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ABSTRACT
This ethnographic case study investigates how a young rural Chinese EAL learner engages in a translanguaging process as she reads a digital and multilingual Cinderella picturebook in her home. It documents wide-ranging translanguaging relations dynamically formed among this learner, the researcher as a reading partner, and a myriad of nonhuman materials (modes, languages, tablet, software, time, space, etc.). Accordingly, the current research adopts a sociomaterial approach to examine language and literacy learning environments in terms of social and material dynamics. A sociomaterial perspective on translanguaging expands the researcher’s gaze from looking only at individual actions or social interactions in translanguaging practices to consider how nonhumans also constitute and affect these practices as active agents.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Positioned in a sociomaterial landscape, observant participation is understood as becoming, doing and learning with humans and nonhumans rather than a human-centric technique of collecting data. It foregrounds the ethnographers’ engagement in the research assemblage and entanglements in what they observe (Toohey, Citation2020). This is different from traditional ethnographic participant observation, which is rooted in representational paradigm as it is often used to represent human sociocultural experiences.
2 In this article, text enclosed in square brackets is my translation from Chinese to English.
3 I introduced myself to Qian and her family as a researcher who had no official affiliation with her school. Nevertheless, they insisted on calling me ‘teacher’ (in Chinese 老师) mainly out of respect for me. This might be related to the long tradition of Confucian values that teach people to show respect for intellectuals.