Translanguaging in Everyday Textual Performances: Implications for Literacy and Pedagogy
Dr. LEE Tong King
Abstract
Translanguaging refers to the strategic and creative use of one’s available semiotic resources to achieve contingent communicative needs, often transgressing established boundaries between languages as well as between modalities of language. This seminar aims to seek out evidence of translanguaging in everyday textual practices, with a view to exploring the pervasiveness of translanguaging as a social semiotic phenomenon. It first traces the trajectory of the concept since its coinage in the 1990s and briefly reviews its applications in language education, sociolinguistics, and visual studies. It then draws on David Crystal’s understanding of the linguistic formations in text messaging to demonstrate how translanguaging is inherent in mundane communications. Using further authentic, including anecdotal, examples from Singapore, Hong Kong, and Japan, the talk elaborates on how translanguaging constitutes a mode of literacy in its own right. It proposes that by virtue of its aberrance and recalcitrance vis-à-vis the language institution, translanguaging provides an alternative pedagogical resource for understanding the dynamism and flux of language performances.
Speaker
Assistant Professor of Translation in the School of Chinese, University of Hong Kong
About the Speaker
Dr Lee Tong King is Assistant Professor of Translation in the School of Chinese, University of Hong Kong, and a NAATI-accredited Professional Translator. He is the author of Experimental Chinese Literature: Translation, Technology, Poetics (2015) and Translating the Multilingual City: Crosslingual Practices and Language Ideology (2013).
Date
10 April, 2017 (Monday)
Time
12:30 - 2:00pm
Location
Room MW408A-10A, Meng Wah Complex, HKU
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