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Abstract
In our contemporary society, digital texts circulate more readily and extend beyond page-bound formats to include interactive representations such as online newsprint with hyperlinks to audio and video files. This is to say that multimodality combined with digital technologies extends grammar to include voice, visual, and music, among other modes for articulating ideas beyond written language. In this paper, I discuss these multimodal designs in relation to a group of transcultural youth and their multilingual exchanges online. I examine patterns that reveal how their linguistic exchanges both drew from and extended beyond in-school literacy practices. Using discourse and multimodal analyses, I examine data from a 3-year ethnography that documents specific ways in which their multimodal design migrated across contexts and facilitated their social language development. In so doing, I describe their artistic approach to attending to language variety beyond code-switching through a process I identify as linguistic layering.
Acknowledgements
The author would like acknowledge the National Academy of Education and the Carnegie Foundation for their support in completing the ethnographic research of the Filipino British youth in London.
Notes
In so doing, meaning making of the data moved beyond Third Space (Bhabha Citation2004) literacy conceptualizations, whereby in-school practices and out-of-school practices overlap to create an intermediary space. Further, just as my work moves away from a causal relationship between orality and writing, ethnography of media moves away from causal effects of technology on the lives of people. Instead, there is an emphasis on the social practice of media, which attends to understanding how people manipulate technologies to attend to their own culture, economy, and ideology.
I would like to differentiate my literal use of the term ‘noisy and moving’ to describe the Pinoys’ textual products from studies in dyslexia, which also reference words as having animated qualities despite being page-bound. As such, this research does not reference dyslexic symptoms that impair visual perception of written text. Throughout this dissertation, I apply the term to conceptually allude to the Pinoys’ language and literacy practices as socially and culturally mediated (Scribner and Cole Citation1981; Street Citation1983; Vygotsky Citation1978).
It is significant to note that this article proposes layering to move beyond traditional structures of grammar in literacy classrooms to attend to its migratory features in digital and multimodal settings. For example, Kress (Citation2010a, Citation2010b, 240) aptly described how the grammar of multimodal meaning making has often been described using the standard conventions for reading and writing; however, such conventions do not fully capture the language of grammar in multimodal texts (). Still, I find it useful to make connections between the grammars of the Pinoys’ multimodal design and the grammars of the literacy classrooms; as such, bridging provides insights into how the Pinoys blend the often competing discourses of in-school and out-of-school settings. Further, by focusing on how multimodality extends traditional grammatical structures, this article contributes new ways of conceiving parts of speech as having hybrid and interactive design. In so doing, it presents a view of literacy as an active process that engages students to artistically shape and layer modes as a cultural and linguistic resources.
He argues that referencing speakers as merely being ‘native’ or ‘non-native’ fails to recognize the dynamic social processes involved in negotiating their language loyalty in multilingual settings.
Aziatik used elements of hip hop in ‘Pinoy Ako’. He said he used an ‘old school’ beat measure rather than the faster-paced British grime popular among his peers during the time this piece was developed. Further, Aziatik applied an internal and external rhyme pattern. His gestures tied metaphors together by pairing words to create double meanings.
The Pinoys did not always use my first name. They sometimes referred to me as ‘ate’ [sister] or ‘te’ [sis]. In the Philippine culture, elders – whether family, friends, or even acquaintances – are often called sister or brother as a sign of respect.
Specifically, Aziatik configured his gestures to layer his use of tonal semantics and poetics, which consist of ‘talk-singing, repetition and alliterative word play, intonational contouring, and rhyme …' (Alim 2006, pp. 84–86).
While the English translation fails to vividly display the connection in a way that his Tagalog lyrics makes visible, it is still useful to view the translation as a contextual background.