Transnational narratives of ecological socialisation: exploring multilingual international students’ sociospatial practices through interview conversations

ABSTRACT

This study explores multilingual international students’ narratives of mobility and socialisation through online discursive spaces of interview conversations. Drawing upon an ecological approach to transnational narratives, the researcher analyzed international students’ multiscalar interactions and transformations in sociospatial practices. The analyses provide ethnographic accounts of the participants’ translingual discourses, transcultural trajectories, and translocal community lives that involve transnational connections across temporal and spatial borders. The findings also suggest that interview conversations with peers promote international students’ dynamic narrations of their life experiences of multilingual mobility in continuously evolving ecological communities.

KEYWORDS:

• Language socialisation
• identity
• multilingual mobility
• peer interviews
• spatial practice
• transnational narratives

Acknowledgments

The author would like to thank Joanne You-Nong Dai for her assistance in data collection.

Disclosure statement

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

Data availability statement

Data available on request due to privacy/ethical restrictions

Additional information

Funding

This study is part of a larger research project funded by the Ministry of Science and Technology, Taiwan (107-2410-H-008-044).