Beyond Linguistic Variations: Translingual Identities and Audience Awareness In Writing Contexts

Joan Jiyoung Hwang

Advisor: Courtney Adams Wooten, PhD, Department of English

Committee Members: Susan Lawrence, Douglas Eyman

Horizon Hall, #4225, https://gmu.zoom.us/j/96986940311
April 12, 2024, 10:00 AM to 12:00 PM

Abstract:

Despite language in translingual students’ writing being one of many constitutive elements, linguistic variations in their writing have received overwhelming scholarly attention, often overshadowing such fundamental aspects of writing as identity, agency, discourse, or rhetoric. This research is driven by the desire to shift the language-centric conversation of translingual students’ writing to a holistic, ecological approach that views their written communication as a collaborative, meaning-making process with their audiences. The paradigm shift pursued in this study entails two renewed conceptual affordances of translingualism: understanding translingual rhetorical behavior as kairotic inventions and theorizing translingual identity as a verb, inspired by the translingual author’s and three translingual student participants' narratives of their lived experiences of (re)constructing discursive identities across cultural and linguistic boundaries Centered on the actions and effects of translingual rhetorical behavior, the study places translingual students’ identities at the nexus of culture, language, and rhetoric and theorizes that translingual identity acts like a verb with four key dynamic characteristics: relationality, permeability, agentivity, and performativity. The following question guided the data collection and analysis of the research: How do translingual identities interact with students’ audience awareness in their writing?

Based on a case-study method, the research occurred in six stages, collecting three large sets of data from three undergraduate students with diverse cultural and linguistic backgrounds. The data includes eighteen individual interview transcripts, writing samples of various modalities in personal, professional, and academic contexts, and six Zoom-recorded Thinking Aloud Protocols. Through the grounded theory-based coding complemented by the author’s analytical memo writing, the study offers the theoretical and pedagogical significance of appreciating and understanding translingual students’ writing beyond linguistic variations. The findings suggest that translingual students’ interaction with audiences exhibits a dynamic spectrum of context-responsive relational to transactional audience awareness. Furthermore, by complicating the interconnectedness of translingual identities and audience awareness, the study constructs a model that theorizes the dynamic, idiosyncratic, and complex interplay of relationality, permeability, agentivity, and performativity in audience awareness across four categories: culturally and linguistically affiliated audiences, online community audiences, non-academic audiences in print-based forms, and audiences in classrooms. The model presents a nuanced understanding of how translingual students engage with their audiences in various contexts and provides compelling evidence for the importance of enriching students’ writing experience in classrooms, regardless of their language background, by leveraging the sociality of genres and visibilizing non-teacher audiences in their writing.