Resemiotisation from page to stage: translanguaging and the trajectory of a musilingual youth’s poem

ABSTRACT

This article reports on part of an ethnographic research project undertaken over a period of 20 months in Leeds, UK, with a youth spoken word (YSW) poetry organisation. The research focused on the fluid practices in which the youth engage that span spoken, written, visual, gestural, digital, musical and spatial modes, and across times and places. Given its inherent fluidities, YSW is a particularly interesting practice for studying semiosis. Among other aspects, the research focused on the trajectories of poems written and performed by youth and the semiotic transformations they undergo across time and space. The article explores how resemiotisation sheds light on the complexities of the transformations that one particular poem undergoes as it travels. It focuses on a poem titled ‘To Him’, written and performed by a 17-year old poet. The main arguments put forward are that: (1) translanguaging is a more comprehensive term than others for describing how the poet engages her communicative repertoire; (2) resemiotisation is both a lens for conceptualising translanguaging, and an indispensable analytical process in the case of the data studied for understanding the complexities of the poet’s meaning-making practices. Looking beyond our own discipline and making use of musical annotation, we contend that focusing solely on spoken and written language would be insufficient to gauge the complexity of the meaning-making process undertaken by the young poet.

KEYWORDS:

• Plurilingualism
• musilingualism
• translanguaging
• spoken word poetry
• resemiotisation

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Emilee Moore is Serra Húnter Fellow (Assistant Professor) at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. She is interested in language practices in multilingual educational contexts from a perspective that integrates linguistic ethnography, interactional sociolinguistics, ethnomethodology and sociocultural learning theories. She is a member of the GREIP Research Centre at the UAB and co-convenor of the AILA Research Network on Creative Inquiry in Applied Linguistics.

Jessica Bradley is an ethnographer interested in the intersection of language, education and creative practice. She is Lecturer in Literacies in the School of Education, University of Sheffield, UK. She co-convenes the AILA Research Network on Creative Inquiry and Applied Linguistics.

ORCID

Emilee Moore https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0112-4251

Jessica Bradley https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4232-1983

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Agència de Gestió d’Ajuts Universitaris i de Recerca.