‘I would rather say fighting ㅋㅋ’: discursive analysis of Korean-English language exchange students’ text messages

ABSTRACT

This ethnographic case study has focused on language use in texting out of institutional contexts between voluntary language partners. Within the translanguaging and digital literacies framework, we explored how two pairs of Korean-English language partners practice translanguaging in texting in order to construct their multilingual identities. Their text messages were collected over one year and analyzed using discourse analysis to investigate their co-construction of multilingual repertoires in texting influenced by shared discourses, experiences, and interactional histories in digital spaces and in-person interactions. Our findings present that texting creates a translanguaging space where the learners collaboratively construct their linguistic and cultural repertoires and engage with the broader semiotic options and diverse social discourses. They adopted various strategies of translanguaging to negotiate culturally appropriate language use. This study urges an in-depth understanding of the complex interplay of language use, identities, and social interactions in digital spaces and a reconsideration of multilingual competence and metalinguistic knowledge among language learners in diverse contexts.

KEYWORDS:

• Language exchange
• translanguaging
• digital literacy
• Korean
• multilingual identities

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 All names used in this study are pseudonyms.

2 The Korean word 오빠 is used by a female to her older brother in a kinship relation. However, it is widely used in Korean culture by a female to an older male in a close social relationship.

3 Konglish, a combined word of Korean and English, refers to English loanwords that have been appropriated into Korean in ways that are not readily understandable to native English speakers without localized contextual understanding.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Hakyoon Lee

Hakyoon Lee (Ph.D., University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa) is an Assistant Professor of Korean in the Department of World Languages and Cultures at Georgia State University. Her research interests lie at the intersection of language and identity, bi/multilingualism, and immigrant education. She has recently been researching multilingual practices and identities in homes, schools, communities, and social media. Her work has appeared in such journals as Applied Linguistics, Applied Linguistics Review, The Korean Language in America, Narrative Inquiry, and Journal of Language, Identity, and Education.

Gyewon Jang

Gyewon Jang is a Ph.D. candidate at Georgia State University pursuing a degree in Teaching and Learning with a concentration in Language and Literacy Education. Her research interests include critical language education, interculturality, identities and ideologies of transnational and immigrant population, teacher education, and qualitative research methods.