Exploring bilingual adolescents’ translanguaging strategies during online reading

ABSTRACT

Bilingual adolescents actively participate in literacy practices on the multilingual Internet. However, research has paid little attention to these readers’ use of their linguistic knowledge and skills as they choose and learn from multilingual resources on the Internet. With think-aloud protocols, this study examined how Korean-English bilingual middle school students accessed their two languages during online reading. The findings demonstrated that these adolescents strategically used their two languages to facilitate their actions for information searching and learning from online resources. Notably, their translanguaging strategies operated at a metacognitive level as a function of self-monitoring of their comprehension and language choice. Participants’ use of translanguaging appeared to depend on individuals’ decision-making and preference as each participant used translanguaging in different frequencies and patterns regardless of their reading proficiency in either language. Finally, this study provides pedagogical implications that developing bilingual learners’ access to their two languages during online reading can enhance their learning from multilingual texts.

KEYWORDS:

• Translanguaging
• online reading
• reading strategies
• think-aloud
• bilingual adolescents

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Kwangok Song

Kwangok Song is an Assistant Professor of Literacy in the Department of Curriculum and Teaching at the University of Kansas. Her research concerns immigrant students' bi-literacy practices.

Byeong-Young Cho

Byeong-Young Cho is an Associate Professor of Language, Literacy, and Culture in the Department of Instruction and Learning and a Research Scientist at Learning Research and Development Center (LRDC) at the University of Pittsburgh. His research focuses on adolescents’ reading and critical learning in multisource digital-text environments.