Understanding glocal learning spaces. An empirical study of languaging and transmigrant positions in the virtual classroom

Abstract

The use of digital tools like computers and tablets in institutional learning arenas give rise to forms of flexibility where time and space boundaries become diffuse. Online learning sites are understood as being crucial today, especially in large parts of the Global North, where anyone anywhere potentially can become a student and have access to educational opportunities.

This study focuses on the analysis of recorded sessions, part of an ‘Italian for (adult) beginners' online course. Our interests relate to accounting for how students negotiate different language varieties, including modalities, and how communication in virtual learning settings enables both flexible participation trajectories and identity positions in and across the boundaries of time and space.

The sociocultural and dialogical analyses here are framed in terms of fluidity of ‘glocal' positions and (trans)languaging that emerge in and across time and space in Technology Mediated Communication. Our findings suggest that online environments support meaning-making where it is possible to identify alternative ways of (co)constructing and mediating learning. Such hybridity as well as the performative character of learning and identity display have important implications for online glocal communities.

Keywords:

• language learning
• glocal communities
• online synchronous environments
• transmodality
• translanguaging
• higher education

Notes on contributors

Giulia Messina Dahlberg is a PhD candidate in Education as part of the Research School in Technology-Mediated Knowledge Processes, Dalarna University and Örebro University, Sweden. Her research interest is in the area of multilingualism and multimodality, collaborative learning and negotiation of meaning and technology-based language learning. Giulia Messina Dahlberg's research is a part of the CINLE (Studies of Everyday Communication and Identity Processes in Netbased Learning Environments) project, which deals with issues of languaging, or language use, in virtual multimodal environments as well as the making of identity and negotiation of meaning in these settings. She is the coordinator of the research group CCD, Communication, Culture and Diversity at Örebro University. CCD is a multidisciplinary and international research platform which focuses on issues of learning grounded in sociocultural and post-colonial perspectives.

Sangeeta Bagga-Gupta is full professor of education at the Center for Feminist Social Studies, Örebro University, Sweden. Her transdisciplinary research encompasses traditionally separate fields like literacies, mono-multilingualism, multimodality, learning and identities (gender, functional disabilities, ethnicity). Using multi-scale ethnography across time and space she studies everyday life, policy and sociohistorical dimensions of social practices both inside and outside institutional environments, primarily from anthropological and postcolonial approaches. She has published articles and chapters in different academic domains including Communication Studies, Deaf Studies, Educational Sciences over the past few decades. Her books include Literacies and Deaf Education (2004), Alternative Voices. (Re)searching Language, Culture and Diversity… (co-edited, 2013), Literacy-praktiker i och utanför skolan (co-edited, Swedish: Literacy-practices inside and outside school, 2013). She heads, since 2008, the Swedish Research Council-funded multidisciplinary National Research School LIMCUL (Literacies, Multilingualism and Cultural Practices in Present Day Society).

Notes

1. See Appendix for Transcription Key.

2. For instance some semantic units are coherent in many language varieties (e.g., ‘online' and ‘internet', lines 45, 47 in the introductory excerpt).

3. www.oru.se/english/research/CINLE.

4. Further to our discussion regarding the notion of translanguaging in section 1, we suggest that translanguaging rather than code-switching is empirically robust and attends to the fluidity between the language varieties in use. It also questions the dominant eurocentric language ideology of monolingual speech (see also Bailey 2007; Garcia 2009, 2010; Gumperz 1982). We have in our previous empirical work also introduced and explored the concept of chaining (compare code-switching) for similar reasons (see Bagga-Gupta 2002, 2012a, 2012b, forthcoming; Gynne and Bagga-Gupta 2013; Messina Dahlberg and Bagga-Gupta 2013a).

5. In general some students use Spanish suggesting that they are uncertain about particular word items (as illustrated in Excerpt 1b). Swedish, and sometimes English, are used in terms of a ‘neutral language', which the students also tend to fall back upon in order to fill in specific expressions. This strategy appears to create temporal spaces that allow students to keep the floor. This strategy is also used when students pose direct questions to one another (see Excerpt 1a, lines 19, 23, 28).

6. For instance, a European identity position i.e. passport or high fees constitute formal requirements for participating in Swedish university courses [from anywhere in the world, SIC].