Translanguaging silence and humor: Registering, resisting, and reconstructing identities in an English‐medium classroom in the United States

Abstract

Abstract This article adopts a translanguaging and flows perspective to explore how a graduate course instructor constructs a “quiet student” identity through a historical speech event to explain academic concepts in an English‐medium‐instruction (EMI) classroom in the United States. Recent studies on translanguaging pedagogies in EMI classrooms have highlighted how multilingual, multimodal, and multisemiotic resources are employed through translanguaging practices to facilitate understanding. The present study contributes to this growing body of research by focusing on how student identities, constructed through silence and humor in a speech event, are used to explain academic concepts through translanguaging in sequential speech events. Data are drawn from a larger research project examining EMI and multilingualism at a US university. Classroom interaction recordings are analyzed using multimodal conversation analysis, triangulated with video‐stimulated recall interviews and ethnographic field notes, revealing that EMI instructors play a pivotal role in constructing student identities through translanguaging in the classroom, which can subsequently be utilized to enhance the explanation of academic concepts.

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