Transcribing whole-body sense-making by non-dominant students in multilingual classrooms

ABSTRACT

Whole-body sense-making offers insights for the analysis of identity work in learning in multilingual classroom contexts. The concept has the potential to draw together two strands of classroom discourse scholarship, namely multilingual and multimodal discourse studies. The data presented in this paper constitutes a moment of whole-body sense-making in Science learning in a multilingual South African high school in which the key participant meshes language and identity positions to appropriate Science discourse. The paper tracks the transcription of this moment and the production of a comic strip as transvisual in order to provide a metamethodological discussion of transcription practices linked to a specific research study. Technical and epistemological concerns about translation of speech by speakers of non-dominant languages as well as multimodality in transcription of classroom discourse are explored from a decolonial perspective. The affordances and limitations of the comic strip in representing the agency and voice of non-dominant youth in whole-body sense-making are outlined.

KEYWORDS:

• Whole-body sense-making
• transcripts
• decoloniality
• identity
• multilingual classrooms

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to the anonymous reviewers and to colleagues at the Centre for Multilingualism and Diversities Research for insightful comments on earlier drafts of this paper.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1. All participant names are pseudonyms.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Research Foundation South Africa [118542].

Notes on contributors

Robyn Tyler

Robyn Tyler is a researcher at the Centre for Multilingualism and Diversities Research at the University of the Western Cape. Her research focuses on language across the curriculum in multilingual settings. Robyn is a member of the bua-lit language and literacy collective.