation and speech therapy as a way to make her accent more American, even after she has no plans to take the TOEFL. In addition, Suzu strives to incorporate her drawings and artistic nature into her teaching practices. I also analyze and discuss how Suzu expresses herself through code switching8 when in social environments where there were addressees who knew Japanese.
Method
Research Questions
Originating Research Question
1. What are the literacy practices of members of the Japanese/English learning
community at this university?
8 The difference between code meshing and code switching, according to Matsuda (2014) is a false binary. Matsuda (2014) says: In the context of the translingual writing movement, several contrasts have been made, including second language acquisition versus translingual writing, code-switching versus code-meshing, and multilingual versus translingual. These are all false binaries: negotiating language differences is not possible without having some proficiency in multiple languages or multiple varieties of a language, code-switching (as most applied linguists would define it) and code-meshing refer to the same phenomenon, and whenever there are multiple languages in an individual or in a communicative situation, negotiation and change are inevitable. (p. 480) For the purpose of continuity, I will use the term code switching throughout this dissertation when discussing the data.
106 Specifying Research Questions
1. What does spoken Japanese and English code meshing look like?
2. In what way does Suzu appropriate multimodal and multilingual communication
practices?
The Participant and the Site
I received IRB approval and participant permission9 recording of three social events: a party where people are playing That’s What She Said (a card game with similar rules to Cards
Against Humanity), a 5-person get together where we play Pictionary and eat Okinawan Taco
Rice, and a study session focused specifically on pronunciation and answering the speaking prompt for the TOEFL.
Global Actors in a Local Social Gathering
To begin with, why would composition studies be interested in the details of the atmosphere of a party? After the social turn in literacy studies (Street, 1984; Gee, 2007), scholars have made it clear that literacy cannot be understood without the context of the social. The party recorded and analyzed contained a variety of modes of communication including reading, speaking, and listening. Family literacy studies (Saracho, 2000, 2002; Apperley and Beavis,
2013) discuss how board games and other activities like video games interact with school and work literacies among members of the family. In addition to the reading and performance that took place at the party, this section will discuss how non-local actors were present at the party.
Brandt and Clinton (2002) describe how if we rely only on “the social” as an explanation and context for literacy, we use the social to explain the social, instead of finding ways to more
9 I received IRB permission to record both audio and video of the case study participants and those around them. Suzu and the other attendees at the party signed IRB permission forms and understood they were part of case study involving Suzu. While I had permission to record video, in this chapter, I only recorded audio.
107 critically look at scenes of literacy. They argue that Latour’s actor-network theory can be a useful lens in literacy studies to help to explain the social and describe how the local and the global are manifested within certain situations:
According to Latour, the failure to incorporate things into our conceptions of social
interactions causes the “breaks” in our social theories between macro and micro, agency
and social structure, the local and the global...Bringing objects into play, according to
Latour, allows us to understand that society exists nowhere else except in local situations
but also to understand that, with the help of objects, lots of different kinds of activities
can be going on in and across local situations – including aggregating, globalizing,
objectifying, disrupting, or dislocating. (p. 346)
There were multiple “globalizing” and “disrupting” actors from non-local situations at these parties. The group at the party was brought together through the practice of Brazilian jiu-jitsu, a martial art that originated in Japan for the purpose of hand-to-hand combat and was popularized as a sport, and also a means of self-defense, in Brazil. The host of the party, Scott, has a body with many tattoos that are influenced by Japanese culture, which include: Japanese writing
(kanji) with the characters for jiu jitsu (柔術), the name of an influential jiu jitsu martial artist in kanji, as well as Japanese-style designs with a tiger and swirling black clouds. He also wore a custom purple belt with his name stitched on in katakana (the Japanese alphabet designated for foreign words). The local Brazilian jiu-jitsu community is a conglomeration of practices from far-away locations manifesting within local practices. Gis (the uniform that jiu-jitsu players wear) are often adorned with Japanese writing, even if the company’s headquarters are in the
United States and if their clientele is mainly English-speaking. At many gyms, they bow to both the Brazilian and American flags before practice begins.
108 After being at the party for a short while, Marla brought in a platter of sushi from her workplace, a Japanese hibachi restaurant called Wasabi. When Marla brought in sushi, Scott said, “Suzu, you don’t like sushi,” and Suzu replied, “Yes, I do,” while laughing. In a teasing manner, Scott wants more sushi for himself, but he is also implying that because Suzu is
Japanese she would be more likely to eat sushi than others at the party. Of course, the party was also filled with western objects as well, like cupcakes, pizza, and the English language. The focus on objects in this section draws on actor-network theory for its basis. The role of non- human objects in this setting helps to demonstrate multinational actor network in which the literacy practices of this group took place. Products from around the world are increasing in popularity in the United States. Kinder Joy (German treat with chocolate and a small toy) increased in popularity from sales online and made their way to checkout lines at grocery stores, tee shirts with Japanese writing are sold in Walmart, and gas stations sell sushi.
What does the variety of Japanese writing on bodies and tee shirts and American gas station sushi have to do with literacy? Brandt and Clinton 2002) reference Besnier (1991) to demonstrate how literacy can travel and stay intact. In the isolated community of the Nukulaelae
“‘respectable elderly women”’ – nonchalantly wear Western style tee shirts bearing risqué slogans in English” (p. 344). The English-print tee shirts represent a network of literacy in the
Nukulaelae community that demonstrates a history of trade and communication with English- speaking populations. By considering objects as actors, researchers can help to paint a more detailed, and broader, picture of literacy and the way it operates in different locations, demonstrating the “analytical accomplishment of the social-practice perspective” (Brandt and
Clinton, p. 343). Brandt and Clinton say, when we “treat literacy practices as windows into a group’s social and political structure – that is, not only can one look to local contexts to
109 understand local literacy, but one can also look to local literacy practices to understand the key forces that organize local life” (p. 343). The global objects at the party that have traveled, endured, and stayed intact, while not the central focus of this chapter, help to build a fuller understanding of the context of the literacy practices at this gathering.
That’s What She Said Gameplay and Suzu’s Reading and Listening Performance
Parlor games started to gain popularity in England in the 19th century (Beaver, 1979).
The popularity of various kinds of card games has evolved and developed in various communities of players. Literacy researchers have studied the practices involved with card games like Magic the Gathering (Beavis, 1999) and Yu-Gi-Oh (Gee, 2004). Communities for card games like these include dedicated members who collect the cards, watch animations, read fan fiction, and participate in the community in other ways, like attending conventions and competitions. Gee demonstrates that the abilities required to play Yu-Gi-Oh include learning a new literacy. This study is not focused on the literacies needed for playing card games, however, the games are part of Suzu’s literate activities that she uses in tandem with her overall goal of becoming like a native speaker. For games like That’s What She Said and Cards Against
Humanity, the communities are different than Magic the Gathering. The card games That’s What
She Said and Cards Against Humanity require players to have knowledge of global events, celebrities, innuendos, and pop culture. However, those card games do not require knowledge of a separate universe like the Magic the Gathering or Yu-Gi-Oh card games require. Both Cards
Against Humanity and That’s What She Said require players to read, interpret, and guess which of their cards the reader will find most pleasing.
Suzu does not talk very much during this social gathering. She told me in private after the party that it is difficult for her to understand what people are talking about at parties. Suzu had
110 won multiple games of Cards Against Humanity at previous gatherings, and at this recorded get- together she also won the game of That’s What She Said. The game uses cards with writing on them: white cards and red cards. Each person takes a turn being the reader of the red card, while other players choose a white card that they think the reader will choose as the best match for the red card. The reader of the red card chooses one white card that they like the best. Whoever has won the most rounds (had their cards chosen by the reader) wins.
During the game, I observed that Suzu read the card silently after the reader read the card aloud (an action that other players did not do). At the party, the noise of people having their own conversations, the dogs, and the bird made it difficult for everyone to hear. In addition, Suzu feels that her reading is very strong, but listening to people read is not as easy. The writing on the cards made the content more accessible through reading to Suzu.
Suzu spoke during the game five times. Each time that she spoke (or pointed at a card), she asked about the meaning of a phrase, or asked for clarification about the meaning of the card.
Below are parts of the conversation where Suzu asks for clarification, or others who are playing the game ask if Suzu understands a certain phrase.
Table 4.1 Clarification Requested or Offered During That’s What She Said Game
Example A: Suzu is the reader and is reading the cards that she received Suzu: Let’s Go... Motor boating Scott: Do you know what motor boating is? Suzu: (pause) No Riley: Who’s going to demonstrate? (laughter) Riley: No one? Scott: It’s when you go like this in breasts Riley: Between boobs. Suzu: Oh! I didn’t know that Philip: Oppai, oppai, yeah Suzu: I thought it was like motorcycle Scott: Nope, face full of titties.
111 (laughter)
Example B: Understanding a cliché phrase Me: Have you heard of this phrase before? Suzu: No Me: It just means that like if you catch one bird, it’s better than… (laughter gets very loud, bird making noises in the background) Me: It means that having caught one bird is better than having two in the bush that you didn’t catch yet. Suzu: Having words, birds Me: Birds, like a tori. Suzu: is better than what? Me: if you’ve already captured one bird, like if you’re trying to catch birds
Example C: Suzu asks for a definition after reading the card Suzu: what is spanking? Me: like if you punish your kids, you hit them on the bum like this. John: But it’s sexual. Suzu: Oh, oh okay.
Example D: Suzu asks for definition through pointing Suzu: points to card Me: like when a guy’s nuts go on your face Suzu: that is teabag? Me: that’s what tea bagging is. Suzu: へー (hee), I didn’t know that
Example E: Suzu asking card reader for clarification Card reader: My friend Dave was bent over in the locker room, and I thought (blank) Suzu: what room? Sorry Suzu: Can I see? Suzu: locker, thank you. Suzu: bent over...like bent over Me: do you get the locker room part? Suzu: it’s like changing room, right? Me: wait, what was the first part, Angela? (49:08) Scott: I saw my friend bent over Me: Like someone bending over to put their pants on. Me: Like imagine someone bending over in a locker room putting on pants, and then you have to bend over to do it. Suzu: That’s it? Okay, thank you. While some of the phrases may be vulgar, it is not uncommon for college-level language classes to incorporate Cards Against Humanity and games like That’s What She Said into classroom practice for special occasions. During the semester-long observation of two
112 Intermediate Japanese courses, Tom used Cards Against Humanity as an activity that the
Japanese-language students could do with the Japanese international students who visited for the class period.
Representation Through Pictionary
Compared with playing Cards Against Humanity and That’s What She Said, with over thirty people at the first event and over ten people at the second, playing Pictionary was a very different communicative event. We had only four players, and the night was much more structured. We ate dinner, had coffee and tea, and then played Pictionary. The playing of
Pictionary had been planned for a few days, and playing Pictionary was a main event of the evening. Playing Pictionary the way we did contrasts with Cards Against Humanity and That’s
What She Said because with the case of the latter, playing the card game was not a primary focus of the night, but more like an afterthought, something to do while at the party.
Pictionary does not elicit natural speech, but instead isolates the players’ ability to communicate pictorial representation with pencil and paper. Like the games Cards Against
Humanity and That’s What She Said, Suzu demonstrated that she was the strongest player in
Pictionary as well. This event was also different from the other games because Suzu suggested that we play Pictionary. Pictionary was a game that Suzu played with her high school students learning Japanese. She modified the rules and words to include the Japanese vocabulary words her class was studying.
Pictionary was a key actor in the social communication between Suzu, Clyde, Sasha,
Philip, and myself during this meeting. Our speech and actions were focused around the board game. Through Pictionary’s mediation, Suzu’s talent was evident to us from the sixty-second sketches that she produced. Because the game suppresses verbal and word-based written
113 communication, we were able to practice communicating with Suzu in a different mode than we would have in most other situations. Kress and van Leeuwen (1996) argue, “Just as a knowledge of other languages can open new perspectives on one’s own language, so a knowledge of other semiotic modes can open new perspectives on language” (p. vii). Pictionary asks players to, in
Kress and van Leeuwen’s (1996) terms, “represent” “what they have in mind” (p. 11-12). Kress and van Leeuwen say, “Representation requires that sign-makers choose forms for the expression of what they have in mind, forms which they see as most apt and plausible in the given context...circles to stand for wheels, and wheels to stand for cars; heavy to stand for significant effort, and significant effort to stand for climbing a steep slope” (p. 11). The communicative task in Pictionary is one of representation—the players must represent the word on the card through a drawing, excluding written language.
In the Pictionary game recorded, we used the standard American version of the game with English words. Throughout the game, players complimented one another when they were impressed with the representation work done in the drawings. Philip complimented Clyde on his strong representation of the word refrigerator. Clyde combined drawings of low, temperature, and box, to convey refrigerator. Besides this one positive comment on Clyde’s representation of refrigerator, Suzu received the remaining five positive comments on the drawings. Before we played the game, we were unaware of how skilled Suzu was at drawing. We had never been in a communicative situation that involved drawing. The drawings that she received positive comments on were for the words “pitch,” “list,” and “paintbrush.” The comments that Suzu received included: “That’s such a good picture” and “That was a really good picture” for the word “pitch.” Suzu drew these pictures within a sixty-second time limit.
114 Sasha told Suzu, “Wow, that's a nice drawing. Look at that paint brush.” Philip told Suzu,
“Suzu's got good strong line definition,” referring to her drawing for “list.”
Figure 4.1. Suzu's drawings for “paint brush,” “miss,” and “list.”
115
Figure 4.2. Suzu's drawing for "pitch."
At the gathering, we all noticed that Suzu’s drawings were much better than ours. As we will see later, Suzu practices drawing on a regular basis and works to incorporate her drawings into her teaching practices while the other participants do not draw on a regular basis. However, in a conversation after the game, we all speculated if the art classes in Japan were more rigorous than the typical ones in American, and we also wondered if drawing kanji (characters in the
Japanese language) strengthened Suzu’s ability to create drawings of pictures with strong line definition and accurate proportions. According to Nihon Shock, there is a standardized list of
1006 kanji that elementary students study. For instance, in first grade, students are tested on kanji that go up to 12 strokes. The complexity of the kanji that students are tested on increases, going up to 20 strokes in both grades 4 and 5. Drawing accurate proportions and line definition along with precise memorization of stroke order are some of the skills required for writing kanji by hand. The figure shows the order in which the characters must be drawn and the proportions of
116 each stroke in relation to the quadrants of the square in which it is drawn.
Figure 4.3. Chart depicts both stroke order and importance of proportion when drawing kanji. From Japan Activator, “Kanji.” In addition, Suzu described art classes as being focused on drawing with a pencil. It was especially eye-opening to me when Suzu came to help me paint the interior of a house and she said she had never worked with paint before in her entire life. It seems that generally, art classes in American grade schools focus on experiencing wide ranges of media such as paint and clay, while the art classes in Japan focus on drawing with a pencil.
The example of writing kanji by hand is one instance where we can see that the border between literacy practices in a standard view of literacy (reading and writing) and in a non- standard literacies (drawing) are blurry. From my own experiences of being tested on the accurate writing of kanji, I have seen how much practice, repetition, and study must be put into drawing the characters correctly. Coming to the study of Japanese as an adult, I had never developed a sense of proportion with my own handwriting. In fact, my own handwriting was never commented on by teachers at any level. I am not offering conclusions about these practices because the data set is so limited. I can only offer data from Suzu’s case study as a way to begin thinking about what we can learn from investigating individuals through their literate activities.
The depictions that Suzu used to represent specific English words during Pictionary are not the only drawings that Suzu shared in this case study. In the next section, Suzu shares a multimodal and multilingual story that she drew and performed for her high school Japanese
117 class. She also performed the story for Philip and me during a recorded session where Suzu’s main goal was to use the study materials for the TOEFL to make her accent more American.
TOEFL Study Session
Suzu explains at the beginning of the study session, “I...うんんん (unnn, vocal pause). I took test one time of this, and my speaking score was low. That’s why I’ve been working on speaking section recently. But I looked through reading and listening too.” I found later in the study session that Suzu was not planning on taking the TOEFL again. I asked her if she is focused on pronunciation in order to for passing the speaking section of the TOEFL, and she says, “It’s not TOEFL. I’ve always wanted to make my pronunciation better, んん (nn-vocal pause)...I just really, really, really liked American sound from when I was little. うん (un, yeah), like when I was listening to American people talking when I was so small, I was so, oh, that sounds so cool...so that’s why I’ve wanted to, I’ve been wanted to talk like that.” Suzu appropriated the TOEFL study material for her own purposes of making her pronunciation more
American.
The study session consisted of Suzu doing the following activities:
1) Reading practice. Reading a passage about the history of chocolate. Suzu had worked on reading this out loud previous to our meeting.
118
Figure 4.4. “History of Chocolate” (page 1 of 2) reading marked up by Suzu to help her with standard American English pronunciation.
119
Figure 4.5. “History of Chocolate” (page 2 of 2) reading marked up by Suzu to help her with standard American English pronunciation. Suzu marked the script that she practiced reading with pronunciation notes, circled words that she struggled pronouncing, and wrote phonetic pronunciations of words. Suzu read the script
120 paragraph by paragraph, and at Suzu’s request, Philip and I told her when she said words unlike a native speaker would.
2) Speaking prompts. Suzu chose prompts that she had practiced in the days before Philip and I met with her. She chose the first prompt because she had attempted to practice the prompt and feels like she did not do well on it. The prompts were from a variety of sources that include online printouts (below) and prompts from a textbook.
Figure 4.6. List of TOEFL speaking prompts.
Speaking prompts.
121 In the following section, I will describe Suzu’s performance on the speaking prompts. In normal conversation between Suzu and I, we would use mainly English, with Japanese throughout. Because Suzu is a better speaker of English than I am of Japanese, we used mainly
English. In the speaking prompts, I suggest that she remove the translanguage features of her speaking that she usually uses with me. For the speaking portion of the TOEFL, the test-takers speak into a computer’s microphone. According to Muniz (2017), the speaking portions are graded by humans. Educational Testing Services (ETS) (2017) scores the speaking test based on
“General Description,” “Delivery,” “Language Use,” and “Topic Development.” ETS describes a
4, the highest score, in “Delivery” as, “Generally well-paced flow (fluid expression). Speech is clear. It may include minor lapses, or minor difficulties with pronunciation or intonation patterns, which do not affect overall intelligibility.”
The inclusion of Suzu’s performance of the TOEFL prompts offers translingual studies examples of a multilingual speech performance intended to be graded and judged for its content and performance. While most translingual studies focus on writing, this data provides the field with real examples of multilingual speech.
Prompt 1 of 5.
The prompt is: “choose a teacher you admire and explain why you admire him or her. Please include specific details in your explanation.” For the study session, we decide to take turns answering the prompts. At first, I try to answer the prompt in Japanese and Philip answered the question in English. I ask Suzu if bending the prompt to include bosses or mentors would be appropriate for the teacher question. Suzu says she doesn’t know, but then she explains, “you have to talk to a computer” for the speaking prompts in the TOEFL. She says compared to speaking at the computer, Philip and I make it easier to speak on the topics. She says:
122 It feels like it helps a lot, having you guys...it stimulates my mind. And “oh, I have this
teacher and this teacher,” but when looking at it on the screen, and a mic here (sighs).
That is why, that is why I feel like I am good at speaking, I feel like. I feel like I'm bad at
listening and writing, but [speaking] was my lowest, score, and I feel so pressured, that’s
why.
Suzu tells Philip and I how it is easier to do the speaking prompts in front of us, versus in front of the computer screen. Having real living humans to speak to stimulates her mind, she explains.
Suzu answers the prompt in this way:
mm, I would say 道子先生 (Michiko Sensei) for my elementary school teacher. The
reason I would say so is she made us, she every day, write, I don't know how to say,
handout about what happening in classroom, and also, she draws our pictures every day.
Like this kid and this kid did stuff together. Like, they did good job on cleaning floor...
After Suzu performed her reading, I repeated back the main point of her explanation and then suggested that instead of saying “sensei,” she say “teacher” instead. For the purpose of standardized testing, she needs to remove the Japanese translingual aspects of her speech that she uses freely with Philip and me. I do wonder what would happen to Suzu’s score if she would use
Michiko Sensei instead of Mrs. Michiko in an excellent performance of the ETS graded speaking prompt. Suzu attempts the prompt again:
I really like mi…Mrs. Michiko um, Mrs. Michiko for my elementary school, the reason why
I liked her a lot is because she always gave us handout every day, which is about what we
did in our classroom, with a really cute pictures, which she drew every day, and we got
really excited when we worked on that paper, it's not every day, but she, and she, we
could tell she was really trying to make classroom, make classroom and also her job a lot
123 more fun by doing it every day. I feel like she wanted, she wanted to be a creator, but
maybe she's trying to express her creation, her artistic in that way, and really appreciated
that, and it really influenced me a lot.
In the second answering of the prompt, Suzu added more details about the handouts based on the questions that I asked her about the first prompt, and she changed Michiko Sensei to Mrs.
Michiko.
Prompt 2 of 5.
The next prompt that we did was:
“Some students study for classes individually, others study in groups. Which method of study do you think is better for students and why?” I responded first, Philip gave commentary, and then
Suzu answers the prompt in two different ways, “I would say, I personally like to study by myself. Cause when I have my friends around me, I would never be able to concentrate.
(laughter) んん (nn, vocal pause).” The second way she answers is:
I think it’s better to study with peers cause it helps you to hmm…it helps you to come
with the ideas you’ve never been able to otherwise, and also, as you discuss with your
friend sometimes you can get (laughs). 難しい (muzukashii, difficult). You can stimulate
each other.
Prompt 3 of 5.
The next prompt we did was: “Choose a famous person who you think would be enjoyable to have a conversation with. Explain why you would like to talk to them, using specific details and reasons.” Philip answers in English, then Suzu answers the prompt in the following way:
I don't know if you could say he’s famous in here, but I would like to talk to Mr. June
124 Okada, in Japan, pretty famous novel writer, for kids novel writer, and the reason why I
wanted to talk to him is that he has been working in schools for like 40 years, and he’s
teaching art for little kids, and while he’s doing that he also writes his novel, and also
draws pictures along with it, and um, a lot of time, people like artists trying to seek,
trying to live on their life with only artists, like only their creations, but he does both.
Like I don’t know how to say, but real-life job, like a lot of people would do, but he does
artistic stuff at the same time, and he accomplish it. Like he free worked whole life. He’s
still alive, but as a teacher, I wanted, I kind of wanted to do that. As I am a teacher, and I
wanted to do not just only teaching at school, but I also wanted to create something, like
draw pictures and write small stories for kids. So that’s what I want to do, and I want to
talk to him, and I want to listen, how do he do that.
Like the answer to prompt 1, the answer to this prompt has a similar theme: integrating artwork and teaching. I will discuss this connection more in the next section.
Prompt 4 of 5.
The next prompt we discuss after Suzu shares her drawings with us. The prompt is: “Do you agree or disagree with the following statement? Use details and examples to explain your answer: snakes should never be kept as pets.” Philip responds first in English, then Suzu responds:
I disagree with the statement. Um, cause I think people should have freedom to what
they like, and also, uhh, unless it’s like poisonous or harmful to human or other animals,
and also, um, not scare people because I feel like even if it’s not poisonous some people
get really scared just seeing snakes. So, if they can the responsibility of keeping them
125 away those people who get really scared by seeing them, I think it’s okay to keep them as
a pet.
Prompt 5 of 5.
The last prompt is: “Some people prefer work that allows them to work outdoors, others feel it is more pleasant to work indoors in an office. Which do you prefer, and why?” Suzu answers first,
うん (un, yeah), okay, I’m a teacher, and I’m really used to, I am used to working inside
classroom, and as long as I get sunlight from windows, I don’t, I really like to be outside,
but I don’t mind, I don’t mind….mmmm, spend inside much time and also getting
sunlight too much makes me really tired, and also, I don’t like to be suntanned. I kind of
like to work inside.
Prompts 1 and 3 focus on people who Suzu looks up to and who she wants to emulate. She wants to find ways to incorporate her passion for drawing into her teaching, like Mrs. Michiko and Mr.
June Okada. Suzu wants to incorporate art into teaching, focusing on how her artwork can make the classroom a more enjoyable place for students.
As we have seen in the game play of Pictionary, Suzu’s drawing skills are easily recognized by others. She also has a passion for speaking English, and she actively works towards making her accent like a native speaker of American English. In addition, Suzu also wants to be a teacher. As Suzu describes in the speaking prompts, drawing, speaking English, and teaching are bounded together by two people: Mrs. Michiko and Mr. June Okada. The separate laminated chronotopes of literate activity (English, teaching, and art) are chained together by two models of literacy. These two are examples of what Brandt (1998) calls
“sponsors of literacy.” She describes these people as “any agents, local or distant, concrete or
126 abstract, who enable, support, teach, model, as well as recruit, regulate, suppress, or withhold literacy—and gain advantage by it in some way” (p. 166). Suzu’s sponsors of literacy modeled ways for her to combine the various literacy practices that she enjoys and excels at into one activity—using her drawings to compliment her teaching of language (in this instance, the teaching of Japanese). We will see in the next section that these disparate literate activities become streamlined into one literate activity, which is a code meshed, multimodal story that
Suzu created to help her students learn Japanese. After discussing her performance on prompt 2,
Suzu asks, “Can I show you my pictures?” The content of Suzu’s answers for the prompts created a way for Suzu to bring up how she brings art into her own classrooms, which I discuss in the next section.
Suzu’s Use of Multimodal and Multilingual Storytelling to Enhance the Japanese
Classroom
As discussed previously, before Suzu asked us if she could show us her pictures, a theme of using drawings to enhance language learning had emerged from Suzu’s answers for the speaking prompts. The “pictures” were more than pictures. Suzu used the pictures, her drawings, as part of a multimodal and multilingual storytelling performance. Like her role models, Michiko
Sensei and June Okada, Suzu used her story in her Japanese language classroom. While Suzu’s story performance could be considered off-topic from the study session, it helps to draw a more complete picture of Suzu’s literacy practices. Roozen and Erickson (2017) argue that through assembling and presenting rich case studies:
Our goal is to offer a coherent account of disciplinary writing, learning, and enculturation
without flattening out the richness, complexity, and dynamics of how literate actors and
127 artifacts are continually taken up, transformed, recombined, and re-coordinated across
space, time, and representational media. (n.p.)
The picture of Suzu’s literacy competence that the TOEFL measures is a flattened version of
Suzu’s literacy. Just as I suggested that Suzu translate “Michiko Sensei” to “Mrs. Michiko” in the performance for prompt 1, which resulted in the flattening of her language use, the exclusion of multimodal evaluation in the TOEFL leaves the picture of Suzu’s literacy practices incomplete at best. Kress (2005) says:
Unlike words, depictions are full of meaning; they are always specific. So on the one
hand there is a finite stock of words—vague, general, nearly empty of meaning; on the
other hand there is an infinitely large potential of depictions—precise, specific, and full
of meaning. The former tend to occur in the fixed order of syntax, line, page, text; the
latter tend to occur in an open order fixed by the reader and/or viewer’s interest. This
leads to the paradox of speech and writing as having a finite number of open, relatively
vague elements in fixed order, and image or depiction having a possibility of infinitely
many full, specific elements in an open order. (p. 15-16)
With infinite possibilities in drawings (Kress, 2005), Suzu excels in storytelling as well as in the representational exercises in Pictionary. Suzu’s story uses pictures, as well as a mixture of
English and Japanese.
The multimodal and multilingual story is part of Suzu’s own communicative repertoire and is also a strong example of blending languages and modes to enhance teaching methods. In the field of ESL, using visual aids like photographs and drawings has been recognized by education researchers as part of a balanced approach to teaching English to non-native speakers from various countries (Raimes, 1991; Canning-Wilson, 1999; Wood and Tinajero, 2002;
128 Macwan, 2015). Additionally, ESL scholarship has also addressed the use of code switching for pedagogical gains (Canagarajah, 1995; Brice, 2000; Azlan and Narasuman, 2013). Suzu’s performance of the story can stand on its own as being a concrete example of transmodal and translingual communication. Hall (2018) points out that the “trans” part of translingual and transmodal suggests a fluid overlap among disciplines. Suzu uses her understanding of best practices of teaching from second language education she gained from her undergraduate education in Japan, from her J-Leap training, and from her head teacher of the Japanese classes she co-teaches. Suzu mobilizes her skills in multiple modes and languages to create what can become a successful classroom activity. Within Suzu’s story, we can also find the “overlap” within transmodal and translingual in composing processes (Horner, Lockridge, and Selfe,
2015). Below are the specific ways that Suzu code meshes during the performance of the story.
Table 4.2 Suzu’s Multimodal and Multilingual Story Used in a Japanese High School Classroom
Drawing to accompany speech Suzu’s use of code switching during the story
129 You know 鬼 (oni, demon)? Like 鬼? His 鬼 friend.
Figure 4.7. Oni apologizing.
So, he became his coach and together, 走 って (hashitte, ran)
Figure 4.8. Coach Oni running with boy.
ロッククライミングをして (rokku kuraiminngu wo shite, rock climbed)、
Figure 4.9. Coach Oni rock climbing with boy.
泳いで (oyoide, swam)、
Figure 4.10. Boy swimming.
130 プロテインを飲んで (purotein wo nonde, drank protein)、
Figure 4.11. Boy drinking protein.
and then 強くなりました (tsuyoku narimashita, became strong). 強くなりま した (tsuyoku narimashita, they became strong)。
Figure 4.12. Boy becoming strong from Oni's training.
ちょっと待って (chotto, wait a minute). That’s what he said, the boy, ちょっと待 って。
Figure 4.13. Boy stands his ground.
and then そして (soshite, and then) they have battle,
Figure 4.14. Alien preparing for battle.
131 and so the coach was watching it, but he kind of 弱い (yowai, weak), weak, and the reason why he was weak is he noticed he gave him wrong pants. so that was why he's weak, so he’s like 待って、(matte, wait)
Figure 4.15. Boy being struck by alien.
He was like 弱い (yowai, weak)、ダメ (dame, no good). I’m not going to make it, that’s what he said.
Figure 4.16. Boy gives up.
and then he said 頑張って (ganbatte, do your best), you are wearing that strong pants, because he doesn’t know he is wearing the wrong pants.
Figure 4.17. Oni yells, "Ganbatte!"
And alien was 泣いて (naite, crying)
Figure 4.18. Alien is defeated.
132 パンツを履いていませんでした、ごめ んなさい。(pantsu wo haitteimasendeshita. gomenasai, you weren’t wearing the pants. I am sorry). And then, but they were happy, they saved the earth.
Figure 4.19. Oni admits that the boy was not wearing the strong pants.
The code switching in the story, in conjunction with the drawings, allows for the students of
Japanese to understand the Japanese within the story without having to use a dictionary after the use of a Japanese word that they do not know. In the storytelling, she uses Japanese for vocabulary, verb forms, and phrases that her class was studying. Suzu used the marked code in combination with the unmarked code as a teaching tool. Within the context of the rest of this chapter, Suzu’s storytelling adds to the existing evidence of what her literacy practices as a second language learner of English includes. As I described in the previous section, Suzu combines multiple literacies (English, Japanese, code meshed Japanese/English, and drawing) for the purpose of teaching Japanese, as modeled by her literacy sponsors Mr. June Okada and
Mrs. Michiko. In addition to demonstrating how literacy sponsors can model ways for disparate practices to be combined in a career, we can also use Suzu’s example of multimodal and multilingual storytelling as a demonstration of “best practice” for teaching language learners.
Code switching among Japanese L1/English L2, English L1s, and English L1/Japanese L2s
In addition to codeswitching for the purpose of pedagogical gains, Suzu also code switches between English and Japanese during the recorded social situations with learners of the
Japanese language. The two previous sections have focused mainly on multimodal
133 communication through Suzu’s drawings on pencil and paper. The next section will focus more on the translingual aspects of Suzu’s speech where Suzu incorporates Japanese into her English speech aimed at an audience with limited fluency in Japanese. Clyde and Sasha are English-only speakers, and Philip and I have some proficiency in the Japanese language.
Compared with the larger social gatherings where we played Cards Against Humanity
(not recorded) and That’s What She Said where Suzu barely talked, Suzu spoke more freely while we played Pictionary and used TOEFL materials to practice speaking and pronunciation.
Suzu code switched only one time during the That’s What She Said game, when she said “へー”
(hee), which is an interjection to express surprise. Below is a chart that shows the types of code switching and the frequency with which it occurred during the Pictionary game and the study session. All instances of code switching during the Pictionary game can be seen in the chart below.
Table 4.3 Classification of Suzu’s Code Switching during Pictionary
Suzu’s instances of code switching Number of times and mixed usage examples
Name-さん (san, honorific for Julie and Philip) 8 mmm なんか (nanka, something) maybe discard 1 somewhere
良い (yoi, good)、ドン (don, bang)。Yeah, どう 1 ぞ (douzo, go ahead)。
はい (hai, yes) a.) はい (hai, yes) b.) いいですか。はい。(ii desu ka? hai) Is it okay? Yes) c.) Action? はい。(hai, yes).
すごい (sugoi, awesome) a.) すごい。(sugoi, awesome), 3 b.) Wow, すごい
134 いち、に、さん、し、ご (ichi, ni, san, shi, go, 1 one, two, three, four, five)
頑張って (ganbatte, do your best) 1
Total instances of code switching 19 The study session was longer (2 hours and 22 minutes) than the game of Pictionary (66 minutes).
In addition, all present at the study session were at least partially competent in the Japanese language.
Table 4.4 Classification of Suzu’s Code Switching during TOEFL Study Session
Suzu’s code switching Japanese language used 135 times by Suzu
Mixed language use in the Occurred 44 times same phrase (1)
Example A This one? One picture? 十分 (jippun, 10 minutes) 、五分 (gofun, 5 minutes), five to ten minutes でも (demo, however)
Example B English 今 (ima, now)、でも (demo, but), when I'm doing MMA or 柔術 (juujutsu, jiu jitsu) like blank
Example C I have another picture, but he was like 弱い (yowai, weak)、ダ メ (dame, no way), and I am I am going to make it that's what he said.
Japanese-only use during Occurred 56 times her speech turn (2)
Example A インタネット (intanetto, Internet)
Example B はい (hai, yes)
Example C へえ？ 本当に？(hee? Hontouni? wow, really?)
Japanese then English OR Occurred 34 times English then Japanese (3)
Example A What? すごい (sugoi, wow)
Example B Yeah. 分かった (wakatta, I understand)
135 Example C うん、そうだね (un, soudane, yeah, that’s how it is). Maybe, for the, we used to do, like…big words too.
Example D it's a whole classroom. みてもいいよ (mitte mo ii yo, it’s okay to watch)
Example E ここですかね。(koko desu ka ne, is right here okay?) I hope it's okay for you. 良かった? (yokatta, is it good?) The purpose of highlighting the code switching of Suzu, Philip, and myself throughout our conversations is multi-faceted. First, by presenting a variety of data from Suzu, including her speech, her interview data, her methods and reasons for wanting to make her speaking sound more American, and the way she expresses herself through mixed language use and mixed modalities (which includes reading, drawing, writing and speaking), I hope to present a full picture of what Suzu’s literacy practices look like. Second, I want to show that while Suzu wants to have an American accent because she has thought it would be “cool” since she was a child, she also code switches in her speech when there are Japanese-language speakers. Suzu’s literacy practices help to complicate the static picture of standard language use and code switching. Suzu aims for the ability to perform a standard American accent with standard English language use, but with an audience who has some competence in Japanese, she also code switches.
Code switching as a translingual practice is a process more studied in areas other than composition. However, as composition studies takes up a “trans” framework, as Hall (2018) argues, there will be “overlapping of intellectual territories” (p. 3). It will be useful to use the
“markedness model” from the study of sociolinguistics (Scotton, 1983). Scotton (1983) explains that speakers have “communicative competence (Hymes, 1972)” in which “speakers recognize choices as either unmarked or marked in reference to the norms of their speech community” (p.
115). Scotton says the speaker’s choice of an unmarked or marked variety of language is a function of negotiation “so that speaking is seen as a rational process involving decisions” (p.
136 115). In a parallel argument, Canagarajah (2013) argues that multilingual situations require an amount of performativity within the speakers:
...meaning does not reside in the grammars they bring to the encounter, but in the
negotiated practice of aligning with each other in the context of diverse affordances for
communication. In the global contact zone, interlocutors seek to understand the plurality
of norms in a communicative situation and expand their repertoires, without assuming
that they can rely solely on the knowledge or skills they bring with them to achieve
communicative success. (p. 43)
Composition scholars have often focused on code switching and code meshing in writing
(Young, 2009; Palacas, 2001; Canagarajah, 2013) while not as much work has been done with speaking. Canagarajah (2006, 2009) focuses on multilingual strategies in speech and the use of global Englishes in speech communities. Composition studies can gain new insights regarding performativity and negotiated communication by also considering verbal code switching. Suzu’s verbal code switching acted as a way to make our communication more personal and more specific to our own communicative needs. When Suzu code switched between Japanese and
English while speaking with me, she was able to perform partly with her first language and partly with her expanding skills in English. Her use of code switching demonstrated two shared literacies.
Hall (2018) suggests that composition studies needs to draw from related disciplines, like contact linguistics, in order to be more informed about code switching and code meshing (p. 4).
Wei (2000) says:
Code-switching is an extremely common practice among bilinguals and takes many
forms. A long narrative may be divided into different parts which are expressed in
137 different languages; sentences may begin in one language and finish in another; words
and phrases from different languages may succeed each other. (p. 13)
As we saw with Suzu’s code meshed and multilingual story, she used Japanese and English throughout. Like Wei says, Suzu began sentences in English and ended them in Japanese.
Language learning classrooms, like the high school Japanese classroom for which Suzu composed the story, are a common place for code switching and storytelling. But in the context of the composition classroom, what is the place of a code meshed story? In a composition classroom in the United States, English is the shared language of the teacher and students. If we suggest that teachers encourage code meshing performances in composition classrooms where the audiences may not understand the partially code meshed language, the teachers may create an unnatural and possibly awkward speech task. However, if we look at the multiple ways that Suzu uses code switching, we can see that the instances in which Suzu says the Japanese word and then the English word equivalent afterwards would be intelligible to an audience who is unfamiliar with Japanese. For instance, when Suzu says, “Is it good for you? 良かった？
(yokatta), she says the phrase in English at first, and then says it in Japanese.
A composition instructor who has a writer who would like to code switch during a presentation or essay could suggest that the writer use the translation/foreign word style of code switching. In this manner, the writer communicates mainly in the dominant language (assuming
English), and when the student would like to add a word from another language, they write the
English word in addition to the foreign word. The audience of English speakers and readers will have enough information to understand the communication fully. This could help to alleviate a writer’s resistance to code switching that stems from a desire to be considerate to their monolingual readers.
138 Monolingual students could also use the translation/foreign word style of code switching while writing a research essay about an issue in a different culture. The students could use words from the culture’s language accompanied with the English translation in their writing. In this style of code switching, the authors create a bridge from one language to another that the readers can easily follow.
According to the participants in the study, the situated context of code switching between
Japanese and English did not present issues of cultural appropriation. However, there are contact zones in which code switching may be uncomfortable and problematic. Young (2009) argues that code switching is “a strategy to negotiate, side-step and ultimately accommodate bias against the working-class, women, and the ongoing racism against the language habits of blacks and other non-white peoples” (p. 51). Young promotes “code meshing, the blending and concurrent use of
American English dialects in formal, discursive products, such as political speeches, student papers, and media interviews” (p. 51).Young promotes the use of code meshing for speakers of marginalized languages. However, if a teacher or student of the dominant language appropriates languages of oppressed communities, the situation is entirely different. Curry (2019) argues the use of a marginalized language by a speaker of a dominant language to be a form of “swag jacking.” Curry says that context and situation are consequential in contact zones between standard English speakers and AAVE speakers and that it is problematic when whites “swagger jack” the codes of minorities.
If instructors use the translation-based code switching exercise discussed earlier, they must also include discussions and readings that discuss the contextual and situated nature of language and bring into discussion problematic forms of code switching. For instance, Pough,
Curry, Jones, and Hull (2019) use a skit from Saturday Night Live titled “Aidy B and Cardi B,”
139 in which Aidy Bryant, a white woman, appropriates Cardi B’s language in various ways. They suggest that the appropriation of Cardi B’s language is vulgar and another example of Black culture being appropriated by whites.
Code switching through a Sociolinguistic Lens
Scotton (1983) describes six conversational maxims of code switching: un-marked choice, deference, virtuosity, exploratory, multiple identities, and flouting. I coded the TOEFL study session using Scotton’s maxims of code switching in order to view Suzu’s conversation from the perspective of sociolinguistics in order to better inform composition theory. I coded
Suzu’s uses of code switching by logically analyzing the situated interactional behavior between
Suzu, Philip, and I through detailing the positions of the speaker (S), speakers (Ss), the addressee
(A), and the rights-and-obligations set (RO). The speaker (S), Suzu, is fluent in both English and
Japanese, both addressees (A) are fluent in English and less fluent in Japanese. At the time of the recording, all three speakers aimed to improve their proficiencies in their second languages. In this situated context, the unmarked choice was unclear. All three speakers were eager to communicate in both languages. However, because of the fact that Suzu’s English was stronger than my Japanese and Philip’s Japanese, Suzu spoke more English than Japanese.
Scotton explains the conversational maxims take place within the situated behavior of the speakers. The speech that I coded is representative of only one communicative situation. The
“unmarked choice” for the situation is unclear, but arguably it is English. Because the focus of the chapter is instances of code switching, I did not code the “unmarked-choice maxim.” No speakers used code switching for “deference” because none of the speakers were trying to persuade one another to give them something. The “exploratory-choice” is also not applicable because we were all familiar with each other’s language proficiencies at the time of the
140 conversation. This leaves three conversational maxims, which appeared in the conversation in varying amounts: “multiple identity,” “virtuosity,” and “flouting.”
Scotton (1983) describes the situation for “multiple-identity maxim” as “S chooses more than one code because he/she is attempting to establish the salience of more than one RO set for the exchange. In an additive fashion, then, Ss [speakers] negotiate multiple identities by
‘showing their wares’” (p. 127). She explains, “Speakers typically follow this maxim in nonconventionalized exchanges simply because it is easier to negotiate multiple identities when norms do not dictate one identity” (p. 127). She illustrates the maxim with an example from
Heller (1978) that takes place in Montreal:
Patient: Est-ce qu’il y a un endroit ou je peux acheter un journal? [Is there a place where
I can buy a newspaper?]
Clerk: ??
Patient: Can I buy a newspaper somewhere?
Clerk: Un journal? [A newspaper?]
Patient: Oui [Yes.]
Clerk: At the truck stop, au bout du couloir. [At the end of the corridor.] (qtd. on p. 128).
This example demonstrates a situation where both speakers know English and French to some extent. I argue that Suzu overwhelmingly uses code switching as a maxim of “expressing multiple identities.”
Oftentimes, Suzu’s Japanese use of a word is followed by an English word equivalent, or vice versa. Of 134 occurrences of code switching, 6 were instances of “virtuosity,” 126 were instances of “multiple identities,” 1 was an example of “flouting,” and 1 was an example of both virtuosity and flouting.
141
Table 4.5 Suzu’s Code Switching Categorized by Scotton’s (1983) Negotiation Maxims
Maxim of virtuosity (6 out of 134)
Example a ダブルバーガー(daburu After I tell Suzu that people at the Freshness Burger had a baagaa, double burger) it difficult time understanding me, she repeats the order in sounded good though? Maybe Japanese. they are not used to…”
Example b ブラックニッカウイスキー? Philip tells Suzu about a cheap whiskey that his brother (burakku nikka uisuki? Black drank in Japan. Suzu then clarifies what brand he is talking nickel whiskey?) about.
Example c カカオ (kakao, cocoa)in Suzu, Philip, and I discuss the pronunciation of “cocoa” Japanese during Suzu’s reading practice for the TOEFL. Suzu explains the Japanese pronunciation to help us find the correct pronunciation.
Flouting the maxim (1 out of 134)
Example 1 of 1 私の名前は (watashi no namae Suzu discusses her desire to hone in her American accent wa, with exaggerated American through training her pitch. In the example, she speaks accent) Japanese in an exaggerated American accent to better our understanding of pitch, but it also makes us laugh.
Flouting the maxim and maxim of virtuosity (1 out of 134)
Example 1 of 1 Neck-u san (neko-san, mr./ms. In this example, Suzu, Philip, and I are trying to hone in cat), like? Philip’s pronunciation of neko-san (Mr./Ms. cat) in Japanese. Suzu uses her exaggerated American accent while saying a Japanese word to help Philip see how he is pronouncing the word.
Maxim of multiple identities (126 out of 134)
Example a Yes, JLEAP, そう(sou,that’s Suzu shows me an example lesson plan that she received right) 頑張ります from JLEAP. She explains the lesson plan is for a college- (ganbarimasu, I will try my level Japanese classroom, but she plans on using it in her best) high school classroom.
Example b だれ？(dare, who?) Sam harris?
142 Philip suggests to Suzu that listening to podcasts might be a way for Suzu to work on her listening and pronunciation. He suggests listening to Sam Harris.
Exaple c えと、(eto, um) every time you Suzu describes what language she thinks in depends on who guys not around me always she is around or if she is alone. Japanese, 全部 (zenbu, all) Japanese. The “virtuosity” examples of code switching are used by Suzu for two reasons: to figure out what an English word is or to help Philip and me with our Japanese pronunciation.
In conversations with myself and Philip, Suzu is able to express her multiple identities.
Philip and I demonstrated our interest and respect of Japanese language and culture through our own pursuit of the language. Suzu often told her friends in the Brazilian jiu-jitsu community that she felt more at home at the gym and at social gatherings with her teammates than she did in
Japan. Looking at her language usage with Philip and I, I would like to suggest that her ability to express herself mainly in English, with parts of Japanese, is one aspect of what made her feel at home. Being able to continually express her multiple identities through code switching was part of what built a feeling of comfort and home within her and her interactions with the community.
Performance, negotiating, and knotworking
By 2050, there will be 30 million more English-as-second-language speakers than
English native speakers (Crystal, 2012). What will happen to the prestige of Standard American
English as varieties of English across the globe continue to develop? Canagarajah (2006) says about the changing demographics of English use:
My fellow villagers in Sri Lanka would say, “Who the hell is worrying about the
rules-schools of Queen’s English, man?” After all, multilingual speakers have a much
larger speech community with which to use their varieties. Their reference point is
not British or American communities anymore. They know that there are millions of
143 people around the world who use varieties like their own and are open to negotiating
differences with sensitivity and skill. Therefore, they are now using their own varieties
with greater confidence. (p. 589)
While Canagarajah writes about the lessening importance of adherence to standard British or
American varieties of English, both Suzu and Akari’s language goals include native-like competence in writing and speaking.
While Suzu’s code switching in a friendly community with Japanese and English speakers suggests that she is comfortable expressing both her Japanese and English-speaking sides, Suzu also made clear her interest in honing her American accent to form an English- speaking identity that is more separate from her Japanese one.
When Suzu has an American accent at her disposal, she will have access to new opportunities and be able to more effectively communicate with English-only speakers who are not willing, or able, to negotiate language. Peirce (1995) argues, “It is through language that a person negotiates a sense of self within and across different sites at different points in time, and it is through language that a person gains access to—or is denied access to—powerful social networks that give learners the opportunity to speak” (p. 13). Suzu, Philip, and I recount and discuss situations where communication was not successful in a contact zone. These were situations that required “knotworking” (Engestrom, Engestrom, and Vahaoo, 1999), but the resources were not available to untie the knot.
Philip discussed that when he visited Japan, he asked a variety of people, トイレはどこ
ですか (toire wa doko desu ka?, where is the bathroom?). Suzu and Philip went back and forth with the pronunciation of toire in order to get Philip’s pronunciation more understandable to a
Japanese speaker. Suzu explained to Philip, “It’s kind of R and L mixed together.” This example
144 shows that there are times when a difference in phonemes between the languages can cause a breakdown in communication, a place where knotworking (Engestrom, Engestrom, and Vahaao,
1999) would be necessary to move past the miscommunication. However, if speakers do not have the resources, or the desire, to enroll alternate modes (like gestures or photographs), or actors that could help in the translation (like a smartphone or piece of paper with written
Japanese) in the communication, the knot will not be undone, and the speakers will not be able to communicate.
Like Philip, I also told Suzu about a time that I had a hard time communicating in Japan at a restaurant called Freshness Burger. Like the word that Philip had a difficult time with, the phrases I struggled to say are English words adopted into Japanese.
Julie: Nobody understood me when I was at Freshness Burger, and I was like, ダブルバーガー (daburu baagaa) and they were like, “a whaa.” Suzu: (laughing) なんで？(nande? Why?) 大変？(taihen? Was it hard?) Philip: yeah, katakana words are the hardest to say Suzu: ダブルバーガー(daburu ba-ga-) it sounded good though? Maybe they are not used to… I don’t believe that my pronunciation of daburu ba-ga- changed much from pronouncing it with
Suzu to the time that I attempted to order the burger in Fukuoka, but like Suzu began to guess, maybe the interlocutors at the burger joint were not used to foreigners ordering at the restaurant.
I worked through the knot with the cashier by repeating the word and trying to get my pronunciation to be understood, by pointing to the menu, and by rewording the order with other
Japanese phrases.
On the level of performance and negotiation at a phonemic level, Philip suggested to
Suzu that once she is able to perform the sounds in “Earl,” “Girl,” and “World,” that anyone will be able to understand her. Philip and Suzu discuss how Philip never has a hard time
145 understanding what Suzu is trying to say, while other interlocutors never seem to understand what she is saying.
Phillip: those kind of sounds, you get those sounds down, and your accent will be a lot like…like…even like hillbillies will be able to understand what you're talking about Suzu: hillbillies? Phillip: yeah, that's the only people…I know what you're saying. I'm never like “what’s Suzu saying right now” Suzu: yeah, some people never understand what I'm talking about
While Canagarajah (2013) describes one type of communication situation where interlocutors have an eagerness to use their multilinguality to communicate with others of varying multilinguality, Suzu, Philip, and I discussed communicative events where interlocutors either don’t want to negotiate or don’t have the resources to negotiate languages. This observation points to the gap between descriptions of multilinguality as being only a positive experience in translingual studies and the felt realities of the participants in the study.
Like Donahue (2018) suggests translingual scholars do, Canagarajah (2013) turns to the fields of contact and applied linguistics to build a foundational understanding of transnational literacy practices. Canagarajah explains that linguists (Firth, 1996; Seidlhofer, 2004;
Khubchandani, 1997) point to the observations that in contact zones:
Interlocutors are open to co-constructing new norms and meanings from the linguistic
resources all participants bring to the interaction. They don’t depend on form (i.e.,
grammar, vocabulary), but focus on communicative practices (i.e., interpersonal,
sociolinguistic, and discourse strategies) to help negotiate their diverse grammars. (p. 43)
In the recorded spoken interactions between Suzu, Philip, and I, we performed and negotiated meaning, used mixed Japanese and English vocabulary, and came to full understanding. While the recorded conversations are an example of language negotiation, code switching, and translingual communication, we also discuss times when communication failed in contact zones.
146 Canagarajah (2013) explains, “In the global contact zone, interlocutors seek to understand the plurality of norms in a communicative situation and expand their repertoires, without assuming that they can rely solely on the knowledge or skills they bring with them to achieve communicative success” (p. 43). While Canagarajah’s argument represents multilingual speech acts where the “interlocutors seek to understand the plurality of norms,” Suzu, Philip, and
I discuss situations where interlocutors, for any number of reasons, interlocutors are not able or willing to work with a plurality of norms to come to an understanding. This chapter brings to translingual studies recounts of communication where speakers were not as generous, or able, with their language resources as Canagarajah describes. The recorded conversation at the
TOEFL study session gives translingual studies an example of mixed language use where the interlocutors have not reached the worldly cosmopolitan level of the speech community that
Canagarajah references.
Translingual, Transmodal, and Writing Assessment Theory
This study has implications for composition instruction as well as language assessment at various levels. Through this case study, Suzu revealed her skill at representing ideas through drawing with Pictionary and her performance of the multilingual and multimodal story. Suzu performed the multimodal and multilingual story under the pretense of studying for the TOEFL.
Suzu’s studying for the TOEFL was a central activity for the case study, but Suzu appropriated the materials for the TOEFL to match her own goals for having an American accent and had no plans on taking the test again. She explains that the speaking portion of the TOEFL is performed at a computer station with a microphone, which made her uncomfortable and made it difficult to speak about the prompt.
147 Through the lens of literacy studies, we can see the value of the multimodal and multilingual story that Suzu shared. The literacy sponsors Mr. June Okada and Mrs. Michiko gave Suzu examples of how to combine art, language, and teaching. Suzu combines her disparate literacy activities with the goal of excelling in her positions as a JLEAP assistant teacher.
However, what value do multimodality and multilinguality hold in standard assessment, and could that change?
In the field of writing assessment, Behizadeh and Engelhard Jr. (2011) explain that writing theories and contextual factors affect writing assessment (p. 205). If theories of writing assessment, and then writing assessment, look to the translingual and transmodal theories within composition to inform their practices, high-stake tests, like the TOEFL, would incorporate, accept, and value communication that is outside of single-language/single-mode standard
English. This is not to conclude that non-standard English be included on high-stakes assessments. Behizadeh and Engelhard Jr. (2011) cite Au (2007) and Winn and Behizadeh
(2011) to describe the “harmful consequences of high-stakes standardized tests on U.S. students, particularly students of color” (p. 206). In addition to scholars and teachers more fully understanding the reality of multilingual speech communities through studies of specific instances of literacy, writing assessment scholarship could also benefit from the presentation and analysis of situated instances of multilingual and multimodal literacy practices. Behizadeh and
Engelhard Jr. say:
This negative washback from skills-oriented assessments highlights the necessity of
creating assessments that consider sociocultural context and encourage more student-
centered pedagogy and a widening of curriculum...Ideally, with greater input from
writing theorists and writing assessment theorists, future writing assessments can be
148 developed that recognize the role that ecological contexts play in the creation and
assessment of student writing within the United States. (p. 206)
Figure 4.20. How writing assessments are affected. Figure from Behizadeh and Engelhard Jr.
(2010), p. 205.
Further studies may use Suzu’s case study as an example of situated multilingual and multimodal communication and as a way to begin to think about incorporating a more fluid picture of what communication looks like in the context of a growing diversity of modes and languages in the
United States.
CONCLUSION
Through Suzu’s case study, this chapter addresses the global actors in social environments and communication through representation of ideas through drawing, multimodal storytelling, and code switching. These areas may seem disparate and disconnected. However,
Horner, Selfe, and Lockridge (2015) make the case for the translingual and the transmodal to be intertwined and studied together. Horner, Selfe and Lockridge argue:
We all sense a need for a more expansive view and practice of composition, whether in
terms of modalities or languages of expression, and a sense that we can stimulate and
149 support efforts toward that goal by identifying overlaps and parallels and work towards it
from questions about both language and modality. (p. 6.)
Through the discussion of Suzu’s successes and hardships at negotiating the literacy practices involved with games like Cards Against Humanity, That’s What She Said, and Pictionary, by discussing the study session of the TOEFL, and through Suzu’s multilingual/multimodal story that she used in her teaching, I have presented complications and deeper examples of language acquisition and mixed language use in speech.
As translingual studies grows, I argue that it is important for scholars not to leave behind speaking and communicating within social situations. Translingual scholars should not forget how the social turn in literacy studies opened up study of reading, writing, and being to all areas of life, beyond classroom writing assignments (Street, 1984; Gee, 2007). Students can diligently study language in the classroom with textbooks, but as we have seen in the That’s What She Said
Party, and what I find in Chapter 5, until languages learners are placed in a social environment, they may not be able to function like as a commanding speaker of the language would in new environments with different vocabularies than they studied in the classroom. I am not suggesting that classroom content should expand to include innuendos and vulgar phrases. Instead, my aim is to draw a fuller picture of literacy practices within the English language learning community.
As Chapter 5 suggests, students of foreign languages who want to communicate with speakers of the foreign language need to experience language beyond the textbook ecology of the classroom.
Many language learners, like Suzu and Akari, aim to achieve “native-speaker like” participation in conversations, writing, and communication overall. Instructors of second language speakers could help students learn social literacies by connecting them with native speakers through joint classroom activities with mainstream classes or through promoting
150 international coffee hours, where students get opportunities to meet students outside of their second language classrooms, at the university. A second language instructor could also encourage students to keep journals of phrases or words that they hear outside of the classroom that they did not learn within the classroom. Students could discuss these journal entries among themselves, use the Internet to help to define the meanings, or ask the instructor for more explanation.
In the next chapter, I turn my attention from Japanese L1s who have commanding levels of English, who want to achieve “native-like” communication in English, to English L1 speakers who have a variety of language goals with Japanese. In Chapter 5, I will point to how entertainment from Japan that travelled to the United States had disruptive effects on the literacy practices of the participants and how the participants have enrolled various actors within their language learning network to further their success in the Japanese language.
151
CHAPTER 5
TRACING LITERACY ACROSS SPACE:
MOBILE MULTILINGUAL PRACTICES
Introduction
Unlike Chapters 3 and 4, which focus on single case study participants, this chapter uses multiple data streams to paint a picture of the mobility of the literacy practices of members of the
Japanese-as-a-foreign-language learning community at this university. This chapter aims to contribute to a disciplinary shift that investigates “sociolinguistic phenomena and processes that are defined in terms of fundamentally different [from structuralist] units--flexible, unstable, dynamic, layered, and mobile ones” (Blommaert, 2016, p. 244). As I explained in Chapter 1, the field of translingual studies is tightly related to other fields of language study. The move to investigate mobility and spatiality is part of the broader sociolinguistic shift that views language boundaries as fluid and communication as performative as opposed to the “the reifying legacy of structuralism” (p. 244). The same shift of thinking from structure to fluidity is apparent in translingual studies (Horner et. al., 2011; Horner and Lu, 2016). This chapter presents a variety of literacy portraits, the compilation of which aims to present the layered and heterogeneous practices of students moving across languages, both bounded and unbounded by location.
Within translingual studies, Fraiberg (2018b, c) and Blackledge and Creese (2017) take up the notion of mobility and the “spatialized nature of everyday literate activities”
152 (Fraiberg, 2018c). The interviews, classroom observations, and literacy portraits in this chapter aim to answer Fraiberg’s (2018b) call for a “need to situate writing and disciplinary enculturation in broader contexts that conceptualize them as dynamic, embodied, and deeply distributed” (Conclusion, Para. 1).
While drawing a large and detailed picture of the distributed literacy networks of these students, this chapter also adds observational data that speaks to conversations in translingual studies on the topics of “shuttling” (Canagarajah, 2005) between mixed-language literacy practices and artifact ecologies (Spinuzzi, 2008). The complex web of literacy networks that the students travel through move them in and out of classrooms, back and forth between Japan and the United States, and across English and Japanese.
By focusing on discrete literacy activities across participants, languages, and space, I also aim to contribute a multilingual perspective to existing case studies in the third generation of
New Literacy Studies grounded in sociohistorical activity theory (Roozen and Erickson, 2017;
Fraiberg, 2010, 2018a, b, c; Prior and Olinger, 2018). Roozen and Erickson (2017) explain,
“From the perspective of mediated discourse theory, the concrete histories people trace through the world, and the heterogeneities those histories produce, are central to understanding social action and the production of persons and social worlds” (2.03, para. 3). This chapter highlights specifically the vast, complex, deep, and layered literacy networks of Japanese-as-foreign- language students.
In addition, this chapter also brings a different perspective to existing translingual studies: the perspective of English L1 students in various stages of acquiring Japanese as a foreign language. This move aims to suggest a broadening of the scope of translingual studies to incorporate English L1s acquiring foreign languages. By incorporating English L1 literacy
153 practices into the discussions of translingual studies, we can show the process of cultural influence is not unidirectional, as in the Eurocentric narrative that Baca (2009) exposes but is realistically more like a continual process of bidirectional cultural osmosis through imaginary geographical borders. Through the study of English L1 literacy mobilities, we can gain insight into how the globalized nature of language uptake varies between Japanese L1s learning English and English L1s learning Japanese in this community.
The chapter begins with a description of the literacy practices and language motivations of Japanese L2 undergraduate students. Then, in more detail, I will describe the literacy practices of teachers of the Intermediate Japanese classrooms: Nino Sensei and Tom Sensei. At the time of the study, both of these teachers were graduate students and, like many of the students in their classes, they first encountered the Japanese language with Japanese media. As they have developed their competencies throughout their undergraduate and graduate study of the Japanese language, studying abroad, and working abroad, both Tom and Nino continue to consume
Japanese media.
After discussing Tom and Nino, I will discuss the practices and artifact ecologies within their classrooms. Both classrooms are relatively similar, with the textbook being the most widely used classroom artifact. After the classroom practice discussion, I will showcase literacy portraits from undergraduate students, some of whom had Nino or Tom as their teacher in their Japanese coursework. With little overlap of literacy practices across in-class and out-of-class practices, this chapter aims to inform the reader of how Japanese/English literacy practices, both in and out of class, work as stabilized genres that the language learners mobilize throughout their study of
Japanese as a foreign language. Integrating the discussion of genre into a social understanding of reading and writing, Miller (1984) explains that “if genre represents action, it must involve
154 situation and motive, because human action, whether symbolic or otherwise, is interpretable only against a context of situation and through the attribution of motives” (p. 152). Miller suggests that classification through genres “seeks to explicate the knowledge that practice creates” (p.
155). I will use this conception of genre within the framework of activity theory to gain insights into regularized actions that involve reading and writing.
This chapter presents how the Intermediate Japanese classrooms use formal scripts of a language learning classroom and will also present out-of-class literacy portraits from four
English L1, Japanese L2 students in this language learning community. I argue that the students encounter more opportunity for “disturbances,” “ruptures,” and “breaks” with their out-of- classroom tools and practices, allowing for more instances for students to enter the zone of proximal development10 (Engestrom et. al, 1997, p, 372). Through researching both the at-home and classroom practices, I will be able to paint a fuller picture of Japanese language acquisition.
Method
Research Questions
Originating Research Question
1. What are the literacy practices of members of the Japanese/English learning
community at this university?
Developed Research Questions
1. What tools do students use in the Japanese language classroom? How do the tools
interact with other tools and with the students? What kinds of disruptions occur
within these activities?
10 The zone of proximal development is a term from Vygotskian psychology that refers to the range in which a learner can complete a task with help and learning is optimal.
155 2. What tools do students use in their home study of the Japanese language? How do
the tools interact with other tools and with the students? What kinds of disruptions
occur within these activities?
The Participants and the Sites
This chapter focuses on the complex and distributed nature of the participants’ literacy networks, describing and analyzing the literacy practices from a wide variety of data streams: interviews with two English L1/Japanese L2 graduate students in Japanese translation (Tom and
Nino), observations of the Intermediate Japanese classrooms of those two graduate students, and four literacy portraits from students in the undergraduate Japanese classes (Olivia, Michael,
Masamune, and CK). The participants in this chapter have varying levels of Japanese competence and native English proficiency. While all of the participants featured in this dissertation are part of the same language-learning community, the participants within this chapter are more closely related to each other: Tom and Nino were the teachers of the
Intermediate Japanese class, a required course for the Japanese Minor, and the other participants in this study are undergraduate students in the Japanese Minor program.
Interviews
Before recruiting the literacy snapshot participants, I interviewed 14 Japanese learners—
12 undergraduate and 2 graduate students. The questions from the interviews were adapted from
Brandt (2001), in which she described the social and material dimensions of literacy practices of
80 Americans born between 1895 and 1985. Brandt’s interview questions focused on specific and material details of literacy. For instance Brandt asks her participants about reading and writing during their childhood, at school, with peers, and for extracurricular value. Brandt asks participants about their “Earliest memories of seeing other people writing/reading; Earliest
156 memories of self reading/writing; Earliest memories of direct or indirect instruction” (p. 208). I modify these questions for second language learning. For English L1, Japanese-as-foreign- language learners, I ask the same questions but specify “in Japanese,” and for Japanese L1,
English language learners, I ask the same questions but specify “in English.” Brandt’s interview questions ask about reading and writing that is self-initiated and for work and also ask about the participant’s purposes for reading and writing.
I found that many of the undergraduate, English L1 Japanese-language-student participants have not developed reading and writing practices outside of what they recalled as their first exposure to the Japanese (for example: watching anime) and classroom reading, writing, and speaking practices. It makes sense that learners of the language do not have ways of using reading and writing for work when they are beginners in the language. Nino, Tom, Akari,
Mari, and Suzu all shared a variety of ways in which they used their foreign language literacies for work and contexts beyond their first experiences and beyond the classroom. The interviews were helpful in understanding how the foreign language actor networks of the participants were assembled and how those networks varied depending on the participant and their experiences.
Brandt (2001) describes the importance of understanding the “contextual perspectives” in writing and reading activities. These “contexts” create “the meanings for which we reach during reading and writing and in that way help to constitute (and can hinder) our ability to read or write” (p. 3). These perspectives can help literacy researchers understand literacy as a series of practices and, in turn, to better understand literacy. Brandt’s interview questions allowed her to document specific descriptions, memories, and details about the reading and writing of her participants, which is why I chose to use a modified version of her interview questions in this
157 chapter, which uses material semiotics to further understand L1 and L2 literacies. Brandt says understanding contextual perspectives of literacy
...also tends to recognize the multiplicity of literacy abilities and their legitimacy: As
social groups differ in their cultural expressions or class locations, for instance, so will
preferred ways of reading and writing differ. In fact, this perspective tends to eschew
references to skills or abilities at all, focusing instead on the concept of literate practices,
emphasizing the grounded, routinized, multiple, and socially sanctioned ways in which
reading and writing occur. (p. 3)
By appropriating Brandt’s (2001) interview questions and turning them to focus on second language literacy, I was able to gather a variety of data from my participants regarding how the students first encountered the second language, whether English (for Japanese L1s) or Japanese
(for English L1s). For English L1 students studying Japanese, their answers for the “earliest memories” of interacting with Japanese include media, cultural artifacts, and family members, while the Japanese L1, English L2 participants interacted for the first times with English through family members. The findings from the limited set of interviews are not meant to suggest that these are typical patterns for Japanese L1/English L2 or English L1/Japanese L2.
I will present findings from all 17 interviews and then will focus more closely on the two interviews with Tom and Nino, the teachers of the Intermediate classrooms that I observed and discuss.
Classroom Observations
I gathered data regarding objects used in the classroom and how they were used by the teachers and students from two Intermediate classes. I observed and took notes at every class of
Nino’s and part of every week’s classes for Tom’s section. Through the observations, I was able
158 to contribute to the classrooms by teaching two class periods because Nino got acutely sick and
Tom had a planned absence. Through attending the classes, I also became closer to students in this cohort. I met two of the four participants in the literacy portraits, Olivia and Michael, through these classroom observations.
Fraiberg (2010) suggests that future studies may investigate how “textbooks, blackboards, and classroom conversations become knotted into new genre and cultural ecologies
(and vice versa)” (p. 118). I describe the Intermediate Japanese classroom ecologies and demonstrate how the participants work within and outside of that ecology beyond the classroom with the varied practices in the literacy portraits.
Literacy Portraits
Olivia, Masamune, Michael, and CK were all students enrolled in the Japanese Minor at the university. All participants, except for Masamune, were students whom I spent extended periods of time with through my observations of the Intermediate classes and through my own coursework in the Japanese language. Masamune was recruited for the study through a chance meeting in the student multimedia studio in the library. I took a writing class to the multimedia studio and noticed that Masamune was scanning booklets of Nintendo games that were in
Japanese. After my class was finished, he was still there scanning, and I asked if he would like to participate in the study and gave him a consent form. Masamune writes game reviews for the
Super Nintendo review website Playing With Super Power and sells unofficial translations of
Famicom packets on Ebay. He is a master’s student in Accounting, and he was taking
Elementary Japanese II at the time I met him.
Both Olivia and Michael were in one of the Intermediate courses that I observed. Olivia wants to be a translator, in both the Japanese language and the Spanish language. She envisions
159 herself working from home and writing translations in English for the two languages. At the time
I talked to Michael, he was studying Japanese to gain entrance into a master’s program for business in Japan, with classes taught in English. He showed me some of the extra study material that he used, which included textbooks not used in classes. He also shared his opinion and experiences studying abroad and learning the specifics of Japanese grammar points.
CK was in my own cohort of Japanese language courses, and we took a total of four courses together. CK shares how he navigates tricky international copyright laws when looking for Japanese music and games. He also walks me through how he reads, interprets, and plays smartphone games from The Idol Master universe. The apps mainly use Japanese but also use the
English. The games are intended for a Japanese audience but have a large international following.
Overall, these portraits and classroom observation data will help to complicate and contextualize what language study is like at various levels and between two languages: English and Japanese. While monolingual speakers may assume that the way to learn a language is to choose a language and go to class, these portraits of mixed language literacy will help to complicate that storyline. In addition, through the portraits, we can see that Japanese learners studying in the United States are often interested in being able to experience games, manga, and books in Japanese for a more genuine experience of the translated media that introduced them to
Japanese culture.
Findings
My initial interest in this entire dissertation project stemmed from seeing the out-of- classroom practices—for instance, anime, manga, music, and video games—as durable and disruptive practices, like the technologies that Brandt and Clinton (2002) discuss:
160 ...we want to grant the technologies of literacy certain kinds of undeniable capacities –
particularly, a capacity to travel, a capacity to stay intact, and a capacity to be visible and
animate outside the interactions of immediate literacy events. These capacities stem from
the legibility and durability of literacy: its material forms, its technological apparatus, its
objectivity, that is, its (some)thing-ness. (p. 343)
Anime acted as an initial tool that led some of the students in this chapter to study the Japanese language at university. However, when the students enter the university classroom, what kinds of out-of-classroom practices do they engage in? As I discuss in the following section, using terms from activity theory, the Intermediate classrooms follow strict “coordination” that involves a
“scripted flow of interaction” (Engestrom et. al, 1997, p. 372) between tools and actors. The tool and actor coordination within the classroom does not include the tools that brought many students to study the Japanese language: authentic Japanese media. However, as Nino and Tom demonstrate, they continue their Japanese media literacy practices as their Japanese language skills improve.
The interviews led me to an understanding of how particular students taking Japanese classes interact with Japanese literacy both inside and outside of the classroom. In order to investigate more deeply the objects of literacy in and out of the classroom, and how the students are appropriating these literacy objects, I use an activity theory lens (Russell, 1997; Miettinen,
1999; Spinuzzi, 2003, 2008; Geisler and Slattery, 2007; Kaptelinin, 2009) and a genre ecologies framework (Miller, 1984; Russell, 1997, Spinuzzi, 2003, 2004, 2008). Genre ecologies focus on how texts (broadly speaking) are used in concert with one another. Without relying on the social or the cognitive to explain learning, activity theory presents a way to understand the relationship between learners and genres and how the learner’s actions can be analyzed to suggest how they
161 move through routinized reading and writing practices, encounter problems, and acquire (parts of) a foreign language. Activity theory will also allow me to demonstrate where and how learning takes place by looking at the relationships and interactions between the learner, the objects they use to acquire the language, and the classroom in which these actors operate.
Miettinen (1999) describes how activity theory can be used to explain human development:
The relation between the human agent and the object is mediated by cultural means or
artifacts. The basic types of these means are signs and tools. During socialization, an
individual internalizes, by participating in ‘common activities’ with other humans, the
means of culture: language, theories, technical artifacts, and norms and modes of acting.
Thus consciousness does not exist situated inside the head of the individual but in the
interaction—realized through material activity—between the individual and the objective
forms of culture created by the labor of mankind. (p. 173)
In other words, the language learning process is not explained only by cognition but by the human relationship between artifacts, activities, and other humans. I will use activity theory as a means to understand the complex relationship of the activities of the participants and their relationship to classroom literacy practices and to suggest how learning and development in the language takes place across the activities. Through researching both in-class and out-of-class practices where students are interacting with the Japanese language, we can see how these settings interact to create “expansive transitions” that lead to proximal zones of development
(Engestrom et. al. 1997, p. 374). Spinuzzi (2008) explains that in activity theory:
Activity networks are linked activity systems--human beings laboring cyclically to
transform the object of their labor, drawing on tools and practices to do so. These
activities themselves are the nodes, nodes that are constituted by, but transcend, the
162 humans and nonhumans who participate in them. The links in the nodes of an activity
network are often portrayed as supply lines: Activity A labors to produce an artifact that
then serves as a tool for Activity B; Activity C labors to develop practices that then serve
as rules for Activity B; and so on. (p. 7)
The following sections will describe how learners move from in-class and out-of-class artifact ecologies, encounter disruptions, and encounter the Japanese language through a variety of stabilized genres.
Language spreads, flows, and penetrations: Contrasting English L1/Japanese L2 and
Japanese L1/English L2
Through my interviews, I found that in some students taking Japanese courses, media from Japan was an initial and ongoing artifact in their study of the language. Of the 14 participants in my initial interviews, 8 said their first memories of the Japanese language were through Japanese media. All 14 of the participants reported that they have interacted with
Japanese media in the past, or still do. This contrasts with how the Japanese L1 participants had first heard English. Out of the three Japanese L1 participants, all of them had heard or seen
English first in person, either through a family member, or at school.
Table 5.1 First memories of the Japanese Language or Japanese Media
Undergraduate students
1 Sailor Moon, dubbed in English.
2 Mom speaking Japanese and watching Japanese news and weather.
3 “Dragon Ball Z, from age 5” dubbed in English.
4 Playing Legend of Zelda or Pokemon on the Nintendo 64, translated in English.
5 Pokemon game, in Japanese, bought from The Exchange because “it looked cool.”
163 6 Her grandfather was stationed in Okinawa during the Vietnam War, so her mom and her sisters lived in Japan for a few years. “My mom, my mom’s family used to live in Japan, I have a couple friends who are half Japanese, so their mother would have stuff all over the house.”
7 Saw brother learning Japanese, “using it to show off.”
8 “Anime—Naruto, or Pokemon, or Yu-Gi-Oh,” dubbed in English.
9 “In high school, my friend introduced me to a video game that as undeniably Japanese-- it took place in Japan, unlike most other translated works. It was put simply, a kinetic visual novel. A visual novel is a type of video game where the main part of the game takes place by reading the screen. Different visual novels have different kinds of game play, some have it where you make a choice and then you can get different endings.” Unofficial patch of English translation.
10 4 years old at the Okinawa military base, “my earliest memories of Japanese is having my Japanese pre-school teacher telling me to hold my pencil like a normal person.”
11 Japanese step grandmother who “had everything Japanese in her house. She even gave me a kimono.”
12 Pokemon, dubbed, but “The first time I can really remember hearing someone speak Japanese was when I was 20, was in Bleach...I was watching Bleach in English, but I got to a certain episode and there were no more dubs, and I was like, oh, shit, I guess I got to do it like this.”
Graduate students
Tom Japanese babysitter talking on the phone in Japanese and watching VHS tapes of Dragon Ball, in Japanese
Nino “I think my friends introduced me to J-Pop, or J-Rock, something like that.” While many students describe interacting with a translation that was dubbed in English, many students described a kind of realization that occured after they started to become fans of the translated shows and related media. Pokemon, Zelda, and Yu-Gi-Oh are all made in Japan and were originally in Japanese. While it is impossible to say that the translated anime and video games were the cause of the students’ initial interest in Japan, these are the first memories that the students have interacting with anything coming from Japan.
164 I did not interview as many Japanese L1 speakers. The Japanese L1 speakers who I interviewed are at a commanding level of speaking and writing in English. As the chart shows, these speakers’ ways of being introduced to English were similar to one another.
Table 5.2 First memories of English or English-Language Media?
Mari “That’s a good question too. Because I lived in America from when I was 3 to five because my father went to graduate school in Tennessee, so I lived in Tennessee for two years, and I went to preschool there at the University of Tennessee, so I because I guess maybe it was kind of shocking because I was thrown into an English speaking environment, I kind of remember the teacher kind of vaguely. Or like my friend’s mom. Because they are like, “Hi Mari.” Talk to me totally different. So I kind of remember it, not like clearly, but I kind of remember them talking to me in English. So in a sense, maybe, that’s like my earliest memory, you know what I mean. Because I don’t remember how I was in Japan before that, when I was two and stuff.”
Akari “That’s a difficult question. I think was when I went to Hawaii with my family. It was just a trip, family trip. Of course, I didn’t know any English at all, at that time, but I didn’t feel weird when I hear or see people talking in a foreign language, but it was definitely weird when I saw my parents trying to communicate in English because, like what were they saying, kind of thing.”
Suzu “My dad, when I was in Kindergarten, he was reading English book.” Also, Suzu says one of the first times that she heard English was when her family hosted an adult female Fulbright scholar for a few days who was in transit to the next city. The fact that the Japanese L1 participants, Suzu, Akari, and Mari, heard English first through school and family members is not surprising, considering that English is a required language of study in Japanese schools. It is also not surprising that many of the Japanese learners did not hear
Japanese spoken in person for the first time, considering that Japanese is not widely studied in public schools and Japanese speakers do not make up a significant population of the local area.
According to Noack and Gamio (2015), English is the most-studied language in the world with 1.5 billion learners, followed by 82 million learners of French and 30 million learners of
Chinese. In addition, there are 101 countries where English is spoken as an official or dominant language, followed by 60 countries where Arabic is a dominant or official language (Noack and
165 Gamio, 2015, n.p.). Japan is one of the countries in which English is studied, starting in fifth grade. According to Aoki (2016), by 2020, the public Japanese education system will change
English from a “foreign language activity,” where fifth and sixth graders do activities like “sing songs in English” and begin to become familiar with the English language, to a mandatory course. Aoki explains that the change will “double the annual number of English classroom hours to 70 from the current 35, and see reading and writing taught for the first time, according to a draft guideline released in August.” Aoki explains that the public schools’ increase in hours of study of English is because “the current system failed to achieve the government’s target of making students fluent enough to debate or negotiate in English.” In addition, the “foreign language activity” in English that was for fifth and sixth grades will be moved to third and fourth grades.
The relationship of English to Japan and Japanese to the United States are clearly different. Jacquement (2005) discusses the mobility of language practices through face-to-face, local communication, and online interactions and suggests two metaphors to describe how languages gain speakers: “spreads” and “flows” (p. 260). Jacquement argues:
...contemporary studies on language and communication must address the progressive
globalization of communicative practices and social formations that result from the
increasing mobility of people, languages, and texts. They must, in other words, be able to
talk about flows while shying away from a power-free, neo-liberal vision of globalization
processes, that is without forgetting to address the asymmetrical power relations and
penetrations engendered by each flow” (p. 261).
He explains spreads are forms of unavoidable linguistic contact, whereas flows can be avoided by “finding a different route, stepping over it, or ignoring it” (p.258). While more data is
166 necessary to make broad claims about English and Japanese language “flows,” “spread,” and
“penetrations,” the interviews that ask participants the first time they heard either English or
Japanese can help us to begin to contextualize the difference in power dynamics in how the
Japanese and English languages are taken up in this community, with these participants.
The requirement in the Japanese education system to study English, the extensive use of
English writing in signage in Japan, and the increasing amount of English phrases that are becoming part of the Japanese language are signs of English “spreading” through Japan
(Jacquement, 2005). In that respect, the Japanese L1 perspective differs from the English L1 perspective. The students taking up the study of Japanese in this study could have chosen not to be in contact with the Japanese language, but they decided to further their contact with the
Japanese language because of their desire to understand Japanese media and their interest in
Japanese cultural artifacts.
Horner and Trimbur (2002) discuss specifically the composition classroom’s place within the context of the history of the American university and the relationship of English to other languages in the United States and across the world. The authors call attention to the
“unexamined” and tacit mono-language policy of writing classrooms. The authors say:
...we want to examine the sense of inevitability that makes it so difficult to imagine
writing instruction in any language other than English. As we hope to show, a tacit
language policy of unidirectional monolingualism has a history and a cultural logic that
have gone largely unacknowledged in our field and that, by remaining unexamined,
continues to exert a powerful influence on our teaching, our writing programs, and our
impact on U.S. culture. (p. 595)
167 As I describe the Japanese Intermediate classroom and the literacy portraits in the next sections of this chapter, it is necessary to discuss how the language learning climates for English and
Japanese are very different. For Japanese native speakers, the Japanese public schooling system aims for graduates to be able to “debate” and “negotiate” in English, whereas the public education system in the United States does not require fluency in languages other than English.
By looking at both English L1 and Japanese L1 perspectives in this language learning community, my study aims to show a more complete picture of language literacy, which includes the political and situational background of learning both languages from various perspectives.
Transidiomatic flows of Japanese to English L1s: portraits of graduate students who started their study with J-Rock and Dragon Ball
Jacquemet (2005) suggests the term “transidiomatic” to capture the interactions of
“translocal multilingualism interacting with the electronic technologies of contemporary communication” (p. 266). He continues, “The world is now full of locales where speakers use a mixture of languages in interacting with friends and co-workers, read English and other ‘global’ languages on their computer screens, watch local, regional, or global broadcasts, and listen to pop music in various languages” (p. 266). He argues, “Their transidiomatic practices are an instance of how new discourses and modes of representation are reterritorialized within the local environment, and as such must be taken into account in any assessment of the impact of globalization on languages” (p. 267).
In this section, I will discuss the interview data from English L1/Japanese L2 who were graduate students in the Japanese translation program at the time of the study and who have an expanding to commanding use of Japanese. These two graduate students, Nino and Tom, are also the teachers for the Intermediate classrooms that I observed. The sections focus on how the
168 “transidiomatic” (Jacquemet, 2005) media practices of Nino and Tom initiated their study of the
Japanese language and how those practices stuck with them as they progressed in their proficiency of Japanese.
Nino Sensei
Nino is a native English speaker, born in Ohio, who was introduced to the Japanese language through two main literacy practices: Japanese music and video games from Japan translated into English. She was introduced to the music by a friend. Nino explains that she does not know how her friend found the Japanese music. According to Nino, her friend said, “You should listen to this, if you like this game’” because the music was in Japanese, and the games were from Japan. She earned her undergraduate degree with a major in Japanese. Then, she participated in the JET Program, a program funded by the Japanese government that brings native English speakers into public school classrooms as Assistant English teachers. After JET, she worked at a factory in Ohio as a translator. She says she “wanted to make it as easy as possible for [the Japanese workers] to work there” and that she acted as “the default person for
America questions.” She did not just help them out on the job site. For instance: she accompanied one Japanese employee to the dentist and accompanied another employee to the pre-school where he enrolled his child.
At the time of the interview, she was in her second-year of the MA program in Japanese
Translation and working on her case study of a video game patent. Nino enjoys watching
Japanese variety shows and listens to Japanese music every day during her drive to campus. She has a job secured as an office worker in Tokyo that she will begin after graduation.
Nino picked her own pseudonym based on her favorite Japanese idol, actor, and member of the band Arashi, Kazunari Ninomiya, also known as Nino. Nino has been a member of the
169 Arashi fan club since the first time she went to Japan, even though, as she explains, you technically cannot be a member without a Japanese mailing address. However, almost all of the fan material that she gains access to through her membership is online, and she uses her friends’ parents’ mailing address to cover the fact that she lives in the United States.
After Nino began to meet speakers of the Japanese language through her formal study of the language at college, her motivations for learning Japanese grew to include more than the desire to consume the media she enjoyed. She explains her progression of motivations:
I guess the beginning was...that I wanted to be able to understand the music. But then
once I got into college, it was for homework,..but once I had my roommates who were
Japanese, I wanted to get better, so that I could talk to them. Or, in the case of the one
roommate, I wanted to talk to her parents...Because they would always ask about me for
some reason, even though they never met me before. So, I wanted to actually have a
conversation with them. Or, at least write them a letter, or something, one day.
Unlike Akari, from Chapter 3, who was motivated to learn English during a family vacation when she saw her parents speaking a language she didn’t understand, Nino was first motivated to study Japanese to understand media, not to communicate with people. However, after she began her formal study, communication with people became a motivating factor.
After graduating with her undergraduate degree, Nino participated in the JET program, where she worked in Japan as an English teacher’s assistant in a public school. She wanted to excel in this position and participate in the Japanese workplace in Japanese, even when none of the teachers or administrators she worked with expected her to use Japanese at a commanding level. She discusses a time after a teaching observation where the teachers and principal gathered together to discuss what went well with the teaching observation and what could be improved.
170 Nino put a lot of preparation into her speaking part in this meeting. She prepared a written speech and had her Japanese colleagues edit her writing. She says:
I remember speaking, I remember looking at him [the principal]. He looked like that
proud dad that’s sitting in the audience, kind of thing. And afterwards, he was like, you
did a really good job. And I was like, “Oh, thank God.” (laughs)...he kind of was a
motivation for doing well on the JLPT because I could kind of get my results, and like,
“Look dad, I passed the test” kind of thing...Also, when I wrote my farewell speech...it
was the same thing.
Similarly to the way Nino formed language goals after meeting her Japanese college roommates, she also wanted to be able to participate in the school meetings with a commanding use of
Japanese.
Before entering graduate school, Nino worked in a factory in Ohio as an
English/Japanese translator. She explained that she helped the workers negotiate visits to the doctor as well as help to answer questions that they had concerning communicating with the schools their children were enrolled in. She says, “A lot was being that person that they could rely on to help them get through, just that everyday stuff.”
By looking at Nino’s literacy story, we can see that she could not form salient language goals until she met Japanese-speaking people and discovered Japanese media that she wanted to understand. When she was introduced to the Japanese music, she made it a goal to understand the
Japanese lyrics; when she shared a dorm with Japanese speakers, she wanted to be able to speak with them in Japanese; when she taught in a school, she wanted to be able to participate in the
Japanese-language work environment. None of the participants in this study decided to begin their study of Japanese, or of English, without first coming into contact with the language,
171 whether that was through media, school, or family. If American or Japanese students are not coming into contact with foreign languages or media from foreign places, they will not develop a need to communicate or understand the languages. Without contact with a foreign language, a learner cannot form a language goal to make their language study possible, or, worthwhile.
Tom Sensei
Tom is a native English speaker, born in Ohio, who became introduced to the Japanese language through anime and video games. He began his study of the Japanese language with an introduction to an anime that was widely available (in its English dubbed version) on cable television. However, his introduction to the Dragon Ball Z series was more intimate than just watching it on television in the English language. Tom watched the Japanese version of Dragon
Ball on VHS tapes with his childhood babysitter (who is Japanese L1/English L2) and also often heard his babysitter talk on the phone in Japanese. He then started to make connections between the video games that he enjoyed playing and Dragon Ball; he realized both media were from
Japan.
Tom notes that before college, he wanted to understand games in Japanese and began to study hiragana and katakana by himself, but he says he lacked the ability to excel in learning the language when he was studying alone, even though he wanted to understand the Japanese in the
Japanese games. He says:
One of my games for the Playstation 2, you can change the language. It was still written,
like the text would be, in English, and that was probably high school. At the time I also
started to study...hiragana and katakana, but because I didn’t have a teacher, and because
it was all self study, I didn’t really progress very far with the language. Actual speaking
on my own didn’t come until my freshman year of college.
172 During college, Tom was an exceptional Japanese undergraduate student, skipping two years of
Japanese classes. He owes his classroom success to Mari Sensei, the Japanese instructor in his courses. He explains:
The thing that’s the most, like most memorable for me was just the way that [Mari
Sensei] kind of went out of her way so that I could improve. I really had a desire to learn
as much as I could, and that the class, although it was fast pace for some students, I found
that because I enjoyed it so much, I was putting all this extra study time in, and I kind of
got ahead in the class, and so she would give me a lot of individual instruction as well,
and she would also, she’d lend me her children’s...Japanese books...you know, they were
easy to read ...and so yeah a lot of fond memories like that that. I think helped to motivate
me even further to study.
Since Tom had skipped ahead in the program, he was able to complete all of his Japanese coursework before he participated in the study abroad program. A placement test showed that his
Japanese was at a high enough level that he was able to be placed into classes at the university with native Japanese speakers. Tom likens the classes he took at the Japanese university to the
Liberal Education Requirements at the university where this study takes place. While doing study abroad, he also worked a part-time job as an English conversation teacher.
Tom often writes in Japanese to his friends online using Facebook or Line, but he also describes an attempt to write a short story in Japanese. He says, “It was not a good story, but it did give me a chance to experiment with the language and think about, like, characters, and come up with different personalities for them and interactions...It let me experiment with a lot of different types of vocabulary and grammar as well.” The shuttling back and forth between various communities of writing and speech is discussed by Canagarajah (2006). He says, “The
173 facility displayed by this non-native writer for shuttling between different communities and constructing creative texts shows how agency may be exercised in negotiating discourses” (p.
62). The agency displayed in Tom’s choosing to write and read in various Japanese genres relates to Jacquemet’s description of language “flows,” in which speakers can choose to engage with a language. There were no strong political or economic pressures suggesting that Tom take the study of Japanese seriously. He acted with his own agency to pursue Japanese across a variety of genres.
Tom also describes himself as a “gamer.” He takes pride in playing games “day one” from Japan in the original Japanese. From the time Tom was working on his undergraduate to the present, he keeps a notebook in which he writes down new vocabulary and grammar that he has to look up when he encounters them in the games. Tom, like Nino, at the time of the interviews, was in the second year of his M.A. in Japanese translation, working on his case study, and teaching Intermediate Japanese. Tom held well-attended open office hours in the student center and outside of class held reading sessions in the library with PDFs that are not used in class. He has secured a job in Chicago doing Japanese translation for a large company and eventually wants to continue his education with a Ph.D. in sociolinguistics.
Playing video games “day one” and joining Arashi’s fan club as rhetorical genres
Both Nino and Tom navigate bilingual digital and tactile spaces. If we look at Tom’s playing of Japanese video games “day one” as they were “intended” as a genre of bilingual literacy practice, we can see the recurring features of the practice. Nino and Tom’s practices of listening to music and playing games, respectively, have grown and changed with their increasing competence in the Japanese language. Spinuzzi (2003) explains, “Genre is a way of talking about how people regularly interpret and use texts. I mean ‘texts’ broadly speaking: we
174 talk about genes of literature, music, architectures, speech, and even computer interfaces” (p. 1).
With this definition of genre, we can begin to explore how out-of-class literacy practices, such as playing video games in Japanese, downloading exclusive Japanese-language content, and listening to Japanese-language music act as stable genres that learners may continually appropriate to match their competency in the Japanese language. For instance, Nino listened to J-
Pop songs when she knew no Japanese and she could only mouth approximations of the sounds of the Japanese words. As her knowledge of Japanese grew, she continues to listen to the J-Pop songs, knowing what the lyrics meant and how to say the words. When Tom first began to play video games in Japanese, he had to refer to dictionaries and take more notes on the unknown words and phrases, but as he became more proficient in Japanese, he grew to barely needing to refer to dictionaries and take notes to understand the language in the games.
In order to purchase a Japanese game in the United States, players need to visit specialty websites like play-asia.com, or, for digital downloads, create “fake” profiles that require
Japanese addresses. These addresses could be hotels they have stayed at, random addresses they have no connection to, or Japanese friends’ parents’ addresses. Similarly, on the Amazon store, books published in the Japanese language are not intended for circulation outside of Japan, but by using a Japanese address, the Japanese media consumer is able to purchase the book digitally, or even have it shipped to an address in the United States, as long as their profile contains a
Japanese address. While consumers can use the bookstore Kinokuniya to send Japanese books to the United States without a Japanese mailing address, some students do not know about this service or still prefer to use the Amazon workaround. Gaining access to the Japanese game, playing the Japanese game, using a notebook to keep track of unknown vocabulary and grammar, and researching those unknown vocabulary and grammar become a stable genre of practice that
175 Tom can use over and over again with different games. In this way, Tom combines the genre of playing Japanese games with the more traditional school literacy of compiling vocabulary and grammar points lists. Spinuzzi argues, “Genres tend to be living, constantly adapting, and hybridizing with other genres in order to fit more particular and restricted situations while providing regularity and stability” (p. 146). As I discuss in the classroom observation section, taking notes on grammar points and vocabulary words is part of the artifact ecology in the
Japanese language classroom. Tom appropriates the note-taking into his own at-home artifact ecology that includes Japanese language video games, game systems that can play the Japanese versions of the games, the websites he uses to access the Japanese language games and gaming systems, his notebooks, and the tools that he uses to translate the unknown terms, including dictionaries, websites, and textbooks.
Nino explained that with the fan club membership, there was not much content delivered through the mail, only a yearly letter that she could access online. However, navigating the international copyright and distribution practices that limit access to those only with Japanese addresses becomes part of the practice of obtaining the relatively rare Japanese media in the
United States, or anywhere outside of Japan. Lewis (2016), through a study of a bit torrent tracker and content management system, argues that “technologies often function as rhetorical genres” (p. 2). He continues, “technologies affect our experience of the world, transforming our intentions, mediating our motives, and anchoring us in contexts of use” (p. 2). Lewis (2016) explains:
Genres at this layer play important stabilizing roles in sustaining entire activity systems,
allowing the collective action of numerous subordinate mesoscopic and microscopic
actions and operations to aggregatively move the activity along; however, individuals are
176 not typically cognizant of macroscopic activity beyond recognizing the shared social
motive or object rendered. (p. 5)
CK, a participant in the literacy portraits also found ways to bypass the international distribution blocks of the Japanese smartphone application that he plays. CK did not want to talk about the details of his Japanese address, but a quick Google search reveals that accessing the Japanese iTunes store, and therefore all of the Japan-exclusive content in the store, is a process similar to that of accessing the Japanese Amazon store and includes coming up with a Japanese address for the profile. The act of accessing the Japanese media becomes a stabilized genre in itself that becomes part of the literacy practices of consuming untranslated media intended for only those living in Japan.
Nino described that when she first began listening to j-rock, she would move her mouth in an approximation of what she was hearing; she didn’t know what the lyrics meant, but she still sang along. She said that now, when she drives to campus, she still listens to j-rock and sings along, but she knows what the words mean. Songs are often utilized in language learning classrooms (Jolly, 1975; Saricoban and Metin, 2000, Keskin, 2011). Saricoban and Metin (2000) say:
Songs also give new insights into the target culture. They are the means through which
cultural themes are presented effectively. Since they provide authentic texts, they are
motivating. Prosodic features of the language such as stress, rhythm, intonation are
presented through songs, thus through using them the language which is cut up into a
series of structural points becomes a whole again. (p. 1)
The language learner can utilize the rhythm and melody of a song to memorize the lyrics and phrases within the song. If we look at the practice of listening and singing along to foreign
177 music as a genre of language study, we can see the stability of the practice in the way that it is adopted and hybridized as the learner develops their language skills, from mouthing approximations of the unknown words to singing along with full understanding of the lyrics.
With a genre framework in mind, the use of the textbook functions similarly to the out-of- classroom practice of singing Japanese-language songs.
Like the textbook, a song presents a set number of grammatical phrases and vocabulary words. While the textbook is used in conjunction with the workbook, classroom activities, and quizzes to make the material salient and memorable, the structure, repetition, and melody of the song provide all of the structure necessary for the learner to memorize the foreign material in the song. The textbook works in conjunction with the other resources in the classroom, as well as the instructor’s explanation of the materials for the students to begin to read, speak, write, and be in the new language. In the next section, I focus on how various classroom genres that I observed within the Intermediate Japanese classrooms of Nino and Tom work to give stability and scripts to the language learning process.
Genre Ecologies in the Classroom
One of the most striking differences between the at-home and in-class literacy practices of students of Japanese is the orchestrated nature of multiple in-class genres, which include the textbook, the whiteboard, PowerPoint Presentations, quizzes, exams, and in-class work. Spinuzzi explains that genre analysis can be used on particular artifacts to discover and describe “how the artifact is typically interpreted and used” and also to analyze how the “given artifact is typically used in concert with others. That is, genres are used in assemblages or complexes; few if any technological activities use just one, and most use great clouds of them” (p. 1). The objects in the classroom, like the textbook and the whiteboard, act as “genres” in that they provide “a
178 developmental, stabilizing influence on human activity” (Spinuzzi, 2008, p. 146). Spinuzzi describes how a telecorp worker uses “multiple genres simultaneously to make sense of a case, organize her work, coordinate with others, and solve problems” (p. 147). As we saw in the previous section, the at-home practices are oftentimes authentic texts written for a Japanese- speaking audience. However, the classroom ecology offers regularized, extremely stable, and predictable practices that are intended for language learners and designed to work in conjunction with the teacher and the students. The stability of the practices is one way to solve the problem of a new language: the fact that every aspect of the new language is a roadblock to overcome.
Through the classroom observation, I found that the classes use the following objects.
Table 5.3 Genre Ecologies in Intermediate Japanese Classrooms
Tutoring signature sheet, syllabus, PowerPoint about study abroad and JET Program, Genki textbook, kanji quiz, grammar quiz, PowerPoint with vocabulary words, pictures, hiragana, kanji, and English, handouts, kanji worksheets, whiteboard, Genki Workbook, YouTube, brochure from JET Program, Genki audio CD, New Years cards, Google Images, document camera (to project textbook), study Guide, written self-introduction in Japanese (listening exam), midterm grammar exam, Google Slides, rough draft of writing assignment-typed, genkō yōshi (Japanese-style composition paper), Gmail, teacher evaluations, oral presentation evaluation sheet, computer and projector, Jim Breen's online dictionary11 There were 27 unique objects in my observations. I did not take into account personal items that the students brought to the class and used for their Japanese study, for instance: cell phones with online dictionaries, laptops, and notebooks. In addition to taking notes on what the literacy objects were, I also noted how the teachers and students used the objects. Because of the versatility and wide usage of the textbook in both classrooms, my first analysis will focus on a discussion of the textbook and its usage in the classrooms.
The role of the textbook and whiteboard in the classroom genre ecology
11 Jim Breen’s WWWJDIC. Retrieved from http://nihongo.monash.edu/cgi-bin/wwwjdic?1C.
179 The Genki textbook was the object with the widest variety of use, with 24 different ways the textbook was used by itself. In order to analyze my data in a way relevant to composition studies, I use Spinuzzi’s (2013, chapter 7, p. 3) areas of focus for meso-level observations on
“information resources” and “relationships among information resource” as a starting point. I have added the category “verbal annotating” and “verbalizing” to Spinuzzi’s list to expand
Spinuzzi’s categories to include more categories of analysis in the mode of verbal speech, which was a prevalent mode throughout both classrooms.
Table 5.4 Teacher and Student use of the Textbook as an “information resource” (Spinuzzi, 2013, p. 3)
Transfer is “using one resource as source for filling in another” (Spinuzzi, 2013, p. 3). This category refers to the transfer of information from a source to an application of the information from the source in the classroom. Differs from “transfer” as in knowledge used in one course transferred to another area of life or a different course. 1) students study by looking at the textbook before class (information in textbook used to fill in answers on quiz) 2) students use textbook glossary for word meanings (using knowledge of English word to find Japanese word) 3) teacher reads silently while students are taking test (teacher frames her knowledge of the Japanese language with how the textbook presents the grammar point)
Modeling is “using one resource as a model for another” (Spinuzzi, 2013, p. 3) 1) teacher asks students to answer questions, but they do not answer, so teacher goes to whiteboard to explain 2) teacher explains they can use grammar page as a reference to answer worksheet
Annotation is “writing or altering a resource” (Spinuzzi, 2013, p. 3) 1) teacher asks students to write answers from textbook activities in groups 2) teacher asks students to work in pairs on textbook exercise, but they mainly talk about study abroad and tips for studying kanji 3) teacher uses whiteboard to write grammar points from the textbook 4) student asks teacher to write answers from homework on board and explain
Verbalization is changing the mode of the resource from written to speech 1) teacher says word in textbook, then students repeat after her 2) teacher holds textbook and reads aloud in front of the class 3) students read along in textbook with teacher 4) teacher calls on students who have their hands raised to read aloud 5) students are called on to read dialogue in textbook aloud
Annotation and Verbalization
180 1) teacher asks students to read aloud answers they wrote from questions in textbook for homework 2) teacher asks students to read answers aloud from class work 3) teacher writes down answers of textbook questions on whiteboard that students read aloud to her
Verbal Annotation is altering or working with a resource with speech 1) teacher asks students to answer textbook exercises without preparation 2) teacher asks questions in English about pictures in textbook
Verbalization and Verbal Annotation 1) students read textbook in Japanese and translate it when called on 2) teacher asks students to read text in class, then read it aloud, then she asks questions about the meaning in English 3) teacher asks students to read and summarize grammar points when called on 4) students read a sentence, then the teacher translates it
Modeling and Verbal Annotation 1) teacher leads students through answering the exercises outloud
Transfer and Verbal Annotation 1) students asked to silently read questions, think it over, then get called on to answer the questions aloud
Transfer, Verbalization, Annotation, and Verbal Annotation 1) students look at new grammar point in textbook while teacher explains that grammar point using whiteboard The textbook in these two Intermediate Japanese classrooms is the most used and most widely used genre within the classroom artifact ecology. Through the observations, I found that the students and teacher used the textbook in 22 ways. Speaking both from the experience of being an Elementary and Intermediate Japanese student and from the observations, I find that the Genki
I and Genki II textbooks are foundational texts for learning the language in the classroom. Like the Rosetta stone that linguists used to understand Egyptian hieroglyphics, the textbooks used in the Elementary, Intermediate, and partially into the Advanced Intermediate classrooms function as the students’ main tool to speak and understand the Japanese language. With so many possibilities of registers, genres, vocabulary words, and grammatical structures, the Internet provides too many options for new students to the language. The new language student does not have enough context with the language to know if a translation is strange, archaic, extremely formal or informal, or otherwise inappropriate. Even something as seemingly simple as
181 translating a single word can be problematic for a new student, which is why the glossary and explanation of grammar points in the beginning textbooks are such an important, stabilizing genre in the language classrooms. A new student can rely on the vocabulary and grammar in the textbooks for being acceptable for regular communication in the Japanese language, whether among classmates, the teacher, or even for use in Japan.
Coordination of the whiteboard, textbook, worksheets, and quizzes for the study of
kanji
The whiteboard was the object that was used the most in conjunction with other items. It was used in 19 different ways in conjunction with six items: the kanji worksheets, handouts, the textbook, the workbook, quizzes, and exams. In a repeating script, the teachers used the whiteboard in conjunction with the kanji worksheets, the textbook, and quizzes. The kanji worksheets feature the same selected kanji from the textbook chapter. The teachers pass out the kanji worksheets and then write the kanji from the worksheet (the same kanji as in the textbook) on the whiteboard. Each kanji have a specific and regularized stroke order. Unlike handwriting the roman alphabet where there are multiple acceptable ways to write the letters, handwriting kanji is a highly regulated practice. The teachers used deictic gestures to point to radicals (parts that make up kanji characters) of the kanji that could be confused with different radicals of other kanji. The students fill out the kanji worksheets for homework. In a quiz separate from grammar and vocabulary quizzes, the students then take a kanji quiz. After the quiz is graded, the teacher uses the whiteboard and gestures again to call attention to frequently incorrect kanji, pointing to the places in the kanji that were proportionally distorted or drawn the wrong way in other ways.
The kanji, worksheet, textbook, quiz, and whiteboard script was used throughout all of the
Japanese courses that I took at this university. The actions are regularized and when we look at
182 the practice as a genre, we can see how its stable nature travels throughout the various levels of
Japanese classrooms and acts as part of the classroom ecologies by the teachers and students to teach and learn kanji.
Textbook as a minimizer of disruption
When a learner begins to study a new language, every element of the language is what
Engestrom et. al call a “disturbance” (p. 374). Every part of the new language system is a roadblock, or a knot to work out (Engestrom, Engestrom, and Vahaao): from the phonemes, to the writing system, the vocabulary, the grammar, and the activity systems in which all of these parts of language operate. To an English native speaker first encountering the Japanese language, all of these elements of the Japanese language present a roadblock. The manner in which the
Japanese students attempt to classify and internalize the new language can be likened to the way that the entomologists and architects work in Hall, Stevens, and Torralba’s (2002) study. The authors find that entomologists and architects similarly look to “stabilize a complex network of transitions” with their work, whether that is expanding or reducing categories to understand classifications of insects or to use categories of buildings to meet local building code requirements (p. 180). The Genki textbook provides a durable and stabilizing classification system for the instructors to build a classroom ecology. The textbook presents a stable way of breaking down the language learner’s initial inability to decode the new language.
Moving from the textbook ecology to real language use
Studies on workplaces (Spinuzzi, 2008; Hall, Stevens, and Torralba, 2002; Engestrom et. al, 1997) show how genres are used to provide the “regularity and stability” necessary to help workers solve complex problems. In the Intermediate classrooms, I could find no examples in which the genres of the classroom were used to overcome complex problems, or what Engestrom
183 et. al (1997) call “disturbances, ruptures” or “expansive transitions” inside the classroom (p.
347). Engestrom et. al explain that these disruptions in the activity system are often places where proximal development occurs (p. 347). Perhaps, then, a question that Japanese instructors can ask themselves is how they can increase the opportunities that students can have in the classroom for unexpected problems to occur outside of the typical classroom script. When I followed the four participants out of the classroom, I saw many occurrences of “expansive transitions,” in which information and training from the classroom were put to use in demanding translation and communicative tasks.
Within the ecology of the classroom that is guided so heavily by the textbook, however, we can also see how the textbook works as a way of “deskilling,” which Spinuzzi describes as the process of breaking down “tasks” into “easily learnable and repeatable components” leaving decisions to be made only by management and making automation “prevalent” (p. 136). The heavy usage of the textbook, and the textbook ecology, answer the problem that new language learners face, which is the reality that every piece of the language is a roadblock to understanding. However, the routinized stability of the textbook also creates problems. The only opportunities for a “disturbance” or “rupture” occur when a student misses a question on a test or quiz, but because all of these actions fit so closely with the script of what happens within a classroom, the “disturbances” and “ruptures” are minimized.
The required tutoring sessions, which are more accurately like required speaking practice with the various Japanese instructors, offer students the opportunity to communicate outside of the textbook ecology of the classroom. In a conversation with a teacher-tutor in the Japanese program familiar with the coursework for each class, the teacher-tutor may be well aware of the grammar points and vocabulary that the students will know and may only use grammar and
184 vocabulary that the students are familiar with. However, the way that the teacher-tutor speaks— for instance, the speed and the pronunciation—may differ from that of the teacher’s pronunciation that the students are used to. The students are exposed to a variety of Japanese speakers’ voices through the Genki audio CDs, but the voice actors in the CD are speaking slowly and very clearly because the CDs are designed for beginning students’ skills. In addition, the Genki CD is not used in a way that mirrors genuine speech in a communication. The CD is part of the textbook ecology, which consists of filling in workbook answers and answering the teachers’ questions about the recording. The conversations in the tutoring sessions do not follow the script of the textbook ecology. Instead, the tutor-teacher in the session often asks the students questions (in Japanese) to find a topic that they can discuss in Japanese, much like a regular conversation. Disturbances and ruptures can often be seen in the conversation sessions. For instance, the tutor may begin speaking in Japanese and the student stares at the teacher without responding. The tutor may rephrase the Japanese in multiple ways with no response from the student. The rupture can be resolved through the student or the tutor’s use of English, leaving the communication breakdown in Japanese unresolved.
The dissonance between the language use in the classroom ecology and in the tutoring session is another problem that the stabilized textbook ecology can create. Students can become comfortable with the use of the textbook, taking quizzes, and doing in-class activities, but when confronted with a genuine speaking opportunity, such as in the required tutoring sessions, at the
Japanese Coffee Hour, or during a study abroad opportunity, the differences between the classroom and the real communication experience are extreme. With a quiz, there are a limited number of vocabulary and grammar points that will be expected of the student. Even though the
Japanese teachers expect students to be able to understand and use grammar points and
185 vocabulary words from the first lessons in the textbook to the most recent ones, all of the vocabulary and grammar points are still contained within a regularized set of knowledge that the students can find within the Genki textbooks. In fact, many of the students become proficient at finding the relevant information in the Genki textbooks, even if the grammar point has not been discussed within that semester. However, the communication breakdowns that occur outside of the textbook ecology—for instance, in the tutoring sessions—are likely to happen, and the textbook oftentimes does not have an answer to questions regarding the understanding of a living usage of Japanese.
One communication breakdown possibility is that the student does not understand what their conversation partner is saying. When encountering a new word in a new language, it is often hard for learners to distinguish where one word ends and the other begins, and it is also hard to transcribe the speech into writing, if the student wanted to use online tools to translate the unknown input in the conversation. Inside of the textbook ecology, the students are often working only with written language, and they can quickly look up the word that they do not know. Another possibility is that the students understand the input from the conversation partner, but they are not able to answer because the language they are trying to create is not part of the textbook ecology that they have become familiar with. When working outside of the textbook ecology of the classroom, communication breakdowns with Japanese language conversation partners may be embarrassing, stressful, and unlike anything that the students have felt before.
This discussion is not to say that the textbook ecologies are inefficient or should be left behind. In fact, the genre ecologies view of the textbook-powered classroom points to the heavy lifting that the textbook ecology does for the students. Perhaps then, language teachers can recognize the textbook ecology for what it is and ask themselves how they could incorporate
186 more disruptions, roadblocks, and knots to work out within the daily classroom script. In addition, perhaps the teachers could facilitate additional tools within the textbook ecology that could give students a preview of speaking, writing, and being in different ecologies of Japanese literacy.
Out-of-Classroom Literacy Portraits as Transidiomatic Practice
I chose to highlight the portraits in this section of the chapter because it directly answers my research question “What are the literacy practices of members of the Japanese/English learning community at this university?” These literacy portraits attempt to show a range of practices that language students engage in outside of the classroom. I divide each snapshot by participant. The literacy portraits highlight a variety of “transidiomatic” practices (Jacquemet,
2005). Jacquemet (2005) describes, “Through transidiomatic practices, diasporic and local groups alike recombine their identities by maintaining simultaneous presence in a multiplicity of sites and by participating in elective networks spread over transnational territories” (p. 266). The literacy portraits in this section illustrate the wide range of ways that the Japanese language students use their own agency to adopt “flows” voluntarily for purposes of entertainment or academic achievements. Specifically, this section aims to answer Jacquement’s (2005) call to
“examine communicative practices based on disorderly recombinations and language mixings occurring simultaneously in local and distant environments. In other words, it is time to conceptualize a linguistics of xenoglossic becoming, transidiomatic mixing, and communicative recombination” (p. 274). The literacy portraits demonstrate instances where English L1/Japanese
L2 encounter the Japanese language, how they read and understand the language, and what results from their interaction with the language. The participants in this section are the least
187 familiar with their second language, but as we will see, they are still able to understand the language, each with their own multilingual method of working across Japanese and English.
Michael: “...your whole understanding is thrown out of whack. Things you thought you
knew, you don’t know.”
In the first portrait, Michael adopts many of the same literacy practices that were present in the Intermediate classroom observations. Without using the term “textbook ecology,” he very astutely describes the language classroom environment at the university and discusses how using only the textbook could lead to various problems. Michael supplements the standard textbook ecology with Japanese media and extra visits to the tutoring hours. Each Japanese class requires that students visit the tutoring hours, which offers an opportunity to speak with Japanese speakers for 30 minutes, three times per semester. He says that he visits the tutoring three times per week, with two teachers, and with another teacher as many times as he can, totaling more than six visits per week. Michael has found one way to solve the problem of balancing the textbook with real world speaking. Michael describes another way to restore balance to the textbook-heavy learning of the classroom. He suggests:
You just listen and watch a TV show, and you see how they use certain things, versus
how you use it, and your whole understanding is thrown out of whack. Things you
thought you knew, you don’t know...Use the textbook to get a general idea, and then use
natural resources to truly understand how to use it.
As I described in the observation of the Intermediate classroom, the textbook does a lot of work to make a completely unfamiliar language digestible. However, the textbook is limited in the number of phrases, words, and usage that it presents. The number of ways that a language is used would not fit in the pages of the textbook.
188 One learning problem that Michael addresses is not knowing the nuanced differences of singular grammatical points in English that have multiple expressions in Japanese. For instance, he describes the grammar points youni, mitai, and rashii as being all translated as “like” in
English. Other problems that he faces and tries to overcome when using the textbook is sounding
“stiff,” adapting to regional dialects, and expanding the number of Japanese registers he can use and understand, including conversational, academic, textbook, and keigo (honorific use of
Japanese).
Michael explains that when he has chosen an inappropriate, but close, grammatical structures to express himself in Japanese, his teachers have generally understood what he was trying to say, but tell him that his expression does not sound natural. He explains, “The meaning would get across, but unless I know these details and figure out and just keep practicing how to use them right, you sound off.” Teachers have corrected him through his discussion posts,
PowerPoint Presentations, and conversations. Michael, laptop in front of him, accessed a
PowerPoint Presentation in which he incorrectly used a grammatical structure. Unlike the
Intermediate Japanese classrooms, the advanced Japanese classes often require the students create PowerPoint Presentations and present them to the class. Akari, a teacher of advanced
Japanese courses (see Chapter 3 for her own writing process), requires students to email her the
PowerPoints they will use before they present. She then makes detailed comments about mistakes the students make while speaking or in the writing on the slides. Akari knows that her comments may be harsher than any other comments that the Japanese students receive, so she explains the thought process behind her comments and asks at the beginning of the semester who would like these kinds of comments. In the class that I took with Akari, all the students opted in to the heavy comments during the presentations. With the use of the technology of the
189 PowerPoint and the comments that Akari left on the slides, Michael was able to revisit a mistake in his language use and appropriate it as a zone of proximal development.
Michael also pointed to some of the differences between the classrooms at this university and the Japanese language classrooms in his study abroad program in Japan. While the kinds of tools were very similar—the teacher used the textbook, handouts, and the whiteboard extensively—the language used in the Intermediate classroom and the beginning Japanese course in Japan were different. Michael explains:
At [the university in Tokyo], they’re taught all in Japanese from day one, so we knew
nothing, but we were still expected to try to speak Japanese...our teachers...most of them
couldn't speak English. So when you first got there, they were trying to do a simple
explanation in Japanese, they’d give you a book, they’d write examples on the board,
they would supplement English in there to try to help you, but for the most part,
everything from the words to the grammar points, the explanations were conducted in
Japanese, and your books would have English in them. You were expected to read and
understand and come to class and try to use what you learned.
While the guidelines for the language classes at this university (in Northeast Ohio) suggest that courses be taught in the target language, the reality is that because the language teachers and the students are all very fluent in English, English is often used to teach the grammatical features of the foreign language, especially in the beginning courses.
Like Akari and Suzu (in Chapters 3 and 4, respectively), Michael focuses on wanting to sound natural. This is the third participant in this dissertation who has stated their goal is to achieve a “native-like” use of the target language. I can relate to Michael’s position as a native speaker of English who desires to make his Japanese error free and native-like. This also helps
190 me to see Akari and Suzu’s desire to speak English without errors as a desire that is not formed because of discrimination they have faced as marginalized speakers of English. I remember the look on teachers’ faces when the grammar I used conveyed the main idea but did not sound like something a commanding speaker of Japanese would say. Like Michael, I did not want to make the same mistake again either. Michael’s point of view on the precise usage of similar grammar points allowed me to see incorrect usage not as a symptom of cultural bias or racism, but as a rupture in learning that could be used for learning. Michael made a mistake and sees an opportunity to learn from it. As a language researcher, I feel more comfortable discussing the mistakes of an English L1 in the Japanese language because I’ve been in that position before. I know that I want to use the most natural Japanese, and I understand that Michael feels this way too. Because Michael feels the same way as Akari and Suzu who want to achieve native-like
English speaking and writing, we can begin to understand the language dynamics and social consequences of errors and mistakes in a Japanese and English language learning community.
Michael describes the difference between being a learner of the Japanese language and a native Japanese speaker in the Japanese job market: “Realistically, it’s difficult. You’re competing against people who have been doing it their whole life. That's the difference between them and you.” Michael explains that another asset that Japanese companies require of their non- native speakers is to pass either the N1 or the N2 levels of the Japanese-Language Proficiency
Test (JLPT). Unlike the TOEFL, which is usually only used for non-native English speakers to prove English proficiency for university entrance, the JLPT is an important test for non-native speakers who want to work with Japanese companies. Unlike Suzu who used the TOEFL materials to study English without the intent of retaking the test, Michael explains that the placement on the JLPT is used by employers in Japan to assess the level of Japanese of non-
191 native speakers, and the score itself can help a worker find employment in a company, or disqualify an applicant who did not take, or failed the test.
Figure 5.1. Michael’s notes detailing when and how to use the grammar point ない(nai, negative).
192
193 Figure 5.2. The website Japanese.stackexchange.com on a smartphone detailing when to use the grammar point 〜ば (-ba).
Figure 5.3. Michael’s notes about details of when and how to use Japanese conditionals.
194
Figure 5.4. Textbook that Michael uses outside of the classroom. Michael’s out-of-classroom practices are similar to the in-class practices that I observed in the Intermediate classroom. He showed me various textbooks that he used and described how the various grammar points taught in the shared curriculum of Japanese students Genki I, Genki
II, and Tobira textbooks are actually much more nuanced and include more rules than are highlighted by the textbooks and highlighted by the teachers.
195 The artifacts that Michael showed me include: notes that he took transcribing information from a website and textbook, a different textbook than is used in the classrooms, and the webpage Japanese.stackexchange.com. Michael creates his own ecology of genres that is similar to the ecologies of the classroom. For instance, in a way that is similar to the teacher using the whiteboard to transcribe notes from the textbook, Michael transcribes information from the webpage in a way that is similar to how he would take notes in class. Michael uses the tools in his ecology as a “measuring stick” against the classroom textbook ecology. Using the tool ecology that he assembled on his own terms, he finds that the sources from the classroom are lacking in rigor and accuracy.
Olivia: Outsiders are lauded for even a modest attempt at learning Japanese.
However, since so many countries speak Spanish, there isn’t a clear distinction of
insider/outsider, therefore everyone is held to a higher standard.
Olivia’s literacy portrait demonstrates the process of understanding Japanese for the purpose of translation without being an experienced user of Japanese. Olivia’s process for translation includes a translingual technique that code meshes English and Japanese for the purpose of understanding and learning the language. Her portrait is also interesting because she is able to bring in a third perspective as a second-language learner of Spanish.
Olivia is majoring in Spanish translation, and she wants to be able to work with both
Japanese and Spanish. She shared a graded Spanish essay, which we discussed in comparison with the essays we have both written in Japanese. We noticed that it was a lot more “marked up” than a Japanese essay would be. It is not that she made more mistakes in Spanish. I posed the idea that Japanese was much more foreign than Spanish, so the teachers are more lenient on errors in essays. Olivia gave me her theory on it. Japan is a country where there are insiders
196 (Japanese DNA) and outsiders. Outsiders are lauded for even a modest attempt at learning
Japanese. However, since there are many countries where people speak Spanish as a dominant or official language, there is not a clear distinction of insider/outsider, therefore everyone is held to a higher standard. Olivia said that this is just a theory, and she knows it may not be an entirely accurate explanation, but just what she feels. Overall, because Spanish is more spread around the world, (and because the insider/outsider divisions are not so clear with Spanish speakers),
Spanish L2 are held to a higher standard of language performance.
Figure 5.5. Olivia’s graded Spanish essay.
197
Figure 5.6. Online Japanese to English translation test.
198
Figure 5.7. The notes that Olivia wrote while doing the online Japanese to English translation test.
199
Figure 5.8. Olivia’s workspace while taking the online Japanese to English translation test. Another literacy practice that Olivia shared with me is taking a Japanese translation test that would qualify her to start receiving Japanese translation work online. Olivia noticed that the paper that she used to work through the translation test looked very similar to the work that she does when reading and translating Japanese readings from her advanced classes. Her notes include mixes of Japanese and English. She uses Japanese when she knows words and translates the unknown Japanese words into English. For instance, her notes say: “equipment を持つ soldier なら all through Europe にいた。” The mixed language use in Olivia’s notes is different than that of Akari’s mixed language use in Chapter 3. Akari used mixed language use in her composing process with complete ideas in the alternating languages, and she fully commanded both of the languages she wrote in. For instance, Akari used Japanese phrases in her document to mark ideas and locations to come back to and expand on in English. The difference between the mixed language use between Olivia and Akari shows the difference in fluency between the two language users. Olivia’s mixed language is used for understanding and development in the
200 language. She uses Japanese for words that she knows and translates the unknown Japanese words into English, leaving intact the Japanese wording and grammar. Akari uses Japanese not because she’s having trouble understanding the English but because she was working originally from a Japanese text and her writing process includes shuttling between the two languages for various parts of her writing process.
Figure 5.9. Olivia’s manga, novel, and online manga.
After the final exam of the Voices of Japan class that Olivia and I took together, she walked me through many of her favorite manga (digital and print and Japanese and English), cell phone apps
(games and translators), and Japanese-language novels. Olivia says she tries to purchase both the
English and Japanese version of the same manga so that she can read in English, and then read in
Japanese, and without having to look up specific words in the dictionary, she can get a general understanding of the Japanese version.
201 As she showed the manga to me, it was evident that she was proud of her collection. As I discussed earlier in the chapter, sometimes the act of obtaining the Japanese version of a text takes a set of specific skills in its own right. The feeling of being surrounded by books that one plans to read is common in monolingual readers as well. The notion of a genre ecology is helpful to understand Olivia’s manga collection. In a similar way that the Intermediate Japanese classroom uses a variety of texts (the workbook, audio CD, textbook, handouts, and quizzes),
Olivia has curated a genre ecology based on her own interests and goals. In this way, we can see a personally curated genre ecology as a way to motivate learning as well as a way to perpetuate language learning.
Masamune: “Japanese Super Nintendo Box Art PWNS!”
Masamune’s curated genre ecology is an example that stretches the “normal” conceptions of texts the furthest compared to the other literacy portraits. This portrait specifically focuses on the literacy involved with playing games in both English and Japanese. Masamune’s writing practices, however, fall directly in-line with standard conceptions of literacy. Masamune is a writer, editor, and curator of a large volume of articles that he hosts on his Super Nintendo fan website. There is not enough space in this dissertation to discuss all of his articles at length.
However, I will focus on articles that touch on matters that are particularly relevant to this study: the adoption of Nintendo games in different geographical contexts and languages.
The genre ecology that Masamune shares with us consists of playing, comparing, and writing about the various versions of Super Nintendo/Famicom games. Teachers of foreign languages (or even teachers of monolingual reading classes) could ask students as an exercise to curate their own ideal ecology of genres. With the broad range of texts that are included within the broader conception of genre (including video games, comic books, music, discussion boards,
202 tests, etc.), students could create their own diverse genre ecology. After creating their ideal ecologies, teachers could prompt students to think about the reading, writing, and cultural knowledge necessary to fully participate in the genres that the students listed. Perhaps, the teachers could ask the students to write content that is adjacent to the genres that they chose for their ecologies in the way that Masamune does in this literacy portrait.
In the midst of collecting data for this dissertation, I noticed Masamune because he was
Figure 5.10. Masamune scanning Famicom game boxes and pamphlets. scanning Japanese versions of video game booklets in the library. The katakana caught my eye, and I asked if he would like to be included in this study. He is a master’s student in accounting, but he also was taking Elementary II classes. He self-studied Japanese in Philadelphia in high school for two years. He said that he knew of no Japanese classes anywhere around him that he could take. He bought some Japanese textbooks and started studying on his own.
203 He explained that has been playing the same Super NES that his parents bought him when he was a small boy. He is very good at playing hard games, new and old. He says that people think, “Oh, you are a very skilled person,” but he explains a lot of practice goes into anything, whether it is learning Japanese or playing video games. Masamune is not only interested in the US versions of the Super Nintendo games, but he also has a strong interest in the
Famicom, which is the Japanese version of the Super Nintendo. The systems are the same and can play the same games, but the shape of the cartridges is different. In order to play the
Famicom versions of the SNES games, Masamune explains that he opens up the cartridge, takes out the inside CPU, and inserts it into an SNES cartridge.
He said the games are not his only interest in Japanese; he became really interested in the culture, but he did admit that the SNES was his “gateway” to Japanese language and culture. He agreed with me that almost all Japanese language students played videos games from Japan or watched television shows from Japan. I mentioned one exception that I have found, which is students who are interested in Korean music and study Japanese because no Korean classes are available. He revealed that he was the president of the Korean culture club. He contacted university administrators about why Korean languages classes are not offered. They said because it is not a “critical language.” They did not give him a definition of “critical language.”
Masamune said that he was scanning the boxes to supplement his written reviews, which can be found on his expansive and collaborative website SNES HUB: A Site Where Fans Can
Unite!!. He also said that he sells translated pamphlets of Japanese games on Ebay. He said there is a market because no official translations exist. He uses Google Translate to help with the translation. The Japanese game pamphlets use furigana12on top of the kanji because the audience
12 Furigana are hiragana or katakana, which are syllabic writing systems.
204 of the game pamphlets includes Japanese children who are not expected to have fully learned the kanji writing system. He uses the furigana above the kanji to figure out what words are because he said he knows around only 80 kanji, but he realizes that he needs to know over 3,000 kanji to read normal Japanese writing.
Masamune is the head writer, editor, and moderator of the website SNES HUB: A Site
Where Fans Can Unite!!. He explains on the “Welcome Visitors” page of the website:
Welcome to SNES HUB, the premier Super Nintendo fansite for reviews and articles. My goal is to have an in-depth review of every Super Nintendo game ever made. In addition to that, I plan to have feature articles pertaining to the Super NES and a highly active Super Nintendo forum to go along with it. This is a community website, where the thoughts and ideas of the Super Nintendo fanbase can be heard and implemented. Members will be able to shape the website with suggestions. The look, vibe, feel, and content could be yours to decide. Anyone who is willing may write reviews, articles, and do videos for the website. Having a collective viewpoint of the Super Nintendo experience will make it an interesting place indeed. Register, become a member, and
make this place the best Super Nintendo fansite around!
Masamune has written over 50 reviews and articles on the website, beginning in 2012. The site receives a steady flow of articles and comments. At the time this was written, Masamune’s newest article “SNES Hub Top 200 Super Nintendo Games” was written three months ago. The review articles are supplemented not with Google stock images, but with scans that Masamune does himself (which was what Masamune was doing when I first saw him at the library). Articles and reviews range from 800—1600 words and, as he explains on the “submission” page:
Objective- Reviews must be objective. If you like a game, tell us why. If you don’t, tell us the reasons. Your points should be clear and concise. Imagine yourself a professional writer who is neutral. You’re drawing your critique from sound reasoning….reviewed here are rated on a 5 star system: 5 stars= Excellent, 4 stars=Good, 3 stars=Average, 2 stars= Below Average(barely worth playing), and 1 star= Horrible...first come, first serve. For any game, the first three people to submit a suitable review will have their reviews posted on the website. Citation style is up to the individual reviewer (APA, MLA, Chicago, etc.)
205 Masamune’s website offers a deeply extensive catalogue of SNES and Famicom games and also gives SNES players a place to meet online, read each other’s work, and discuss their opinions and share the progress of their SNES collections.
In one article titled, “Japanese Super Nintendo Box Art PWNS!” Masamune compares artwork from the Japanese, PAL, and US versions of the Famicom or SNES games and explains why the artwork was different in the various regions. Masamune explains:
Back then, publishers believed that in order to gain commercial success with a title, they
had to tailor the look of the box art to fit in with the market and country they were selling
it to. It’s an old fashioned approach to video game localization and a bizarre move to
have designers independently working with completely different goals. If anything, we
now know that the original Japanese designs retained the purest voice and the alternative
designs very rarely looked anywhere near as good, resulting in muddled and confusing
artwork. The following examples should illustrate this point.
In the article, Masamune compares the designs of fifteen separate titles. Masamune consistently comes to the findings that the Japanese designs “pwn” (slang for “own” and means “are better”) for various reasons that he describes within each example.
206
Figure 5.11. Screenshot (1 of 2) from Masamune’s website http://playingwithsuperpower.com/ In the comparison of the artwork for Super Ghouls ‘N Ghosts, Masamune says:
I love the design of the Japanese version. The artist has managed to illustrate each of the
in-game characters perfectly, reflecting the personality and fun to be had with playing the
game. The American and PAL versions however, have an entirely different design that
centers around a cold, faceless, predictable drawing of a knight. It’s not fun, paranormal,
creepy, exciting or particularly Capcom looking. I also don’t understand the need for that
horrid purple colour on the PAL version either.
207
Figure 5.12. Screenshot (1 of 2) from Masamune’s website http://playingwithsuperpower.com/. As I mentioned at the beginning of the portrait, Masamune is the only writer and editor in this study who writes seriously for his own purposes. In the review guidelines, Masamune creates and explains the standard for writing that he follows and expects other contributors to his website to follow. In the same way that academic journals have guidelines for the publication of book reviews, Masamune sets forth writing standards that he finds necessary for a good and
“objective” game review.
The texts (video games) that Masamune discusses are not traditional academic instances of reading, however his writing is consistent, of an archival nature, and aimed at a specific audience of gamers. Many of his articles work to explain variations between region-specific
208 versions of the same games, which requires understanding of different regions, the relationship between those regions, and the relationship of those regions to Nintendo.
CK: “it's just a good way to kind of get a good feel for dialogue in a sense.”
CK’s literacy portrait is an up-close investigation of multilingual reading during Japanese smartphone game play. In the recording, CK opened the application and walked me through how he reads the Japanese in the app, what he chooses to skip reading, and how the community of gamers affect his game play. CK described how he interacts with the Japanese language and his thoughts when he sees English words dispersed throughout the Japanese app. Through the recorded video, he points to and explains how he has learned to read things over time or gained more control of the menu not through greater command of the Japanese language but by becoming more familiar with the game through playing it. CK says that his brother, who does not study Japanese at all, plays the game as much as he does. The walkthrough of the game play answers directly the question: what are the literacy practices of this community? With the walkthrough description of the reading, we can see how CK is navigating an app with mixed language use.
Table 5.5 CK’s walkthrough of Idol Master, a Japanese cellphone game
209 “I try to read these but usually they flash on and off too fast. I get bits and pieces, especially when I start seeing the same ones over and over again. It depends on how fast the game has to load.”
Figure 5.13. Loading screen with manga panel.
210 CK explained that there are two other games by the same maker of this game that he is explaining. He says that he used the other games to help him navigate the menus. In one app, the menu was exclusively in kanji, so he had to “read” those. On this app and the other app, the menu was in katakana, which he describes as easy to read. He uses the menus from the Figure 5.14. Main menu screen. similar game apps to help him read menus in the other games. He says, “So it’s very easy to read the katakana and figure out what each section is, and from there, guessing or looking up tutorials on how to get through. But this one’s pretty easy. The first one’s always the home screen and then the rest are pretty much katakana, or, お仕事 (o shigoto, work) I can read...Komu is the communication and [has] most of the story events, bagu is the rhythm event. It mainly is a rhythm game, so that’s the main function you go to. お仕 事 is just jobs you can do. It's basically a quick way to spend your energy if you don’t have time to do other ones. So it’s really convenient during the semester when I can’t play a lot, but I want to keep up.”
211 “The most, I would say, where people want to go in the game is the ‘gotcha’ function, which is to get characters...it’s all random, it’s a ‘gotcha,’ and the percentage rates are really low except for certain parts in the game where they make them higher, and that’s when I try to do them. Because it’s more guaranteed to get an SSR super card. My luck’s been pretty good.” Figure 5.15 Gotcha function.
“A lot of it is like in English, which is kind of weird. A lot of times with the series, a lot of stuff will be in English, which is helpful.”
Figure 5.16. Example of menu items that are in English.
“Sometimes it’s just pushing it and figuring out what they do. This one I couldn’t read, and I just figured it out by pushing it...a lot of this is trial and error.”
Figure 5.17. Unknown menu items.
212 “My brother plays this game, and he knows no Japanese whatsoever, so a lot of times, I'm translating for him. So that’s really helpful trying to figure it out on my own, but then he wants to know exactly what it is, and I actually have to go in and try to read it.”
Figure 5.18. Character menu with little Japanese.
CK reads the words underneath each button to himself softly aloud as he navigates to the “colleagues” screen.
Figure 5.19. CK navigates to the “colleagues” screen.
“What’s funny in this is they don’t say like yuujin or tomodachi for friends, they say douryou for colleagues.”
Figure 5.20. Colleagues screen.
213 “You can usually tell an English player because their name will be in English, usually have an English comment. Most of the time you can tell who’s an English speaker and who’s not.”
Figure 5.21. A player’s profile in Japanese.
“They just recently added this lounge function, which lets you make a group and talk to other players. I actually joined the [lounge] for the site I use for translations...They had started a group, and I just joined it, since they were people who were on [the app] and who know what's was going on and know the updates. It’s mostly English speakers, but there are one or Figure 5.22. Player’s lounge. two Japanese...so I joined last week, and it kind of gives updates on how everyone is doing.”
214 “I guess the specifics, what I actually try to use my Japanese for are these communications. As you level members up and get them fans, you get certain communications with them. I usually try to read only my favorite characters. I guess I should read more of them, but sometimes when you’re leveling up, you get five at a time, and you’re just like, Figure 5.23. The idol communication screen. skip, skip skip. But if it’s my favorite character, I try to read them.”
“You can also check when there are events. This is our group’s events. You can see based on the members of the group, it’s the top 20, I’m not even on this.”
Figure 5.24. Group events screen.
215 “But it’s just a good way to kind of get a good feel for dialogue in a sense. But a lot of times, they’re talking to an upper division, so they are using formal language...but depending on the character's personalities, there are one of two that use keigo all the time. So one girl constantly calls herself watakushi, so it’s always the keigo. Or, there are characters that are very Figure 5.25. Character dialogue. informal. They use like informal speech. Or there’s one or two who are more masculine, and they'll use male speech.”
“And I have it set so that it’s automatically going to be a conversation at a natural flow. If I’m actually trying to read it, I’ll do it at my own pace, but sometimes it's nice to try, if you can do it with their voices, you can listen to the conversation, so it’s kind of nice to figure out with listening without reading.”
Figure 5.26. Choices during character dialogue.
216 “Another time reading comes in handy is for these jobs. They will sometimes give you a challenge you have to answer like a rapid-fire question, but it’s good practice to have to read fast and have to decipher information and pick an answer.”
Figure 5.27. Rapid-fire question.
“Unfortunately, with this one, there’s kind of a cheat. (reading quietly in Japanese)...the cheat way is the percentage, who picked what percentage, so if you’re not sure it’s easy to guess, oh this many people picked it, so that must be it. There’s at least two out there that the one that’s most picked isn’t right.”
Figure 5.28. Rapid-fire question with cheat.
CK describes how the users on the subReddit page r/Theater Days post translations of the gameplay for the The Idol Master app depicted above. The users on this page also follow the
Japanese Twitter for the The Idol Master community and post the translations to the Tweets on the subReddit. CK describes how The Idol Master community is popular across media, including arcade games (Japan only), PlayStation games, smartphone applications, anime, and manga.
Convergence (Jenkins, 2006) describes that the phenomenon can happen on two fronts:
217 Convergence, as we can see, is both a top-down corporate-driven process and a bottom-
up consumer-driven process. Corporate convergence coexists with grassroots
convergence. Media companies are learning how to accelerate the flow of media content
across delivery channels to expand revenue opportunities, broaden markets, and reinforce
viewer commitments. Consumers are learning how to use these different media
technologies to bring the flow of media more fully under their control and to interact with
other consumers. p. 18
The top-down convergence of The Idol Master franchise can be seen with the anime, manga, console games, phone games, and arcade games. The bottom-up model can be seen with the fan- made subreddit, the posts on Japanese Twitter, and the friend group in the in-game lounge area.
CK, through hours of gameplay and time spent on the subReddit, notices that there are a lot of players outside of Japan and the United States. Because of the international appeal of the game, many fans have to find ways around the copyright laws that restrict access to much of The
Idol Master content to Japan only. CK explains:
The copyright on it is very complex. Because in a sense you have the characters that are copyrighted, and there’s a bunch of songs, and a lot of times some of them are written by famous singers or covers of famous singers’ songs. They’re all copyrighted, so that’s actually one of the bad things about being in America with this. When you’re trying to listen to the songs on YouTube and trying to watch them, they’ll be there one day, and then Bandai will take them down the next, it’s like “not available in your country copyright invasion in this country” a lot of regional blocks and stuff.
To gain access to download the phone application in the US, users have to create a Japanese iTunes account. CK explains, “Basically, you make a Japanese Apple account and then from there it's downloading it, searching and downloading it.” CK didn’t want to get into the details of the required Japanese address that he uses because he has seen his friends’ accounts become disabled because they are not “100% authentic Japanese” accounts. However, CK notes that
218 many international fans are able to get around the copyright legalities, and with online walkthroughs, it is not that difficult to find out how to download the app from outside of Japan.
Conclusion
This chapter has presented a large variety of data streams in attempts to draw a wider and more detailed picture of the way that Japanese “flows” (Jacquement, 2005, p. 260) into America, as opposed to the way that English “spreads” (Jacquemet, p. 260) through Japan. The participants in this chapter use their own agency to adopt “transidiomatic” (Jacquemet, p. 266) practices that they want to adopt for the purposes of entertainment or future employment in
Japan. This chapter, through the multiple literacy portraits, offers a response to what Blommaert
(2016) claims is a “poorly understood new level of globalized mobility” in the face of online contexts affecting “offline” life, which “combines space–time scope with speed and volume in ways previously unthinkable” (p. 248). As we saw throughout the portraits, there were no instances where Japanese-language learning was compulsory. The participants, even when they adopted the genres from the Japanese classroom were doing so because of their own desire to speak, write, and/or read Japanese.
Akari, Suzu, and Michael’s desires to write like a scholar, speak like an American, or enter the Japanese job market with the skills of native Japanese speakers can be contextualized in various ways. From the perspective of monolingualism, the variety of Japanese on the JLPT
(standard Tokyo dialect) and the TOEFL (standard American English) supposes that there is one singular and correct version of Japanese and English. From the perspective of multilingualism, we can see the varieties of English and Japanese that the tests presuppose are part of a linguistic repertoire that can lead the users of those varieties of Japanese or English to more economically prosperous career opportunities and greater mobility.
219 From a translingual perspective, we can see the JLPT and TOEFL as harmful to language users because of their presentation of language as static, unmoveable, and strictly bounded. The idea of a singular correct language is itself a myth built on a set of hierarchical power relations.
However, when considering the economic advantages that become available to commanding speakers of the set of language practices that represent standard American English and Tokyo dialect, we can see that the translingual perspective is at odds with economies that operate on monolingual assumptions.
Akari, Suzu, and Michael are aware of the multiple varieties of English and Japanese and want to harness all of the opportunities that the standard versions of English and Japanese afford them. However, the multilingual and monolingual perspectives are at odds with the actual practice of the participants in this study who use English and Japanese in fluid ways to achieve communication across both languages.
The findings in this chapter suggest a pragmatic approach to multi and translingual communication. There are situations when it is advantageous to work inside strictly bounded notions of language (language placement tests), situations where it is advantageous to switch back and forth between codes (Chapter 4, Suzu’s speech with Philip and me), and situations where language boundaries are more porous and fluid (Chapter 3, Akari’s writing process,
Chapter 5, CK’s mobile gaming). From the findings in this chapter, I encourage reading teachers
(whether of second or first langauges) to implore students to create their own ideal genre ecologies. As we saw with Masamune and his genre ecology of videogames, he is able to research, summarize, and review videogames on his website through multitudes of articles that he writes according to his own explicit writing standards and guidelines. If we encourage
220 students to compile their ultimate genre ecology, the students may find that they are diligent and motivated writers.
221
CHAPTER 6
CONCLUSIONS AND MOVING FORWARD WITH TRANSLINGUAL STUDIES
Introduction
I will begin the conclusion to this dissertation with a pair of narratives (one from a
Japanese L1 perspective and one from an English L1 perspective) that demonstrate the situated, contextual, fluid, and performative nature of communication across languages. The first story is about Suzu, the main participant in the case study in Chapter 4. Suzu and I spent a lot of time together with the same group of friends for a year. The friends in this group were brought together by the practice of Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, a martial art. Within the communications of this group, Suzu noticed that many of us used the “f-word” in a variety of friendly ways. After watching Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy, Suzu asked me why Ron Burgundy got fired when he said, “Go f—yourself, San Diego.”
Because within our friend circle, we had been using the f-word in ways that were not offensive to anyone, Suzu was confused why the same phrase could cost Ron Burgundy his broadcast job. To English native speakers, at first it might seem odd that Suzu does not see the difference in the contexts (public broadcasting versus intimate friendships) as being the reason for the unacceptable nature of the f-word. However, assuming the f-word is not discussed in classrooms or textbooks and because of the fact that there is no real equivalent to the f-word in
Japanese, how could Suzu understand the difference in the usage without asking? Gee (2015) describes a “traditional view of literacy” as “the ability to read and (sometimes) to write, an ability that resides in our heads” (p. 45). More specifically, to read is to “be able to decode
222 writing; to be able to write is to be able to code language into a visual form...traditionalists realize that the reader has to attribute a meaning to the words and sentences of a text. The reader, that is, has to have an interpretation of the text and its parts” (Gee, 2015, p. 45). Gee describes that in this traditional view of literacy, the processing of meaning takes place as a mental process in the heads of the readers and writers. However, as NLS researchers (Street 1984; Barton and
Hamilton, 2012; New London Group, 1996; Gee, 2015) have suggested, reading and writing are more than cognitive processes of a single person. Language is intertwined through social practices and is not an unchanging static entity. Suzu’s confusion over the f-word shows how language literacy is more than a word-for-word translation process and shows the extremely social nature of language use.
The second narrative describes another language roadblock, from an English L1 perspective, which my friend Philip and I encountered while looking for a video game arcade in
Doyama, Osaka, Japan. Doyoma is a shopping area with covered, outdoor pedestrian walkways connecting restaurants and various other shops. We were looking for the NAMCO arcade because we knew that arcades in Japan have brand new releases exclusive to Japan. We could not access directions with our smartphones because we did not pay for cellular data in Japan.
But, with GPS, we could see the NAMCO arcade appeared close on the map. For some reason, we kept getting turned around in the streets, and we decided to ask someone how to get to the
NAMCO arcade.
I looked around, frustrated, and then, became excited. “Does that sign say free information place? Maybe it’s for tourists?” The sign in fact did say “Free Information,” or muryou annaijo, 無料案内所. We approached the building, and from outside on the pedestrian street, we could see rooms with four nicely dressed women, curtains, and a man in a suit standing
223 outside on the street. Philip and I looked at each other. It did not look like it was for tourists, and there was no English anywhere, but Philip asked straight away, “ナメコはどこですか”
(NAMEKO ha doko desu ka?)” or “Where is the NAMCO?” The man explained, with gestures,
Japanese, and a little bit of English, how we could get to the NAMCO. The directions were helpful, and we found the arcade.
A few days later, Philip and I saw a similar sign with “Free Information Place” written in kanji, in Shinjuku. This time, there was English next to the sign “Free Information for Men.” For men? With an online search, I found that these “Free Information Places” are found in red light districts in Japan. The women, whose services are for sale, are not in the building, but you can purchase information about their location. The free information places are a kind of loophole that the Japanese government does not close to allow for legal forms of prostitution.
In this situation, I could read the kanji correctly. Practically speaking, there was free information there—the man outside the building directed us to the NAMCO. But clearly, there was more meaning to the “Free Information” than Philip and I were aware of. The literal interpretation of words is part of the reading process, but with the “Free Information Place,” there were additional social, business, and legal contexts that Philip and I were unaware of. Since the free information places are found in red light districts of large cities, perhaps even native
Japanese residing outside of large cities would be uncertain about the purpose of the business.
This narrative, like Suzu’s confusion over the level of offensiveness of the f-word, demonstrates that understanding across languages is not only about language but about social practices and the ways people become familiar with those practices. Gee (2015) argues, “...whatever literacy has to do with reading, reading must be spelled out, at the very least, as multiple abilities to ‘read’ texts of certain types in certain ways or to certain levels. There are obviously many abilities here,
224 each of them a type of literacy, one of a set of literacies” (p. 48). While I read the sign on the level of direct translation, Philip and I had not yet acquired the cultural literacy necessary to understand the signs in the Japanese red-light districts.
Gee (2015) explains that when New Literacy Studies scholars began to ask “What is literacy?”, they began to see how taking literacy practices out of context of the social situation in which they were performed is akin to playing chess after removing all of the white squares from the chess board (Gee, 2015, p. 48). Literacy, in addition to knowing the meaning of words and the correct way to put together grammar points in sentences, includes knowing how to use the language, how the language use will be received, and overall, how to be in the language. With the multilinguals in this dissertation, in addition to learning what it is to be a speaker of the new language, there is also an acquisition process for the ways to be a speaker of both languages. As I have shown throughout this dissertation, the process of acquiring the knowledge of how to be across the two languages of Japanese and English can look like a lot of different acts.
In this dissertation, I asked “What are the literacy practices of members of the
Japanese/English community at this university?” I found a non-exhaustive variety of answers to this question. I hope that this dissertation, which aims to add empirical data and analysis of translingual writing to the third generation of New Literacy Studies, has led readers to a more nuanced understanding of how the Japanese/English language learning community at this university works across both English and Japanese in fluid and dynamic ways across complicated literacy networks. In addition, I also hope that this dissertation leads to deeper conversations about cross-cultural and cross-language practices that are happening inside and outside of official university spaces.
225 Throughout Chapters 3, 4, and 5, I presented evidence of what various forms of translingual literacies look like. Through screen, audio, and video recordings, interviews, websites, and literacy walkthroughs, I have presented a wide range of multimodal and multilingual literacies. The originating research question that bridges all three research chapters is: what are the literacy practices of the Japanese/English learning community at this university?
As I began to search for answers to this question, I found that, especially as demonstrated through the literacy portraits in chapter 5, each individual’s mixed language practices are different and shine a different kind of light on the research question.
Opening the Black Box of Translation Tools in Students’ Writing Processes
Within the New Literacy Studies, literacy refers to the social practices surrounding reading and writing, as well as reading, writing, and speaking practices. Ways of reading, writing, speaking, and listening are always paired with feelings, interactions, and values, as well as ways of dress, thought, and belief (Gee, 2015). This is no exaggeration. Every instance of writing, reading, and speaking is connected to people who lead lives and have needs. Even a dictionary is connected to a cultural system of belief that values the written word. In the mid- sixteenth century, Samuel Johnson wrote a proposal to write a lexicon of the English language because he felt that the available collections of technical, foreign, and difficult words were lacking organization (Hitchings, 2005, p. 55). His project had arisen out of a cultural context where books and written words were becoming more valued. Hitchings (2005) explains that in the construction of the Dictionary of the English Language, “Johnson had fashioned the most important British cultural monument of the eighteenth century. Its two folio volumes tell us more about the society at this period--lustily commercial, cultivated but energetic, politically volatile
226 yet eager for consensus” (p. 1). Even a text as objective as a dictionary holds a history that is steeped in ways of being.
Suzu describes that it is common for parents to purchase their high school and college- age students, who are particularly interested in studying English, a piece of hardware called a denshi jisho (電子辞書), or an electronic dictionary. In the United States, we do not really have an equivalent. The denshi jisho is similar to a very small laptop, or a very large smartphone that opens and has a separate screen and keyboard. The denshi jisho is a common tool for reading and writing practices in English and Japanese for Japanese students learning English. Being fluent in
English, in addition to being a goal of the Japanese Ministry of Education, is one way for
Japanese speakers to increase their chances of economic success.
While the literacy practice of using a denshi jisho is originally a Japanese practice, some
Americans learning Japanese adopt the practice. For instance, Curtis, English L1/Japanese L2, uses a denshi jisho from Japan to study Japanese. Some English L1 students purchase a denshi jisho, even though the product is designed for Japanese L1. The interface is in the Japanese language, and the denshi jisho is designed to be used to translate from Japanese to English. There are countless websites targeting English speakers that describe what a denshi jisho is, how to use it as an English L1, and factors that go into the English L1 purchasing a denshi jisho. As literacy scholars, we can learn how and why foreign practices, like the use of the denshi jisho, are adopted and transformed to fit with the literacy practices of Americans. Through analysis of adoption of technologies from distant places, we can broaden our understandings of literacy, deepen our understandings of reading and writing, and also begin to understand more about cultural values, assumptions, and standards. When educators and language learners realize that even a dictionary is an object laced with cultural significance, we can begin to more fully
227 understand how literacy practices between cultures are affecting reading, writing, and being in another language and culture.
This dictionary discussion, along with Akari’s use of electronic dictionaries in her tool flows, shows how the cross-language language tools are not neutral. Dictionaries are cross- language tools that help shape learning, writing, and reading practices that follow a learner throughout their journeys of being a multilingual. There is no ability to learn a language abstractly, word-for-word, grammar point-for-grammar point without getting involved in the ways that the words and sentences are understood by other users of the language. There is no way to engage literacy without also engaging in some sort of social practice. From this, we can come to some conclusions about how we approach the education of multilingual writers.
Writing teachers, especially writing teachers with multilingual students, could inquire about their students’ histories of using dictionaries. In the ESL writing classes that I have been a part of, the teachers seem to have negative feelings towards the students using translation tools.
Google Translate especially gets bad attention from ESL teachers. However, Akari, clearly a high-performing multilingual writer, says that she uses Google Translate to get a grasp of the meaning of Spanish (a language she is not familiar with) reading assignments. If students are at the very beginning stages of working with a language, is the use of Google Translate acceptable?
What about as the student progresses with the language? If Google Translate is used to get a quick understanding of overall meaning, is that a bad thing? These are questions that teachers of multilingual students should ask and not presuppose answers to.
Without the teacher’s inquiry into the students’ uses of dictionaries, the practice will remain a black-box literacy practice. Canagarajah (2005) argues that his study of a Sri Lankan scholar’s writing practices could be used as “a model ESOL students may aspire to” (p. 53).
228 Akari’s reading and writing processes, as described in Chapter 3, can be another example for multilingual students to use as an exemplary cross-language writing process. In addition to being a model example, Akari’s writing process can also be the start to discussions about the workflows and tools that students use while writing.
Writing teachers can begin the discussion of tools by asking questions like: 1) What online and dictionaries and translation tools do you use while writing? Do you use tactile resources like books or only digital sources? 2) How do you use those tools? 3) Have your parents or teachers mentioned dictionaries or translation tools before? In what way did they discuss dictionaries? 4) What are your attitudes towards the translation tools that you use?
After asking these questions and discussing these questions with the students in the group, the teacher can ask herself in what ways are the answers similar or different based on the students’ native language. In this way, the teacher can begin to learn about the specific practices related to dictionaries and tools for each student.
If the teacher wants to continue to focus on writing tools, the teacher may ask the students to record their screen while they write their next essay. After the students record their screen, the teacher could ask the students to watch the screen recordings and make a list of all the tools that they used while writing. After students make their list of tools, the students might find what kind of tools other students use and how they use them. Students can learn and teach new ways of working across languages from other students. Multilingual writers can gain control of their own writing processes by sharing, discussing, and learning about their own writing process and the processes of their peers.
The beginning of this section described how tools, such as dictionaries, are not neutral and are imbued with feelings and past histories. If writing teachers of multilingual students
229 choose to leave the tools that students are using for translation as a black box, they are ignoring the holistic process of how multilingual students write papers.
Connecting Mobile Literacies
Blommaert and Horner (2017) describe that by viewing literacy in relation to its space, we can see how practices that move across languages are not in opposition to a monolingual standard. They say, “Recognition of the location of language in time as well as space allows us to see language difference not as deviation from a norm of sameness but as itself the norm of language practice, even in iterations” (p. 3). When I captured, transcribed, coded, and analyzed the literacy practices of this Japanese/English community, I did not see the practices that spanned across both languages as a deviation from standard monolingual usage. The screen recordings (in
Chapter 3), the recorded conversations (in Chapter 4), and the classroom observations and literacy portraits (in Chapter 5) all demonstrate normal language use across various spaces and time and language.
I believe that many of our monolingual and multilingual students are entrenched in monolingual ideologies, but they also understand from experience the fluid and changing nature of language. For instance, when we look at the conversations between Suzu, Philip, and I, we can see that Suzu simultaneously desires to achieve a perfect “American accent” and uses code mixing in friendly, casual gatherings with speakers who are capable in Japanese. With Akari’s screen recordings we can see that she writes in scholarly standard English, and she moves between English and Japanese in her Word Documents, texts, and tools, and decides to keep three Japanese words that resisted translation in her final product. However malleable and fluid language is from various perspectives, there does still exist a set of grammar and vocabulary that makes up people’s conception of what standard English is. When language educators argue that a
230 standard English does not exist or is a myth, they are in a sense denying that there is a specific language set that is powerful and that is called standard English. Standard English changes with time and location, but it does exist. I argue that while the translingual approach to language is grounded in the observable nature of language, the multilingual and monolingual views also stem from observable language use. As unfortunate, illogical, and primal as it is for listeners to make judgements on the variety of language that a speaker uses, humans make these judgements, which is why I propose a pragmatic language approach that acknowledges the realities of translingual, multilingual, and monolingual ideologies.
Our students have experienced a wide array of language situations. Language users broadly, but especially multilinguals, experience how language is fluid, dynamic, and dependent on the interlocutors. One way to help show students that the monolingual standards are actually not “normal” is by explicitly discussing literacy practices with speakers of multiple languages. In writing programs where ESL students and mainstream students are placed in different classes, both sections can benefit from having joint writing classes with their ESL or mainstream student counterparts. In writing programs where ESL and mainstream students are in the same writing classrooms, the following discussion can still be applied in a similar manner within the existing classroom.
In the Fall 2018 semester, with the help of two ESL teachers, we facilitated joint classroom meetings between Introduction to Technical Writing and College Writing II classes and College Writing II-ESL. The joint meetings that combined mainstream and ESL students gave ESL students an opportunity to meet, speak with, and read the writing of mainstream students. The mainstream students had the opportunity to meet, speak with, and read writing from international students. Both the mainstream and ESL students reported, in written
231 reflections, that they thought the mixed classroom sessions were a good idea and that they benefited from them.
It is important that the teacher explain why the classrooms are being combined for a number of class periods. From both the mainstream and ESL perspective, this could be contextualized before the first mixed classroom with readings that prompt the students to begin to think about multilingual reading and writing. From the mainstream student perspective, the teacher could ask the students what experiences they have with languages other than English.
The mixed classroom experience, from the perspective of the mainstream students, builds on their experiences with users of multiple languages, a majority of the world’s population. For the
ESL students, the mainstream students offer them opportunities to get one-on-one time with commanding speakers of English, a valuable resource for learners of a language.
For the first mixed classroom meeting, the students could be given an opportunity to get to meet the other students. I suggest that each class come up with a long list of interview questions that the students would like to know about the students in the other class. These questions could also be used for students to gather primary sources on a related essay topic. For instance, both the College Writing II and College Writing II-ESL classes wrote essays on the topic of “Expanding Views of Literacy.” The students interviewed each other and were encouraged to think of ways to incorporate the interviews in their essays. In my class, a few students focused on the literacy practices of becoming a sports fan. My students noticed that the international students were more interested in soccer than they were, but the ways that they became a fan of the team were very similar to the ways the international students became fans of teams: their fathers were fans of the team or their hometowns were close to the sports team.
232 After the initial joint meeting where the students meet each other, it is possible to develop any class period that is not lecture-heavy into a joint classroom activity. For instance, peer review with Google Docs was successful for both classrooms in my experience. I found it to be successful because of the positive written feedback from my mainstream students as well as positive feedback from the ESL instructor and her students. The mainstream students found the peer review with the ESL class interesting because they had an opportunity to gain a different perspective from someone who is not from the United States. The mainstream students also described problems that they had to work through with the ESL students as well. For instance, one student described that he was afraid to write a lot of comments on the ESL essays because he did not know if the student would understand his comments. He concluded that he should have trusted the ESL student more. Struggles, as discussed in Chapter 3 and 5, are opportunities for learning to occur. Some mainstream students reflected that the ESL students’ comments on their essays were not as helpful as their mainstream peers. However, as an instructor who holds peer review for every formal essay, I have found that it is a common reflection for students to find their peers’ comments unhelpful in general.
At the end of the semester, we also had a joint exam period where both classes presented their multimodal projects in a science-fair style manner. Because the students had opportunities throughout the semester to speak with one another and read their writing, I could see that the mainstream students had become used to speaking to ESL students. I noticed that the mainstream students were not afraid of being misunderstood and were not afraid to have normal conversations with the ESL students. ESL instructors know that it is beneficial for their ESL students to talk to and write with more native English speakers.
233 Mainstream composition instructors who are skeptical of the benefits of combined ESL and mainstream classes could consider the opportunities such combinations provide students. To begin with, many mainstream students have never visited a foreign country. In an ESL class, there are often times students from multiple countries and who come from a variety of backgrounds that are different and similar to the mainstream students. If an undergraduate student were given the choice to do a study abroad program that did not require any extra fees, did not require them to board a plane, and did not require them to change their life at all, I think that most students would be eager to take that opportunity. Obviously, a combined
ESL/mainstream class is not the same as studying abroad. However, the students have the opportunity to meet students from multiple countries, and for some students, meeting the people of the countries where they do the study abroad is a large part of the experience.
A common attitude I have noticed among teachers within Japanese language and ESL classrooms is that speech in the native language is discouraged. If the goal of the activity is to speak in the target language, then of course, if students are not following those directions, it makes sense for the teacher to push students to speak in the target language. However, when teachers discourage speech in native languages throughout all class periods, this can be a harmful practice to enforce. If students are asked to do complex literacy tasks, such as writing academic essays, planning and discussing the essay in a native language with other students can be part of the students’ writing process of shuttling across languages.
In an Introduction to Technical Writing course where group writing was a large component of the assignments, I had a group of students from Saudi Arabia who worked as a group. The students spoke to each other in Arabic and that was part of their group writing process. Writing teachers can benefit their ESL students by not casting negative judgements on
234 their use of native language with one another during class when they are working on essays. Of course, it becomes difficult because it is hard to know if the students are actually talking about their writing. But, as long as the students know they are supposed to be talking about their essays, the teacher should trust that the students are working on the essay.
Chiu (2019) suggests that in writing centers, multilingual students can come to the session in groups and rely on the strongest speaker of English to relay questions and suggestions from tutor to students. In fact, this is the strategy that the group of Saudi students employed. Two of the five members of the group oftentimes asked questions on behalf of the group. A few times, the two members of the group with the strongest English brought forth questions from their group members about their partners’ individual group work. If teachers encourage multilingual students with the strongest command of English to help their classmates with shared languages who are not as commanding with English, the teachers make it possible for more communication between students and teacher to happen.
Directions for Translingual studies
More than a few times at the CCCC’s 2019 translingual presentations and workshops, teachers who have included translingual work in their classrooms commented that their students are often resistant to the idea of producing non-standardized English writing. One teacher even presented an example of a group of students from Hong Kong who said their only language was
English. The language landscape in Hong Kong is complicated and includes a history of colonization that had a strong impact on how the people who live their use language and feel about their language use. Li (1999) describes the language landscape in Hong Kong as having “tremendous social prestige and symbolic predominance of English” (p. 70). Liu (2017) describes language use in Hong Kong in 2016: 94.6% Cantonese, 53.2% English, and 48.6%
235 Mandarin. She describes that until 1997, Hong Kong was a colony of the British Empire, and during that time, English was the only official language of Hong Kong. The language landscape in Hong Kong is further complicated by the mainland Chinese government influencing Hong
Kong schools teach Chinese in Mandarin, and many do.
What should the writing teacher interested in sharing translingual ideology with the students from Hong Kong, do? It is a complicated question. When we start to compare the language landscapes of the United States with those of other countries, it is clear that there are political and historical reasons for students to feel the way that they do about their language usage. I suggest that translingual studies, in addition to changing the focus from the products of multilingual writers to their processes, consider the situated context of their multilingual students. The current scholarship on translingualism does not explicitly suggest that writing teachers prescribe their students mixed language writing activities, but without a stronger focus on the dissection and analysis of naturally occurring uses of mixed language, teachers wanting to implement translingual lenses may find their classrooms resisting the unnatural application of mixed language. This resistance might look like monolingual students feeling uncomfortable with the combination of a language they are unfamiliar with and English. It could also look like resistance to combine casual registers of English with academic English. For multilingual students, this resistance could look like students wanting to practice standard academic English and not wanting to mesh other languages into the academic English they are working to standardize. The student resistance to code meshing is not unwarranted in any way. When we consider the political climates surrounding language, composition scholars and writing teachers wanting to engage with translingualism will encounter less resistance if they first discuss with
236 their students the situated and contextual nature of language before asking students to produce mixed-language documents.
Curry (2019) explains that translingualism is a “broad brush that may erase differences between the relationships of language appropriation.” She explains that “difference as sameness” is problematic for AAVE (and possibly other indigenous languages). The contact zones that are prevalent in the Japanese/English community that I studied are different in many regards to a standard English/AAVE contact zone. For instance, Olivia (Chapter 5) meshed both Japanese and English together as a way for her to bridge her understanding of Japanese with the help of
English. While in the context of the AAVE/standard English contact zone, code meshing is not the same. Curry argues that a standard English speaker’s use of AAVE is a form of “swag jacking,” a form of cultural appropriation of an oppressed language.
I suggest the field of translingual studies move in a direction that aims to study, analyze, discuss, and incorporate into classrooms instances of naturally occurring translanguaging. This dissertation offers a variety of instances of translanguaging literacy practices and also suggests avenues for more studies focusing on the literacy practices of multilingual participants. I suggest that translingual studies recognize that many of the themes throughout translingual scholarship are focused on products, specifically final products that appear visibly codemashed. Let us not forget the process movement that occurred within composition studies at large. Murray (1972) argues:
We work with language in action. We share with our students the continual excitement of
choosing one word instead of another, of searching for the one true word. This is not a
question of correct or incorrect, of etiquette or custom. This is a matter of far higher
importance. The writer...is making ethical decisions. (p. 4)
237 If translingual studies turn their gaze to focus on naturally occurring instances of translanguage usage, the teachers attempting to implement translingual lenses in the classroom may find less resistance from students. Ways for translingual scholars to focus on naturally occurring translanguage use may include: studying composing processes by using screen recordings, discussing translation tools explicitly with their students, and asking students to think about natural uses of code switching. Translingual studies can also look to adjacent and related fields of study to inform their discipline.
The special issue of Writing Across Disciplines titled “Rewriting Disciplines, Rewriting
Boundaries: Transdisciplinary and Translingual Challenges for WAC/WID” invites authors to investigate how “trans” is being taken up in related disciplines, from gender studies, linguistics,
English as a Second Language, and Composition. According to Donahue (2018), composition studies that are focused on “code” meshing, mixing, or switching would benefit by including studies from contact linguistics in their reading lists, building on the definitions and models provided by the existing field (p. 139). Translingualism is about translation, so composition studies would benefit from looking to translation studies to learn more about translingualism and the scholarship that has already been done across the existing thought on moving between languages.
However, if compositionists were to have considered work done in linguistics within the discussion of translingualism, Donahue (2018) claims that the conversation around translingualism would be different. He questions the use of composition’s use of “code,” as in
“codemeshing,” “codemixing,” and “code switching” and asks translingual, second language, and composition researchers to consider the work that linguists have already performed around the term “code”. Donahue says that in French linguistics “code” is viewed “as a very limiting
238 term that focuses on fixed structures rather than dynamic language practices; a concept much more appropriate to structuralist assumptions about language than many linguists had moved beyond by the 1970s or 80s” (p. 138). Donahue suggests that the discussion happening in composition studies around code mixing would benefit from the definitions and models provided in the study of contact linguistics.
I argue that if translingual studies focuses on how mixed language use occurs in natural situations, we can focus on language use as a dynamic and situated practice. However, if translingual studies focuses on products that seem exotic, we run the risk of reverting to structuralist methodologies that exclude the relationship of the speaker with their audience.
Composition teachers attempting to practice translingualism are doing a disservice to students when they dismiss the existence of the sets of grammar and vocabulary that people associate with the term “standard English.” I conclude that one possible answer to the resistance that teachers are feeling in their implementation of translingual lenses in their classroom is to ask students how they use their multiple languages in real life. I also argue that the field of translingual scholarship will benefit from more studies of naturally occurring cross-language use.
Of course, this demands that the scholars and teachers be comfortable working across multiple languages as well. If we are asking our multilingual and monolingual students to work across multiple languages, then it is only just for teachers to do the same.
239
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