Multiliteracies on Instant Messaging

in Negotiating Local, Translocal,

and Transnational Affiliations:
A Case of an Adolescent Immigrant
Wan Shun Eva Lam
Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois, USA

ABSTR ACT
Through an in-depth case study of the instant messaging practices of an adolescent girl who had migrated to the United
States from China, this qualitative investigation examines the development of multiliteracies in the context of transna-
tional migration and new media of communication. Data consisted of screen recordings of the youth’s digital practices,
interviews, and observations. Data analyses included qualitative coding procedures and orthographic analysis of the use
of multiple dialects and languages in the youth’s instant messaging exchanges. These exchanges illustrate the process of
social and semiotic design through which the youth developed simultaneous affiliations with her local Chinese immigrant
community, a translocal network of Asian American youth, and transnational relationships with her peers in China. The
construction of transnational networks represents the desire of the youth to develop the literate repertoire that would en-
able her to thrive in multiple linguistic communities across countries and mobilize resources within these communities.
This study contributes to new conceptual directions for understanding translocal forms of linguistic diversity mediated
by digital technologies and an expanded view of the literate repertoire and cultural resources of migrant youth. As such,
this study’s contributions are not limited to the domain of digital literacies but extend to issues of linguistic diversity and
adolescent literacy development in contexts of migration.

I n recent years, there has been an increasing amount of

research devoted to understanding how young people
are incorporating digital media into their everyday
lives and the kinds of literacy learning and socialization
(Lam, 2006; Suárez-Orozco & Qin-Hilliard, 2004). As
Jiménez (2003) suggested in regard to research of lit-
eracy learning among migrant students, not only is the
transnational character of literacy in these students’
that take place with the use of new media (e.g., Coiro, lives an underexplored area of research, but also such
Knobel, Lankshear, & Leu, 2008; Hagood, Leander, literacy is “increasingly shaped by the potential and the
Luke, Mackey, & Nixon, 2003; Ito et al., 2008; Sefton- continuously shifting realities created by newer forms of
Green, 2006). However, in the United States, the study technology, particularly those that extend our commu-
of literacy and socialization with new media has dealt nicative reach” (pp. 124–125).
relatively little with young people whose first language In this article, I present a case study derived from a
is not English or who have allegiances to multiple lin- larger qualitative comparative study of the transnational
guistic communities, despite their current demographic digital literacy practices of immigrant youth of Chinese
importance in the United States. Although digital media, descent. The central research questions in the larger in-
and the Internet in particular, has been conceived as a quiry are as follows: (a) How do migrant youth of Chinese
global technology that provides social and information origin use digital media to negotiate social relationships
linkages across geographical space, research has rarely with diverse linguistic and cultural communities across
examined the technoliteracy practices that young people countries? and (b) How does participation in multilin-
of migrant backgrounds use to develop and maintain so- gual and transgeographic online networks affect youths’
cial relationships and affiliations across countries. This literacy use and learning; in particular, how are diverse
is despite the fact that migrancy and new forms of media linguistic resources mobilized to develop social net-
and technologies are both indicative of larger patterns works across countries? This case study presents analy-
of globalization and transnationalization of our societies sis of the use of instant messaging (IM) by an adolescent

Reading Research Quarterly  •  44(4)  •  pp. 377–397  •  dx.doi.org/10.1598/RRQ.44.4.5  •  © 2009 International Reading Association 377
girl to develop simultaneous affiliations with her local within these communities. This study contributes to
Chinese immigrant community, a translocal network of new conceptual directions for understanding translocal
Asian American youth, and transnational relationships forms of linguistic diversity mediated by digital tech-
with her peers in China. The diverse social networks fa- nologies and an expanded view of the literate repertoire
cilitated through IM and other communicative contexts and cultural resources of migrant youth. As such, the
reflect the youth’s migratory history that involves main- contributions of this study are not limited to the do-
taining and developing personal ties across the United main of digital literacies but extend to issues of linguis-
States and China and also her participation in online tic diversity and literacy development in the context of
communities across the two countries. transnational migration.
As a major form of digital communication that has
become pervasive in the lives of young people in the
United States and many other countries, IM involves
private, synchronous, and mostly dyadic exchanges
Theoretical Perspectives
that are carried out via computers connected over the Multiliteracies in Changing Societal
Internet. The interfaces of most IM software programs
are multiwindowed, with the primary interface consist-
Contexts
ing of a contact list with the names of one’s IM partners Given that the interest of this study is to examine how
and a text window where written exchanges take place. literacy is practiced and taken up in the social contexts
There are a great number of IM programs in existence, of migration and digitally mediated communication, I
some of which are regional in nature and are commonly approach literacy from a social and cultural perspec-
used within specific countries, whereas others are glob- tive that considers the situated and contextual nature
al and adopted widely across countries. The present of reading and writing. Research from this perspective
study examines how the focal youth employed multiple (e.g., Barton, Hamilton, & Ivanic‡, 2000; Gee, 1996; Pahl
IM programs in conjunction with other online media to & Rowsell, 2006; Street, 2005) has illuminated how
cultivate a dispersed set of multilingual networks across particular rhetorical styles, interpretive strategies, and
countries. Although this study focuses on the use of a semiotic systems that are involved in any act of reading
specific technological media (i.e., IM), the issues raised or writing are predicated on, and in turn give mean-
in this study in regard to transnational networking and ing to, the beliefs, practices, and social relationships
literacy development across multiple linguistic commu- of particular sociocultural groups. Hence, literacy, as
nities are broader and deeper issues that remain per- a situated practice, appears in multiple forms that are
tinent, even as the technology of IM changes and new contingent on the sociohistorical relationships and ide-
forms of communicative media replace older ones. ologies that are in place.
In the following, I first discuss several areas of re- Although the concept of multiple literacies allows us
search that have informed this study, including the to recognize the diverse and socially specific practices of
multiliteracies framework, the study of literacy in the reading and writing, scholars associated with the New
transnational context of migration, and recent research London Group (Cope & Kalantzis, 2000; Kalantzis &
on literacy and learning in online networks. Drawing Cope, 2001; New London Group, 1996) proposed the
on theoretical perspectives derived from these areas of concept of multiliteracies to describe the literate abilities
research, I examine the IM practices of the focal youth to navigate and negotiate across diverse social practices
as a process of social and semiotic design in which she and text forms that are integral to our changing societal
constructs a transnational set of social networks that contexts. These contexts are characterized by (a) the in-
allows her to access and develop multiple linguistic creasing salience and ubiquity of cultural and linguistic
resources, including vernacular forms of English and diversity across localities and globalized relations across
multiple (mutually unintelligible) dialects in Chinese, to national borders, and (b) the growing variety of hybrid
construct her affiliations with different groups of peo- text forms associated with information and multime-
ple across the United States and China. Analysis shows dia technologies. The changing demographics of most
that, by developing and maintaining her affiliation to postindustrial and industrializing countries resulting
multiple groups, the youth’s literacy practices are char- from the migration of labor associated with our global-
acterized by the synchronic movement across lifeworlds ized economies have meant that people are increasingly
and the development of multiple reference points in the inhabiting multiple lifeworlds—“spaces for community
positioning of self. The construction of simultaneous life where local and specific meanings can be made”
networks and the movement across lifeworlds represent (New London Group, 1996, p. 70)—and moving across
the desire of the youth to develop the literate repertoire multiple lifeworlds in their daily lives. At the same
that would enable her to thrive in multiple linguis- time, the changing communicative landscape facilitated
tic and semiotic communities and mobilize resources by new media and technologies has been marked by

378 Reading Research Quarterly • 44(4)

diverse kinds of online networking and a syncretism of Farr and Guerra each showed that it was in the con-
representational forms. text of such transnational relations negotiated through
To capture the dynamic processes of meaning mak- regular traveling across the border that the speech and
ing that are involved in such cross-cultural movements rhetorical practices associated with their research par-
and navigation, Kress (2003) and the New London Group ticipants’ ethnolinguistic identities were maintained
(Cope & Kalantzis, 2000; New London Group, 1996) and affirmed. Rubinstein-Ávila’s (2007) case portrait
suggested an approach to understanding semiotic activ- of a teenage Dominican immigrant noted how the
ity as design. Design involves the orchestration of existing youth asserted her transnational affiliation through her
representational resources—such as linguistic patterns, choice of texts for voluntary reading (books that relate
genres, dialects, registers, and discourses/ideologies, as to the Dominican Republic) and her relation to media
well as nonlinguistic modalities—in potentially transfor- (watching and discussing television novelas—Spanish-
mative ways to achieve the designer’s communicative and language soap operas).
cultural purpose. The social semiotic concept of design is Indeed, the negotiation of simultaneous affiliations
helpful as we consider how immigrant teens draw upon across borders is increasingly mediated by new and dif-
various representational resources to (re)define their ferent kinds of communicative media. In Yi’s (2009) re-
identities and relations to multiple localities and com- search of the online activities of a local community of
munities in the process of migration. Korean American teenagers in the Midwestern United
Yet, although the multiliteracies perspective offers a States, she found that their IM screen names and web-
conceptual vision for expanding our notion of literacy site postings to one another contained a copious mixing
in changing cultural and communicative environments, of English and Korean and frequent references to prac-
it does not provide a basis for theorizing the new forms tices in both Korea and the United States. Similar mul-
of ethnic and linguistic diversity and literacy practices tilingual practices and representations of transnational
in globalized communicative contexts. In the following, experiences are also described in McGinnis, Goodstein-
I discuss other bodies of literature that have informed Stolzenberg, and Costa Saliani’s (2007) study of two
the present study—first, in relation to the practices of Bengali American and Colombian American youths
transnational migration and, second, with respect to and a Jewish American adolescent with strong affilia-
the communicative landscape of digital media. tion with Israel. These young people used their personal
profiles and narratives in online journals and social net-
working sites to express their identifications with mul-
Language and Literacy in the Context tiple communities across border.
of Transnational Migration In theorizing linguistic practices across transnation-
In the last decade and a half, the development of a al contexts, communication scholar Jacquemet (2005)
transnational perspective on migration has spurred the argued that the mobility of people, languages, and texts
empirical study of various kinds of cross-border con- in our contemporary world has resulted in an increased
nections that are created in the process of migration and intensity and expanded scale of multilingual transac-
how the identities of individuals and groups of people tions across local and distant territories. Jacquemet
are negotiated within social worlds that span more than proposed the concept of “transidiomatic practices” to
one place (e.g., Kennedy & Roudometof, 2002; Levitt describe “the communicative practices of transnational
& Jaworsky, 2007; Levitt & Schiller, 2004; Vertovec, groups that interact using different languages and com-
2004). A conceptual frame that has emerged from re- municative codes simultaneously present in a range of
search on transnational migration and that could be communicative channels, both local and distant” (pp.
helpful for thinking about new forms of cultural and 264–265). He further noted that such practices are con-
linguistic diversity is the notion of “simultaneity” (Levitt stituted by
& Schiller, 2004). Simultaneity refers to the fact that
individuals who have migrated from one country to an- the co-presence of multilingual talk (exercised by de/reterri-
torialized speakers) and electronic media, in contexts heav-
other may continue to incorporate daily routines, activi-
ily structured by social indexicalities and semiotic codes.
ties, and institutional affiliations that connect them to Anyone present in transnational environments, whose talk
their country of origin, even as they are actively engaged is mediated by deterritorialized technologies, and who in-
in their everyday lives in their destination country. teracts with both present and distant people, will find her-
In the field of language and literacy studies, Farr self producing transidiomatic practices. (Jacquemet, 2005,
(2006), Guerra (1998), and Sánchez (2007a) have docu- p. 265)
mented the role of language use in the simultaneous ne-
gotiation of interpersonal relationships among Mexican What is noteworthy about these practices is not that
immigrants with their families and extended kinship multilingual discourse, code-mixing in texts, and com-
on both sides of the U.S.–Mexico border. In particular, munication across borders are new phenomena of this

Multiliteracies on Instant Messaging in Negotiating Local, Translocal, and Transnational Affiliation: A Case of an Adolescent Immigrant 379
era; what is impressive about such practices, according other channels of communication to facilitate a sense
to Jacquemet, is the copresence of multiple languages of connectedness and access to a variety of information
and simultaneous local and distant interactions facilitat- sources from their peers. These practices of fostering
ed through a multiplicity of communicative channels. social relationships, affiliations, and resource networks
Drawing on Jacquemet’s (2005) work, in this study, have been extended to the use of social networking sites,
we are interested in how simultaneous networks may such as MySpace and Facebook (Boyd, 2007; Knobel &
be developed through digital media for youth migrants Lankshear, 2008).
to interact and negotiate their relationships with mul- Another prominent aspect of digital literacies is the
tiple social and linguistic communities across borders crossing over or syncretism of representational modes
and how particular literacy practices are accessed and and forms, as described earlier in relation to the mul-
reinforced within these diverse sets of relationships. To tiliteracies perspective. Research has examined such
further develop a conceptual frame for examining such syncretic representation in young people’s online jour-
horizontal movements across digital networks, I turn to naling, IM, and personal profiles on social networking
recent studies of digital media and literacies. sites, among other practices, that often juxtapose and
integrate different textual conventions and modalities
to achieve particular communicative purposes (Guzzetti
Digitally Mediated Literacies & Gamboa, 2005; Jacobs, 2005; Perkel, 2008). This
and Social Networks kind of hybridized textuality is demonstrated in the IM
A growing body of research on digitally mediated lit- practices of the participants in Jacobs’s study, as these
eracy has brought to our attention the new epistemolo- youth integrate in their exchanges the conventions of
gies and reading and writing practices associated with IM discourse to approximate speech, the conventions
posttypographic and networked digital technologies of standard written English that they learned in school,
that diverge from print-based typographic book culture the lexicon and cultural references familiar to European
(e.g., Coiro et al., 2008; Hagood et al., 2003; Lankshear American middle class teens, and occasionally the lan-
& Knobel, 2006; Warschauer & Grimes, 2007). The guage of hip-hop or urban youth culture. Such hybrid-
connectivity and cross-linked associations between dif- ized discourse reflects the youths’ awareness of and
ferent textual forms and online communities that are identification with multiple norms and conventions as-
promoted by networked technologies have meant that sociated with both middle class schooling and European
reading and writing in these environments often in- American youth culture and, to a limited degree, with
volves making meaning across a variety of social, cul- linguistic influence from their experience of an urban
tural, semiotic, and information sources (Luke, 2003; environment and urban popular culture. Lewis and
Warschauer & Grimes, 2007). In this regard, a range of Fabos (2005) further noted that the design of language
researchers have pointed out how literacy in digital en- on IM is audience sensitive, with the IM users having
vironments is embedded in distributed networks, which to shift voices moment to moment to address different
may be networks of hypertexts (texts linked to each audiences as they manage multiple parallel dialogues
other on the Web) but more importantly are networks of within the same space/time. Hence, these researchers
relationships where one can access and develop textual argued that the ability to flexibly read and write across
or semiotic resources within multiple communities (e.g., genres and modes and to perform different voices and
Gee, 2007; Jenkins, 2006; Lankshear & Knobel, 2007; versions of one’s self dependent on the audience has
Luke, 2003). By developing a broad and diverse set of come to characterize the aesthetics and epistemology of
relational networks, one is able to access a wider range of IM as a form of digitally mediated literacy.
knowledge and resources, which is especially pertinent
in a globalized and fast-changing world (Gee, 2004). The Present Study
In the limited literature on IM literacy, researchers For the case study presented in this article, I use the
(Jacobs, 2005, 2006; Lewis & Fabos, 2000, 2005) have theoretical perspectives discussed above to analyze the
highlighted the role of the design of networks as part ways in which an adolescent girl, who had migrated
of youth practices of IM. Focusing mainly on European from China to the United States two years previous-
American adolescents, these studies have shown that ly, designed her social networks and use of language
the youth actively designed their social worlds by using through her activities on IM with multiple communities
IM to develop, reinforce, and extend particular social across the United States and China. I examine how the
relationships that they value (Lewis & Fabos, 2005) and youth’s literacy practices within these diverse commu-
to gather and distribute information and ideas among nities are characterized by the synchronic movement
peer groups ( Jacobs, 2006). Although the youths’ IM across lifeworlds and syncretism in the use of represen-
networks tend to mirror their offline or face-to-face rela- tational resources to (re)define her relations to multiple
tionships, their use of this media serves to complement localities and communities in the process of migration.

380 Reading Research Quarterly • 44(4)

Such cross-border relationships mediated by IM and borders and how she mobilized social and semiotic re-
other communicative media constitute a distributed sources from her transnational networks.
or dispersed set of multilingual networks from which
the youth accessed and drew upon diverse linguistic
resources, including vernacular forms of English and
multiple dialects in Chinese (including Cantonese,
Method
Mandarin, and Shanghainese), to construct her simul- Study Background
taneous affiliations to different groups of people across Data for this research are taken from a larger compara-
the United States and China. tive case study of the digital literacy practices of im-
Cantonese, Mandarin (known as Putunghua in China migrant youth of Chinese descent across transnational
and Guoyu in Taiwan), and Shanghainese are three dif- contexts. A case-study approach is adopted for this proj-
ferent varieties of Chinese that are mutually unintelligi- ect, with the aim to generate a contextualized analysis
ble, even though Mandarin is the national language, and of literacy use and learning (Dyson & Genishi, 2005;
Cantonese and Shanghainese are ascribed the status of Erickson, 1986), especially given the paucity of re-
dialects within the sociolinguistic history and present- search on immigrant adolescents’ practices with digital
day policy of China. Of all the Chinese dialects, only media. Cases developed from this project examine how
Mandarin has an established writing tradition that is of- the focal adolescents use the Internet to organize social
ficially codified as Modern Written Chinese and recog- relationships, use and produce information and media
nized as the standard written language in present-day content across countries, and develop cross-cultural
China. Together, the spoken standard (Mandarin) and orientations in their language and literacy learning. The
written standard (Modern Written Chinese) constitute six youths who participated in this project were attend-
what is termed Modern Standard Chinese. Cantonese, ing high school in a metropolitan Midwestern city at the
which is spoken widely in the southern Chinese prov- time of the study.
inces Guangdong and Guangxi and the two special Recruitment of the youth participants was carried
administrative regions Hong Kong and Macao, stands out through a survey and screening interviews. We
as a prestigious dialect, with a highly developed writ- administered a survey on transnational communica-
ten language that is prominent in the mass media of tion to students at a comprehensive high school with
Hong Kong (Li, 2000; Snow, 2004). Written Chinese a large immigrant population from Latin America and
texts in Hong Kong that are of a less “official” or formal Asia. Close to 19% of the survey respondents were
nature—from creative writing to advertising to the less of Chinese origin, among whom 73% indicated that
formal genres in newspapers and magazines—are char- they used the Internet to communicate with people in
acterized by the presence of at least some Cantonese China. Based on the survey responses, we invited 20
elements. Some diary novels that have wide readership students of Chinese origin who had indicated engage-
in Hong Kong are written entirely in Cantonese. ment in different forms of transnational communica-
As a weaker dialect compared with Cantonese in tion to participate in one-time focus-group interviews.
regard to prestige and the number of speakers, and From these interviews, we recruited case-study partici-
especially given the strong promotion of Mandarin in pants who showed both similar and diverse patterns of
Shanghai, Shanghainese is marked by the relative ab- media use and received formal consent for their partici-
sence of written usage (Chen, 1999; Xiao-quan, 2001). pation in this research.
Although dialect writing in Shanghainese had existed The key informant for the present study was Kaiyee
in folk drama scripts, folk songs, stories, and other lit- (all names are pseudonyms), a 17-year-old junior who
erary genres for various periods of time until the early immigrated to the United States with her parents and a
part of the 20th century, written Shanghainese in the younger brother from Shanghai, China, when she was
print media or environmental signs in the cityscape in 15 years old. I focused on Kaiyee for this study of IM
present-day Shanghai can hardly be found (Chen, 1999; practices across transnational contexts for two main rea-
Xiao-quan, 2001). Yet, there is an indication that, with sons. First, Kaiyee was the focal participant with whom I
the recent popularization of the Internet in China, the was able to develop the strongest rapport and gather data
use of regional dialects in electronic discourse is becom- on her use of IM extensively over an eight-month period.
ing a visible phenomenon (Gao, 2006). In this study, I Second, Kaiyee, having originated from Shanghai, was
explore how the focal youth acquired and made choices the only participant in the study who was not a native
among different written conventions in English and va- speaker of Cantonese and was acquiring Cantonese in a
rieties of Chinese within the multiple social networks Chinese immigrant community that had a majority of
that she developed on IM. I examine how her language native Cantonese speakers. Hence, her case allows us to
and orthographic choices allowed her to develop affili- explore to a greater extent the multilinguality of online
ations with different communities across geographical networks that an immigrant youth may develop across

Multiliteracies on Instant Messaging in Negotiating Local, Translocal, and Transnational Affiliation: A Case of an Adolescent Immigrant 381
social and geographical spaces. The focus on Kaiyee for During several early observations, Kaiyee described
the present study is, therefore, based on accessibility and to me each of the close to 70 contacts that she main-
the opportunity to learn (Yin, 2002). tained on two IM programs. On the basis of her de-
As an emigrant who moved to the United States scription, I was able to gain an understanding of the
from Hong Kong at the age of 16 years and is now a major social networks that she maintained online.
university researcher, I have been personally involved With Kaiyee’s permission, we began screen recording
in the Chinese American community and had taught in her real-time IM exchanges with six individuals in her
a high school with large numbers of students of Chinese social networks. The six individuals were selected by
origin. My proficiency in Cantonese and Mandarin Kaiyee and were friends of hers with whom she regu-
and familiarity with the local immigrant community larly conversed online. This article focuses on recorded
have helped me to develop a degree of rapport with exchanges between Kaiyee and three of her IM inter-
the study participants that is essential for exploring locutors who were associated with her major online net-
literacy practices in the personal domain of their so- works. These exchanges provided a diverse range of data
cial life. Although Kaiyee and I conversed mostly in with which to examine the different kinds of linguistic
Mandarin and English, we would often consult with resources that Kaiyee mobilized to develop social net-
each other about Shanghainese (Kaiyee’s first language) works across countries. Table 1 shows the pseudonyms
and Cantonese (my first language) when discussing her of these individuals, their gender and relationship as
IM activities in these languages. When we were decid- reported by Kaiyee, the primary languages they used
ing what language to use for our interviews, Kaiyee ex- when communicating on IM, and the recording dates of
pressed an interest in practicing speaking English with the IM exchanges that are used for this study.
me. Hence, most of our interviews were conducted in Kaiyee notified her friends about our research be-
English and included various amounts of code switch- fore we commenced recording of their IM exchanges.
ing to Mandarin and Cantonese. Whenever I recorded an IM session that involved these
IM partners, Kaiyee would inform them that I was there
Data Collection and that their exchanges were being recorded. Over the
Data collection for this study took place between course of the study, 14 hours of screen recordings were
February 2007 and September 2007 and consisted of made of Kaiyee’s use of IM.
home observations of Kaiyee’s online literacy practices, The 12-hour time difference between Midwestern
semistructured interviews, screen recordings of her United States and China posed a challenge to the sched-
IM exchanges and retrospective reflection on these IM uling of recording sessions that would allow us to cap-
exchanges with Kaiyee, and selected observations of ture the IM exchanges between Kaiyee and her friends
her activities in her school and the local Chinese im- in China. Our scheduling allowed us to record Kaiyee’s
migrant community. I visited Kaiyee at her home to exchanges with one of her IM partners in China on sev-
conduct observations of her online practices biweekly eral occasions but did not allow us to record any real-
between February and September 2007. For each home time exchanges between Kaiyee and Rong, a childhood
visit, which all lasted approximately one and a half to friend and former schoolmate of Kaiyee’s. To help us
two hours, a screen recording was made of Kaiyee’s address this problem, Kaiyee provided a 50-minute IM
online interactions (using Spector Pro, Spector Soft, dialogue with Rong recorded on her IM program on
Vero Beach, Florida), our conversations were recorded June 20 for the study.
through a voice recorder, and field notes were written to The data sample of recorded IM dialogues for this
provide a narrative description of Kaiyee’s activities and analysis includes 200 entries (an entry being a message
our interaction during the observation. that is posted in a continuous dyadic exchange)1 from

Table 1. Kaiyee’s Instant Messaging Partners

Primary languages Recording dates of instant
Name Gender Relationship with Kaiyee
for communication message exchanges
Friend and schoolmate in the United May 24, June 7, June 23,
Dawei Male Mandarin and Cantonese
States July 18
Friend and fellow gamer from an April 17, April 27, May 17,
Ricky Male English
online game in the United States July 4
Childhood friend and former
Rong Female Mandarin and Shanghainese June 20
schoolmate from China

382 Reading Research Quarterly • 44(4)

Kaiyee’s dialogues with each of her three IM partners In addition to inductive coding of the content of the
described in Table 1. With respect to the exchanges that IM exchanges, I analyzed the use of multiple dialects
Kaiyee conducted with Dawei and Ricky, which were and languages in the youths’ IM exchanges within dif-
recorded on four dates, the first 50 entries of each of ferent social networks. Specifically, I examined the use
the four recorded sets of IM exchanges were compiled of both standard and nonstandard orthographies to rep-
for analysis. With the one extended IM record between resent standard and nonstandard forms of Chinese and
Kaiyee and Rong, I used the first 200 entries of this dia- English. Following Sebba (2007) and Androutsopoulos
logue for analysis. Altogether, these subsamples com- (2000), I adopt a social and cultural, or ideological, as
prised the 600 entries of Kaiyee’s IM exchanges that opposed to a technological view of orthography (Street,
were used for analysis. 1984), whereby the use of orthography is seen as not
I conducted eight interviews in person with Kaiyee, just the employment of a set of written conventions for
ranging from one hour to one and a half hours each, out- representing language but is itself a value-laden practice
side of the observational and recording sessions. These that reflects the particular stances and identities of an
interviews were semistructured (Patton, 2002), audio- individual or a social group with regard to linguistic
taped, and transcribed to written record. Beyond the ini- variation and its representation in writing. The manifes-
tial interviews that were topically oriented and explored tation of stances and identities in the use of orthography
the daily routines of Kaiyee’s use of IM, most interviews is seen, for example, in how professional British writers
involved retrospective reflection with Kaiyee on the con- writing in English-lexicon Creole distance themselves
tent and language use in one or more of her IM texts. from the standard British model through particu-
Consistent with inductive research methods (Crabtree lar spelling choices, some of which reflect the speech
& Miller, 1999; Kvale, 1996), the interview questions characteristics of Creole while others are homophone
were developed in an ongoing fashion, based on the ac- spellings that serve mainly to accentuate their differ-
tivities observed during the recorded IM sessions. ence from mainstream British English (Sebba, 1998).
Additional data were gathered through observation Hence, orthographic choices constitute a form of semi-
of Kaiyee’s activities at school to get a sense of her peer otic design in which people construct their identity and
group and her participation in classroom activities. I affiliation with particular social groups and practices. I
shadowed Kaiyee on three school days between April analyzed the orthographic choices that Kaiyee made in
and June and conducted informal interviews with four her written exchanges on IM to represent her affiliation
of her teachers to get their perceptions of Kaiyee and her with different social and ethnic vernaculars of English
work in their classes. and regional dialects of Chinese.
For example, with the sample of IM dialogues be-
tween Kaiyee and her Asian American friend from an
Data Analysis online game in the United States, I examined how these
Data analysis involved using qualitative procedures of two incorporated linguistic features of African American
inductive and interpretive coding, cross-comparison of Vernacular English and lexicon related to hip-hop cul-
codes, and triangulation across data (Charmaz, 2006; ture in their written exchanges and how the use of a
Coffey & Atkinson, 1996). Analysis was carried out hybrid vernacular English allowed Kaiyee to develop
on the data set of interview transcripts, recordings of affiliation with Asian Americans who participate in an
600 entries of IM exchanges, and field notes and audio­ urban-identified youth culture. With the IM dialogue
recorded transcripts from observations. My theoretical sample between Kaiyee and her Chinese-speaking peer
perspectives provided an interpretive frame for the de- in the local community, I examined how dialect alter-
velopment of codes as I related instances in the data nation between Mandarin and Cantonese and diverse
to concepts such as social affiliation, design of online orthographic conventions are used in constructing a
networks, social and semiotic resources, hybridity in multidialectal basis for negotiating their social relation-
language use and representation, and mobilizing of ship in a Cantonese-dominant immigrant community.
resources across networks. Using the method of con- In my analysis of the IM dialogue sample between
stant comparison (Miles & Huberman, 1994), I looked Kaiyee and her friend in Shanghai, I received assistance
for key linkages among various pieces of data, signaled from Dr. Dingxu Shi, professor of Chinese and Bilingual
by the reoccurrence of the same codes, to examine pat- Studies at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University, who
terns within and across data types. The patterns that has researched and written about the Shanghai dialect
were identified were placed in larger analytic categories and was consultant for this project. Dr. Shi identified the
that incorporated a number of related codes. These larg- orthographic representation of the Shanghai dialect in the
er categories within and across data sources were then IM exchanges, noting in particular the use of nonstandard
grouped conceptually to provide a basis for the themes Chinese characters to represent Shanghainese-specific
presented in the findings. morphemes. With Dr. Shi’s assistance, I examined the

Multiliteracies on Instant Messaging in Negotiating Local, Translocal, and Transnational Affiliation: A Case of an Adolescent Immigrant 383
nature and extent of the blending of Shanghainese and her. Kaiyee said that she had been laughed at before
Mandarin in the IM texts. Results from these analyses and would refrain from speaking English unless she
were triangulated with the analytic categories developed was confident that she could say something accurately.
from inductive coding of the entire data set to generate Such reticence among adolescent immigrants to speak
the themes or assertions discussed below. English amidst their English-speaking peers for fear of
being teased has also been noted by other researchers
who studied Latino- and Polish-speaking adolescents
Results (Rubinstein-Ávila, 2007; Szuber, 2007). In the spring
semester during this study, Kaiyee was enrolled in a
Background Information on Kaiyee transitional English survey literature class that was de-
Kaiyee and her family had been living in the United signed to be an intermediary course in the transition
States for slightly over two years when the study com- from the English-as-a-second-language program to the
menced. The family rented a small single-family home mainstream English program. Even though Kaiyee re-
in a mixed-income neighborhood that had significant mained relatively quiet in the survey literature class, her
populations of Latino and Asian immigrants and was 10 teacher commented that Kaiyee performed well on her
minutes away by car from the Chinatown neighborhood. written work and specifically pointed out that Kaiyee
Kaiyee’s mother worked full time at a small garment was 1 of 8 students among the 120 students he was
factory and sometimes took on domestic housekeeping teaching who received a near-perfect score on an argu-
jobs, and Kaiyee’s father worked two shifts a day as a mentative essay, which was one of the major writing
chef in a Chinese restaurant. assignments for the semester.
Kaiyee’s mother tongue was Shanghainese but Kaiyee began using the Internet in China when she
she had received schooling only in Mandarin when was 13 years old. Because her family had never owned
she was living in Shanghai, given that Shanghainese, a computer in China, she would go online at Internet
as a regional dialect, does not have official status and cafés, which were easily accessible in Shanghai. Soon
is restricted from being used in institutional settings. after settling in the United States, her parents bought
Although Mandarin is the language of all major public a desktop computer for Kaiyee and another one for her
institutions and media, Shanghainese remains the lan- brother. Hence, Kaiyee had exclusive use of her com-
guage of the home and everyday communication among puter and used it for several hours every day to IM with
most native residents of Shanghai. Kaiyee remarked her friends, play video games, and check out websites
to the researcher that she had been equally fluent in related to her interests in both Chinese and English.
Shanghainese and Mandarin before she immigrated to The two IM programs that Kaiyee used were
the United States but soon began using Mandarin as a Windows Live Messenger and Tencent QQ. Windows
primary language when interacting with her immigrant Live Messenger is an IM client developed by Microsoft
peers who were predominantly native Cantonese speak- and has a user demographic that spans the globe.
ers and bilingual in Mandarin. Kaiyee further noted Tencent QQ (QQ for short; Tencent Holdings Limited,
that, although she had become increasingly comfort- Shenzhen, China) is the most popular IM program in
able with Mandarin through daily use, she felt that she China and has been used in South Africa for several
had stagnated in her Shanghainese proficiency because years. Kaiyee had started using QQ in China and adopt-
she realized that there were some new vocabulary and ed Windows Live Messenger after coming to the United
colloquial terms that she had to figure out from com- States so she could use it to communicate with people
municating on IM with her friends in Shanghai. At the both locally and overseas.
same time, Kaiyee showed an eagerness to become more Kaiyee had more than 40 contacts on Windows Live
fluent in English, the dominant language of the society Messenger, among whom 14 were her schoolmates in
in which she was now living, and also in Cantonese so the United States, 10 were people she had met at online
that she could interact more easily with her friends and game sites (primarily on a massively multiplayer role-
people in the Chinese immigrant community, as is dis- playing game called Maple Story [Nexon Corporation,
cussed later in this section. Seoul, South Korea]), and 15 were contacts in China,
The social groups of age-similar peers that Kaiyee which included friends and relatives in Shanghai and
associated with, both inside and outside of school, people she had met on Chinese discussion forums.
were primarily young immigrants from China who had Among her contacts on QQ were 12 friends and rela-
come to the United States in their middle childhood to tives in Shanghai, many online friends in China but
midadolescence. Although I noted and Kaiyee admit- only 5 with whom she communicated on a regular ba-
ted that she was an outgoing person with a good sense sis, and 17 schoolmates and friends in the United States.
of humor, she was hesitant to speak English at school Because most of Kaiyee’s immigrant peers also used QQ,
for fear of embarrassment from people making fun of there existed a significant amount of overlap of her local

384 Reading Research Quarterly • 44(4)

contacts on both IM programs. In the following, I exam- We know each other like almost one year...He told me he
ine three major social networks that Kaiyee developed was so pressure when he came to the U.S. cuz he couldn’t
and maintained through the use of IM and how diverse speak English well, too, either. So, he can feel what I feel
linguistic and orthographic conventions are mobilized now cuz he was there, he was like that too. (interview,
February 10, 2007)
in her IM exchanges to construct her affiliations with
different social groups and practices across the United
States and China. Among Kaiyee and some of her IM contacts from the
game, their Asian affinity included the shared experi-
ence of being multilingual persons living in an English-
Asian American Youth and Hip-Hop dominant society, which led Kaiyee to feel comfortable
Influenced Vernacular English developing an English-speaking voice with these peers:
Six months after she came to the United States, Kaiyee “I feel more comfortable talking to Asians...they won’t
started playing Maple Story, an online game marketed laugh at me” (interview, June 21, 2007). Kaiyee related
in several language versions targeting specific countries her improvement in English through chatting to a great-
or regions. Kaiyee decided to play the version called er degree of fluency with vernacular English:
Maple Global, which was in English, where the major-
I learned a lot of vocabularies from chatting with my Internet
ity of the players were located in North America. Kaiyee
friends...I think I improved a lot through the [last] half
explained her choice to play this English version of the year...cause I can understand more listening to the conver-
game as a deliberate intention to learn English: “When sation when people talk in school, cause I used to don’t get
I decided to play the game Maple Story, it got Chinese what they’re talking about and I know more now because I
version and English version, I decided to play English know more oral language...I can talk more now when people
version because I want to improve my English.... This is talk to me first. (interview, June 7, 2007)
the purpose that I use English to chat” (interview, June
21, 2007; all quotations of Kaiyee’s words are derived Hence, although Kaiyee felt insecure about her abili-
from verbatim transcriptions of recorded interviews). ty to communicate in English with her English-speaking
Most of the players that Kaiyee associated with and peers, she developed a network of friends through the
recognized as friends were known to her as being 15- online game environment who were mostly Asian and
to 20-year-olds of Asian origin residing in the United with whom she was developing a pan-ethnic and lin-
States. Among the 10 game players whom she added guistic affiliation. How Kaiyee and some of her Asian-
to her IM contact list, almost all identified themselves identified peers designed and signaled their affiliations
as Asian except for one who identified himself as black through writing on IM was marked by the influence
and another who identified himself as mixed Portuguese of African American Vernacular English and hip-hop
and Spanish. IM was used as a way to extend their rela- culture.
tionships beyond the game environment. Kaiyee observed that her online friends from the
The double sense of affinity (Gee, 2004) among game, including Mike and Ricky (who were mentioned
Kaiyee and most of these online friends of hers as in the previous quotes from Kaiyee), tended to adopt, in
game players and as people of Asian descent led her her words, a more “oral” and “black” style when inter-
to consider them as good resources for improving her acting with each other. Regarding this style of English,
English. Kaiyee noted the following in regard to the Kaiyee remarked, “I think it’s cool, and my friends type
people whom she met on the game, especially a male like that too, and I don’t like to type proper, it sounds
friend named Mike whom Kaiyee knew as somebody like a nerd” (interview, June 21, 2007). In particular,
who was of Cambodian descent and was born in the Kaiyee noted that Ricky, who identified himself as a
United States: breakdancer and often shared his interest in hip-hop
music with her, “likes to speak more black.” An excerpt
Because I talk to people a lot and people there are so eager…
of Kaiyee’s IM exchange with Ricky dated April 27th
is that how you say it? [spoken in Mandarin] [Interviewer:
Eager to talk.]… Yeah, and when I just met my first friend, is shown below. Right before this segment of the ex-
whose name is Mike, I didn’t talk a lot...And I told him I change, the two youths were talking about being bored
can’t speak good English and he said he can help me, that by certain classes at school before Kaiyee brought up
doesn’t matter, something like that. And we became better the notion of proper grammar in contrast to Ricky’s
friends. (interview, March 17, 2007) style of language. In the beginning of the excerpt,
Kaiyee mentioned that Mike had told Ricky that he had
Regarding another friend, Ricky, who was known to to use “proper grammar” if he wanted to talk to Kaiyee.
Kaiyee as being of mixed Cambodian and Chinese de- Ricky and Kaiyee had just met in the game at the time
scent who had come to the United States at a very young when Mike made the comment, and Kaiyee observed to
age from Cambodia, Kaiyee said the following: me when reflecting on this excerpt that Mike worried

Multiliteracies on Instant Messaging in Negotiating Local, Translocal, and Transnational Affiliation: A Case of an Adolescent Immigrant 385
that Kaiyee would not understand Ricky’s language be- This excerpt contains a metacommentary on linguis-
cause Mike knew that Kaiyee was not a native speaker tic variation and verbal style couched in an adolescent
of English. (Line numbers and time stamps are shown form of banter. Although Kaiyee seems to be arguing
in the left columns; glosses of emoticons and abbrevia- with Ricky on what form of language would be more
tions appear in parentheses.) appropriate or easier to use, it is cast in a playful way,
in line with the genre of teasing. Yet, this pretend argu-
1 20:27:32 K aiyee: haha i remember Mike told ment highlights the two young people’s meta-awareness
you: You have to speak proper of the effects of their orthographic choices in signaling
grammar to her. their knowledge of and stances toward different conven-
2 20:27:40 K aiyee: do you remember what you tions of English. These conventions include (a) standard
answered? written English (as demonstrated in the use of standard
3 20:27:44 R icky: no syntax and mostly standard spellings, especially in lines
1, 2, 3, 9, 23, 30–32); (b) African American Vernacular
4 20:27:47 Kaiyee: o.o (puzzled expression)
English associated with urban youth culture (as seen in
5 20:27:50 K aiyee: -____________- (perplexed the use of “diz/dis” to represent voiced TH-stopping in
expression) lines 11, 12, 14, 17, 19–21; absence of subject-auxiliary
6 20:27:57 K aiyee: “Dam, thats hard!” inversion and the use of habitual be in line 19; copula
7 20:28:01 R icky: hahahah deletion in line 20; and the use of the compounding
form –ass as an intensifier in line 26); and (c) IM ad-
8 20:28:05 Kaiyee: -________________- (more aptations of English to approximate speech, speed up
perplexed) response time, maintain the floor and interactional co-
9 20:28:05 Ricky: i hate talkin like this herency, and generally signal a sense of creativity (e.g.,
10 20:28:09 Kaiyee: -.- (nonchalant or matter-of- abbreviations, short entries and sequential entries used
fact) to maintain the floor, lexical substitutions through the
use of numbers or single letters, and the use of emoti-
11 20:28:09 Ricky: i like talkin like diz cons as a visual form of paralinguistic cue [Baron, 2003;
12 20:28:12 R icky: diz is way better Jacobs, 2005]; the predominant use of emoticons that
13 20:28:13 K aiyee: o.o (puzzled) have upright “faces” in Kaiyee’s exchanges signifies an
14 20:28:20 K aiyee: dis is more complicated Asian influence, even as these emoticons are increas-
ingly popularized in English-language online environ-
15 20:28:23 Ricky: no ments associated with Japanese animation and online
16 20:28:25 K aiyee: YES gaming [see en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emoticon, accessed
17 20:28:27 R icky: diz is wayyyy ez January 31, 2009]).
Ricky and Kaiyee signal their cross-linguistic knowl-
18 20:28:33 K aiyee: HARD
edge by bracketing the display of African American
19 20:28:35 R icky: who diz nigga be Vernacular English in largely standard English (lines
20 20:28:38 Ricky: who dat 1–9, 23, 30–32). This is demonstrated by Ricky as he
21 20:28:41 R icky: did i do dat? contrasts the use of the standard spelling “this” and the
nonstandard spelling “diz” to symbolically differenti-
22 20:28:43 K aiyee: -__________- (perplexed) ate the variety of English that he affiliates with from
23 20:28:48 Ricky: thats how i talk! standard English or “proper grammar.” The spelling
24 20:28:50 Kaiyee: PUNK “diz/dis” is prominent in hip-hop lyrics and serves an
indexical function (Androutsopoulos, 2000) in this
25 20:28:52 Ricky: ahhaha
IM text to relate this nonstandard spelling to a larger
26 20:28:55 R icky: SHY ASS set of conventions associated with African American
27 20:28:57 K aiyee: o.o (puzzled) Vernacular English and urban youth culture influenced
28 2
 0:29:02 Kaiyee: i aint shy -.- (matter-of-fact) by hip-hop.
It is difficult to evaluate Ricky’s use of “nigga” in
29 20:29:05 Ricky: lol (laugh out loud) line 19 (“who diz nigga be”), which appeared only once
30 20:29:12 R icky: i have to call my friend in the IM exchanges analyzed in this study, without a
31 20:29:15 R icky: but i dont want to contextualized knowledge of Ricky’s background. The
32 20:29:19 R icky: i dont like to call people term nigga is fraught with complex racialized meaning,
being both related to the racial epithet “nigger” and also
33 20:29:20 Ricky: -.- (matter-of-fact) reclaimed by some African Americans as a positive in-
34 20:29:23 Kaiyee: me 2! group term (Smitherman, 1999). Childs and Mallinson

386 Reading Research Quarterly • 44(4)

(2006) found that the writing of the word “nigga,” with   8 13:59:09 Ricky: ill shoot a firework jus for u
the orthographic representation of postvocalic r-less-   9 13:59:10 K aiyee: t i l l tomor row m id n ig h t
ness, was used as an in-group marker in the IM messag- -.- (matter-of-fact)
es of a white teenager who was an integral member of
a black community. Other researchers have found that 10 13:59:17 Ricky: and say diz dedicated to
Asian American youth, particularly those of Southeast Kaiyee
Asian origin, use the linguistic resources of African 11 13:59:20 K aiyee: (smile)
American Vernacular English to mark their affiliation 12 13:59:25 Ricky: =] (smile)
with other urban-identified teenagers of diverse ethnici- 13 13:59:46 K aiyee: haha
ties (Bucholtz, 2004; Chun, 2001; Reyes, 2005). Given
Kaiyee’s knowledge of Ricky as a participant of hip- 14 13:59:52 K aiyee: how are you recently o.O
hop, it appears that Ricky’s display of African American (wondering/puzzled)
Vernacular English in this instance serves to signal his 15 13:59:54 Ricky: so proper now eh
affiliation with an urban youth culture. 16 13:59:55 R icky: lol (laugh out loud)
In analyzing the other three excerpts of IM exchang-
17 14:00:00 K aiyee: o.O (puzzled)
es between Kaiyee and Ricky (the content of which re-
volved around references to each other, their friends 18 14:00:04 Kaiyee: i always be proper -.- (matter-
and families, and online gaming), I found that Ricky of-fact)
incorporated features associated with African American 19 14:00:09 Ricky: lol smart ass
Vernacular English in 7 out of 18 verbal entries that
he made in the excerpt dated April 17, 5 out of 26 en- Here we see Kaiyee using “imma” (line 5) instead
tries that he made in the excerpt dated May 17, and 7 of the standard English form “I’m going to” or informal
out of 16 entries that he made in the excerpt dated July speech form “I’m gonna.” Imma is popularized in hip-
4 (in calculating these verbal entries that Ricky made hop lyrics and has been shown to be adopted very occa-
in the IM exchanges, I excluded the entries that only sionally and only in a playful manner in IM exchanges
contained emoticons; ellipses; brief interjections, e.g., by middle class European American adolescents in
“haha”; or letter strings to signify gestures, e.g., “lol”). Jacobs’s (2005) study. However, in this case, I found that
These linguistic features involve the use of diz/dis; Kaiyee used the term extensively in her IM exchanges,
habitual be; copula deletion (as in “she more chinese sometimes even when she was dialoguing with me on
than khmai”; Khmai is a youthful and in-group syn- IM. In our reflection over this term, Kaiyee noted that
onym for Khmer, the romanization of the name for the she liked using it because her English-speaking online
majority ethnic group in Cambodia, and is commonly friends used it and she had seen it in song lyrics, such
used among young people of Khmer descent in North
as in Umbrella (The Dream, Stewart, T., Harrell, K., &
America); zero marking of the third-person singular in
Jay-Z, 2007; the song is a mixed rhythm & blues/pop/
present-tense verbs (as in “she speak khmai”); absence
rap song that topped the music charts worldwide in
of subject-auxiliary inversion in questions (as in “why
2007), which was a favorite song of hers. Moreover, in
u always get in trouble by ur mom”); the compounding
the excerpt, Kaiyee showed that she could switch styles
form –ass as an intensifier; and hip-hop expressions,
by using the habitual be in line 18 in response to Ricky’s
such as “homeboiz,” “dont bite my style,” and “daz my
thing.” In a later excerpt dated July 4, Kaiyee incorpo- teasing of her for sounding proper in the way she asked
rated features of African American Vernacular English him, “how are you recently?” (lines 14–15).
and hip-hop language in her dialogue with Ricky. Below By designing a hybrid variety of English that incor-
is an excerpt of the dialogue: porates the standard orthography of written English,
nonstandard orthography to represent the linguistic
  1 13:58:24 R icky: watchu gonna do today features of African American Vernacular English and
  2 13:58:37 K aiyee: hmmm iono (short for I don’t hip-hop, and IM conventions to approximate colloquial
know) speech, Kaiyee was constructing an English-speaking
  3 13:58:42 R icky: lol (laugh out loud) voice for herself and developing an affiliation with Asian
  4 13:58:42 K aiyee: maybe go out later Americans who participate in an urban-identified youth
culture. This literacy practice and affiliation that Kaiyee
  5 13:58:52 K aiyee: aha imma start to celebrate my developed in the textual environment of an online af-
bday from today -.- (matter- of- finity community had allowed her to position herself
fact)
beyond the social peripheral status of a new immigrant
  6 13:58:54 Kaiyee: hahaha and, according to Kaiyee, had enabled her to interact
  7 13:59:03 R icky: lol (laugh out loud) more easily with other teenagers at school.

Multiliteracies on Instant Messaging in Negotiating Local, Translocal, and Transnational Affiliation: A Case of an Adolescent Immigrant 387
Multidialectal Interactions With Chinese with her friends, she was acquiring a set of logographic
Immigrant Peers conventions for representing Cantonese in writing. Even
As described earlier, Kaiyee’s peer group in her lo- though I have focused on the use of different Chinese
cal community revolved around friends she made at dialects among Kaiyee and her friends in the foregoing
school who had also immigrated from China. Kaiyee discussion, it needs to be noted that Kaiyee also used
described the use of IM among her local friends as fol- English with some of her local friends. Within the scope
lows: “It makes me keep in touch with my friends and of this article, I have chosen to focus on how Kaiyee
I get to know each other better. [Without IM] I’ll have negotiated a multidialectal Mandarin/Cantonese voice
less chance to talk to my friends, um, and usually, if with her Chinese-speaking peers.2
we decide to go out together, we usually talk on IM” In the four excerpts of IM exchanges between
(interview, March 17, 2007). The role of IM in allowing Kaiyee and Dawei that are analyzed, Cantonese writing
young people to be in touch, to stay in the know, to or- appeared in 2 out of 42 verbal entries in the excerpt
ganize activities, and to nurture particular relationships dated May 24, 18 out of 43 entries in the excerpt dated
that they value has also been documented by Lewis June 7, 3 out of 45 entries in the excerpt dated June
23, and 10 out of 46 entries in the excerpt dated July
and Fabos (2005) and Jacobs (2005) among European
18 (in calculating these verbal entries, I excluded the
American adolescents.
entries that only contained emoticons, ellipses, or brief
However, the sociolinguistic environment in
verbal interjections [e.g., 噢uh, 嗯 mhm, 哈哈 haha]
the Chinese immigrant community contributed to a
that are unclear in regard to their status as Cantonese
more complex situation among Kaiyee and her peers.
or Mandarin). The rest of the entries in these excerpts
Given that the local Chinese community was mostly
were written predominantly in Mandarin, except for
Cantonese speaking and populated by successive waves
a few proper nouns and terms in English. Although
of migration from the Guangdong province of China,
it seems obvious that Mandarin would be used more
Kaiyee found herself as a linguistic minority of sorts in
frequently in these two young people’s IM communi-
this community. Hence, even though she was fluent in
cations given that both of them received schooling in
and proud of her Mandarin, and most Chinese residents
Mandarin in China, the extent of use of Cantonese in
in the community could speak Mandarin, Kaiyee was
their IM exchanges was quite significant. Moreover, in
aware of the value and utility of Cantonese in her social
the two excerpts where Cantonese was less used, it was
relationships and the local economy of the Chinese im-
Kaiyee who wrote in Cantonese in both of the entries
migrant community. In this regard, Kaiyee noted, “there
that contained Cantonese in the excerpt dated May 24
is not a lot of Mandarin speakers here...I’d rather speak
and two of three entries that contained Cantonese in
Cantonese more fluently” (interview, June 7, 2007). In
the excerpt dated June 23. An extract of Kaiyee’s IM ex-
mentioning a Chinese community organization that
change with Dawei dated June 7 is shown below. Prior
hired a large number of teenage interns and where she
to this exchange, the two young people had not spoken
wanted to find a job, she remarked that most places
for a few days because of an argument they had had. A
“require their workers to speak fluently Cantonese and
day before this exchange, Dawei had sent an IM mes-
English. They don’t mention you have to speak fluently
sage written in Cantonese to Kaiyee when she wasn’t on-
Mandarin” (interview, June 21, 2007).
line and asked that they get over the argument and stop
With this awareness of the social and economic
avoiding each other. In the excerpt below, Mandarin is
cachet of Cantonese, Kaiyee was eager to improve her
indicated with regular font and Cantonese is indicated
proficiency in the language. When communicating on
with bold font. Glosses of emoticons appear in paren-
IM with her friends, Kaiyee would choose to type in
theses. Translations of the Mandarin and Cantonese ap-
Cantonese at times because, in her words, “I think it’s
pear in brackets.
getting more close to people who are Cantonese...I just
feel it’s interesting to speak Cantonese to people” (in- 1 20:03:34 D: 昨天发你的.....懂我意思麻?
terview, June 7, 2007). She noted that she was learn- [the message I sent you yesterday.....you got my
ing to speak Cantonese at school from listening to her meaning?]
friends and learning how to type Cantonese from their
2 20:03:40 Kaiyee: 噢...
IM exchanges.
The orthography of Cantonese writing includes the [uh…]
use of both standard and nonstandard Chinese charac- 3 20:04:03 Kaiyee: 你do乜用廣東話講啊。
ters. Standard Chinese characters are used to represent [how come you said it in Cantonese]
lexical items that are common to both Cantonese and
4 20:04:04 Kaiyee: -_- (slightly perplexed)
Modern Standard Chinese. Nonstandard characters are
used to represent words that are specific to the Cantonese 5 20:04:14 D: 国語說出来怪怪的
dialect. Hence, when Kaiyee typed in Cantonese on IM [it sounds weird to say it in Mandarin]

388 Reading Research Quarterly • 44(4)

 6 20:04:19 D: 你懂吧? 26 20:07:18 Kaiyee: 知啦。其實好多次我都想同
[you got it?] 你講野。又唔知定開口
7 20:04:22 Kaiyee: 噢噢。明白 -_- (perplexed)
[uhuh. I understand] [i know. actually i’ve been meaning to talk to you
8 20:04:32 D: 真的懂. ?? 历害.... many times. but i didn’t know how to say it.]
[you really got it. ?? You’re good...] 27 20:07:26 Kaiyee: 嗯 嗯 。你長大了 -。- (matter-
of-fact)
9 20:04:37 Kaiyee: (puzzled)
[mhm. you’ve grown up]
10 20:04:43 D: .. 真的懂吧?
28 20:07:35 D: ..... 吾知点开口mar
[you really got it, right?]
[.... didn’t know how to say it mar]
11 20:04:49 Kaiyee: 當 然 啦 - _ - ( s l i g h t l y
perplexed) 29 20:07:45 D: 对我长大了..我成熟好多
了!~~~~
[of course]
[ you’re right i ’ve grown up.. i ’ve matured a
12 20:05:01 D: 就是没必要这样麻对不 lot!~~~~]
对...... 好幼的
[it’s like there is no need to be like this right.....so In this excerpt, there are multiple orthographic con-
childish] ventions being used: (a) standard Chinese orthography
13 20:05:17 Kaiyee: 嗯。 to represent Mandarin; (b) standard and nonstandard
[mhm] orthography to represent Cantonese (including the use
of logographic forms, i.e., Chinese characters, and one
14 20:05:23 Kaiyee: 聽日你返唔返學啊 instance of romanization in line 28); (c) nonstandard
[are you going to school tomorrow] orthography (character and romanization) to repre-
15 20:05:31 D: ......我听日吾返学 sent Taishanese, a dialect in the same dialect family as
[.....i’m not going to school tomorrow] Cantonese that is spoken in Taishan, a coastal county
of Guangdong province (though the two dialects are
16 20:05:37 D: 返学无野做 not entirely mutually intelligible; Cantonese serves as
[there is nothing to do at school] a high-prestige lingua franca in the region), seen in the
17 20:05:41 Kaiyee: 噢. 好多人都唔返 interrogative pronoun in line 3 “do乜” (dou moot, how
[uh. a lot of people are not going] come); (d) simplified Chinese characters (used by Dawei)
and traditional Chinese characters (used by Kaiyee); (e)
18 20:05:43 D: 你他媽的广东话真厉害 proper nouns written in English (“senior,” “yukong”)
[damn, your Cantonese is really good] related to the young people’s experience in American
19 20:05:45 D: 好犀利! school; and (f) conventions popularized in IM and other
[so good!] forms of electronic discourse, for example, the use of
romanization to represent Cantonese words and mor-
20 20:05:45 Kaiyee: 啊哈哈哈
phemes (Lam, 2004; C.K.M. Lee, 2007), punctuation
[ahahaha] being used less often and, when used, sometimes em-
21 20:05:49 D: 个个都吾返 ployed for its symbolic meaning (e.g., ellipses to signal
[everybody is not going] pauses, hesitation, and trailing off of speech).
Overall, Cantonese is used as a means of self-
22 20:06:00 D: 无senior返...有一个...
disclosure or intimacy (Dawei’s initiation of the use of
yukong
Cantonese to seek reconciliation), expression of solidar-
[no senior is going...one person is...yukong] ity (Kaiyee’s choice to respond in Cantonese and con-
23 20:06:08 Kaiyee: -_________- (perplexed) tinue its use further along), and, ultimately, to enact a
24 20:06:35 D: 所以今日 ....我咪主动 同 rapprochement between the two young people in this
你讲野咯 exchange. Kaiyee’s utterance in line 3 (“你do乜用廣東
話講啊,” how come you said it in Cantonese) seems to
[that’s why today .... i just stepped up to talk to
question/protest Dawei’s use of Cantonese in his prior
you]
message (revealing the assumption that Mandarin is
25 20:06:42 D: 我都覚得好主动嘎啦.. 我平 the default language to use) but at the same time ac-
時都吾主动 knowledges her understanding through her own use of
[i feel like i’m taking a big step already.. i don’t Cantonese. In addition, her adoption of the Taishanese
usually make the first move] interrogative pronoun “do乜” (dou moot, how come),

Multiliteracies on Instant Messaging in Negotiating Local, Translocal, and Transnational Affiliation: A Case of an Adolescent Immigrant 389
which differs slightly from its Cantonese equivalent characters in writing on IM with her immigrant peers,
“做乜” (jou mat), serves to signal her understanding of she would maintain the use of simplified forms when
Dawei’s language, given that Dawei’s family was origi- interacting with her peers in China.
nally from Taishan, as were some of Kaiyee’s other
Cantonese-speaking peers. After a series of confirma- Transnational Relations and Regional/
tion checks and responses initiated by Dawei to make Cultural Linguistic Affiliation
sure that Kaiyee understood his message (lines 6–11),
The people in China with whom Kaiyee kept in touch
Kaiyee enacts her competence in written Cantonese
by writing in Cantonese on a different topic (line 14), through IM included her friends, former schoolmates,
to which Dawei responds likewise in Cantonese. This cousins, and some online friends she had met on
written (literate) performance of Kaiyee’s Cantonese Chinese discussion forums. Among Kaiyee and her
proficiency triggers Dawei’s multiple exclamations in friends and cousins in Shanghai, their IM exchanges
praise of her Cantonese fluency (lines 18, 19). Dawei served to keep them abreast of the events happening
then continues writing several lines in Cantonese, first in their lives across the two countries. Because some of
on the immediately preceding topic of who would be Kaiyee’s friends and former schoolmates from the voca-
attending school the next day, and then back to the tional secondary school that she had attended in China
original topic of getting the two of them back on talking were either poised for entry into the workplace or had
terms. Kaiyee responds likewise in Cantonese about her already started their careers, Kaiyee was able to learn,
similar desire and hesitancy to talk to Dawei. through their exchanges on IM, what the economic and
Within this exchange, we also see some indication societal environment in Shanghai was like from the
of corrective feedback of written Cantonese provided by perspective of this sector of youth and young adults.
Dawei. In line 26, Kaiyee incorrectly uses the character Maintaining contact with her friends in China not only
定 ding to represent a Cantonese morpheme meaning allowed her to learn about the happenings and changes
“how to,” as the character doesn’t match the sound of in Shanghai from their perspective but also provided
the morpheme. Dawei recasts the representation to 点 her with the social connections that would facilitate her
dim—a more conventional character for representing return visits to China: “they’re my good friends and if
the morpheme—with a jocular/teasing tone that is in- I go back to China, I will go out with them” (interview,
dicated by a switch to romanization (mar) to represent March 17, 2007).
the utterance-final particle (嘛) that signals a question- Kaiyee and her friends’ written communications on
ing intonation (in C.K.M. Lee’s [2007] research on IM IM were mostly carried out through a mix of Mandarin
practices among young adults in Hong Kong, she noted and Shanghainese. Even though writing in Shanghainese
that the use of Cantonese romanization was sometimes is almost invisible in the print media of China, the recent
associated by her informants with a sense of playfulness emergence of Shanghainese writing in online environ-
and fun). Such a jocular tone may serve to enact a sense ments had allowed Kaiyee to acquire written usage in
of intimacy in the process of rapprochement between the dialect. This new form of literacy is seen in Kaiyee’s
the two young people and may also help to attenuate induction into the use of written Shanghainese when
the implicit correction made to Kaiyee’s writing of the she started using IM at the age of 13:
particular Cantonese morpheme.
Before, like a couple years ago [meaning some years ago],
By using Cantonese to communicate on a difficult
there was no Shanghainese being typed. And people started
and sensitive aspect of their relationship, the two young
typing it, and I feel it was interesting, and it’s like, it’s for
people are designing through writing a multidialectal people, it’s good for Shanghainese [Shanghai people] and I
basis for negotiating their friendship to achieve mutual just typed it. At first I saw my friend type it in um, netcafe.
understanding and solidarity. Through her IM exchang- And he chatting with, he was chatting with his friends and
es with friends such as Dawei, Kaiyee was developing when he typed it, it’s in Shanghainese, like some words in
and practicing a literacy in Cantonese that enabled her Shanghainese. It’s just like he just typed the way and pro-
to navigate social relations in her local peer group and nounced the way we talk. And I think it’s interesting, and
the larger linguistic economy of the Chinese immigrant more and more people start typing like that...I just used
community. Kaiyee’s adoption of a multidialectal voice Mandarin to talk before that. (interview, March 17, 2007)
in the context of the Chinese diaspora is also symboli-
cally indicated by her use of traditional Chinese charac- Through their electronic practices, Kaiyee joined other
ters, which are commonly used in Taiwan, Hong Kong, people of Shanghai in popularizing written conventions
Macau, and most overseas Chinese communities, rather for their regional dialect. At the same time, she was try-
than the simplified characters that she had learned and ing to keep up with the new Shanghainese terms and
used while growing up in China. Whereas she tended colloquialisms used by her peers as part of the youth
to switch between the use of simplified and traditional culture in Shanghai; as she noted, “the young people

390 Reading Research Quarterly • 44(4)

are creating more and more words” (interview, August 1 10:42:26 Kaiyee: 听上去好像老难生存下去
21, 2007). 额样子。。。
Hence, by developing transnational ties with her [it sounds like it’s really hard to make a living...]
friends and relatives in Shanghai, Kaiyee was able to
2 10:43:31 Rong: 恩
access and nurture the social relations and linguistic re-
sources that kept her connected to the social, economic, [mhm]
and cultural changes in her hometown. This connection 3 10:43:33 Rong: 上海人的饭碗
is in no small part related to a regional and cultural [the bread and butter of Shanghai people]
identity that is celebrated among Shanghainese people
4 10:43:36 Rong: 都被外地人枪了
(Xiao-quan, 2001). Kaiyee affirmed this regional/cul-
tural identity as follows in one of our interviews: [has been snatched by people from outside (other
parts of China)]
E: There wasn’t much writing before, but now
5 10:43:40 Rong: 都到上海来了
people can write in Shanghainese. How do you
feel about this? [they’ve all come to Shanghai]
K: To be a Shanghainese? 6 10:43:43 Rong: 表面上
E: Yeah, and to write in Shanghainese. [on the surface]
K: Yeah, yeah, yeah, really proud [laughs]...And if 7 10:43:47 Rong: RMB升值
on the BBS (discussion forums), uhm, we find a [RMB (Renminbi, official currency in Mainland
person who’s Shanghainese and then we’ll, we’ll China) has gone up in value]
write in Shanghainese, and we’ll feel more, more 8 10:43:54 Rong: 其实都被外国人赚走了
親切 (qin-qie, a sense of closeness) [spoken in
[in fact the profits have gone to people from other
Mandarin]. (interview, August 21, 2007)
countries]
Among the childhood friends that Kaiyee had 9 10:44:04 Kaiyee: 哇哇。你 功 课 老 好 额 嘛
kept in contact with primarily through IM was Rong, [wow. you’re so well-studied]
an 18-year-old young woman who was on the verge of 10 10:44:09 Rong: 报纸看看 新闻看看
entering the workplace during the time of this study.
[just looking up the paper and the news somewhat]
In the IM log record of her exchange with Rong that
Kaiyee shared with us, the topics of conversation ranged 11 10:44:20 Rong: 多了解下形势嘛
from social banter, venting of problems with fam- [to learn more about the situation]
ily members, comments on each other’s recent photos 12 10:44:39 Rong: 多 (对) 以后创业有帮助嘛
that they had exchanged through file sharing on IM,
[it’ll be helpful in the future when I start a
to some serious discussion of the socioeconomic situa-
business]
tion and career opportunities in Shanghai. An excerpt
of Kaiyee’s exchange with Rong dated June 20 is shown 13 10:44:42 Kaiyee: 我都不知道我以后要做什
below. This IM dialogue occurred a few weeks after 么
Rong had graduated from the vocational secondary [i don’t know what i’m going to do in the future]
school in Shanghai where the two young people had 14 10:44:46 Rong: 你 学 什么专业饿
been classmates. Prior to this segment of the exchange,
[what kind of specialty are you studying for]
Kaiyee and Rong had been conversing on the kinds of
jobs that Rong was looking for. Included in the conver- 15 10:44:48 Kaiyee: 老迷茫额
sation was the amount of income that Rong could ex- [it’s all so uncertain]
pect to obtain from the jobs for which she was applying. 16 10:44:51 Rong: 真饿 想做 生 意 的 话 好叫
They both acknowledged that the income range that 说
Rong mentioned was relatively low, and Kaiyee noted
[if you really want to go into business, you’d better
that her cousin in Shanghai was also living on a similar
say it]
income. This observation led to Kaiyee’s remark at the
beginning of the excerpt that it seemed hard to make a 17 10:44:59 Rong: 回来 偶和你一起做
living in Shanghai. In this excerpt, Mandarin is indi- [come back, you and I can be partners]
cated with regular font, and Shanghainese is indicated 18 10:44:59 Kaiyee: 。。。没专业
with larger bold font for the sake of clarity. Glosses of
[。。。no specialty]
emoticons appear in parentheses. The correct form of a
typo is indicated in parentheses in line 12. Translations 19 10:45:01 Rong: 外国来的户籍
appear in brackets. [with foreign residency]

Multiliteracies on Instant Messaging in Negotiating Local, Translocal, and Transnational Affiliation: A Case of an Adolescent Immigrant 391
 20 10:45:06 Rong: 大学生 the sentence one Mandarin word that was used in place
[a college graduate] of a colloquial Shanghainese word, only the individual
characters that were used to represent Shanghainese-
21 10:45:09 Rong: 上 海 的 政 策 老 好 的
specific morphemes are marked as such. Hence, in the
[Shanghai policies look really good] lines where only individual Shanghainese morphemes
22 10:45:15 Rong: 老多优惠饿 are marked, the use of Shanghainese and Mandarin in
[there are lots of benefits] these sentences might actually be much more blended
than is indicated by the markings, as some standard
23 10:45:20 Kaiyee: 是伐？
Chinese characters could also be used to represent
[is that right?] lexical items that are common to both Mandarin and
24 10:45:22 Rong: 恩 Shanghainese.
[mhm] For example, a case of multiple blending is seen in
line 16, where the second clause of the sentence (“好
25 10:45:27 Rong: 一起从小店开始
叫说hoa-jioa-se,” which could be translated as “you’d
[we can start with a small shop] better say it”) and one particle in the first clause (饿 e)
26 10:45:29 Kaiyee: 噶夸张 are markedly Shanghainese. The lexical item in the first
[sounds so incredible] clause that ruled out the interpretation of this clause as
entirely Shanghainese is the second particle in the clause
27 10:45:39 Rong: 就是鼓励外国人来投资吖
(的 de), which is a Mandarin word. The rest of the lexi-
[that’s to encourage people from other countries to cal items in this clause could be read in either Mandarin
come to invest] or Shanghainese. Hence, the exact point(s) in the clause
28 10:45:59 Rong: 10年世博都要开了 where the switch from Shanghainese to Mandarin oc-
[Expo 2010 is just around the corner] curs is not transparent or clear-cut. In fact, the way that
Rong switched between the use of the Shanghainese
29 10:46:09 Kaiyee: 呵呵。那时侯我差不多大学 particle (饿 e) and an equivalent particle in Mandarin
毕业了 -。- (matter-of-fact) (的 de) by first using the Shanghainese particle and then
[ah. by that time i’ll be almost graduating from the Mandarin particle, even in the same clause in line
college] 16, suggests a process of conscious design of blending
30 10:46:13 Rong: 你来上海投资嘛 Shanghainese and Mandarin in these hybrid dialectal
[you come to Shanghai to invest] utterances. Such a form of switching between the two
particles is also seen in the sequential phrases in line 21
31 10:46:17 Rong: 到时候我也有社会经验了 (“老好的 loa-hao-de,” really good) and line 22 (“老多
[ by that time i ’ ll already have some social 优惠饿 loa-tu-yeu-we-e,” lots of benefits).
experience] Of the 200 entries of Kaiyee’s exchange with Rong
that were analyzed, 33 entries contain the use of both
The orthographic conventions that go into the mak- Mandarin and Shanghainese-specific words, and 15 en-
ing of this written dialogue include the following: (a) tries can be read entirely in Shanghainese. The blending
standard Chinese orthography to represent Mandarin; of Shanghainese and Mandarin in their IM exchange
(b) standard and nonstandard orthography to represent suggests a design process to incorporate Shanghainese
Shanghainese; (c) conventions associated with IM and elements in their written communication even though
other forms of electronic discourse, such as the minimal the majority of the text is written in Mandarin, the lan-
use of punctuation, use of spacing in place of punctua- guage through which Kaiyee and Rong acquired litera-
tion, and the adoption of a newly popularized word 偶 cy in China in a sociopolitical environment where the
ou (line 17) for the first-person pronoun in Mandarin Shanghainese dialect was rarely represented in written
that would conventionally be represented as 我 wo. media. The nascent development and popularization
The still nascent form of Shanghainese writing of Shanghainese orthography in electronic discourse
promoted through electronic communication is seen seems to signal the assertion of Shanghainese identity
in the less extensive adoption of Shanghainese writ- among the younger generations, both native residents of
ing in Kaiyee’s exchange with Rong as compared with the city and its diaspora (cf. a news article on sina.com.
the use of Cantonese exemplified in the previous ex- cn, a website in China, entitled “海外年轻人玩转上
cerpt of Kaiyee’s IM dialogue with Dawei. In marking 海方言 [Overseas young people having fun with the
the characters that represent Shanghainese in this and Shanghai dialect]” [Qian, 2005], which describes the
other excerpts, we only marked a whole sentence in an recent rise of the use of the Shanghai dialect in Web-
IM entry as Shanghainese when the sentence could be based electronic communication among both local and
read entirely in Shanghainese. As long as we found in overseas youth of Shanghainese heritage). Through her

392 Reading Research Quarterly • 44(4)

digital practices, Kaiyee was joining these young people in the United States, and transnational social ties with
in the use and propagation of Shanghainese writing and her peers in Shanghai. Such multilayered and dispersed
keeping in contact with new linguistic expressions. social networks are associated with the multiple life-
Through her IM exchanges with her friends and worlds that she had to navigate as she developed and
cousins in Shanghai, Kaiyee was able to gather an un- maintained simultaneous affiliations with diverse so-
derstanding of how these young people, most of whom cial and cultural communities across national borders.
were not able to receive higher education, perceived Through her IM practices that were embedded within
their career and economic prospects within the increas- these communities, Kaiyee accessed and used a range of
ingly competitive job market of Shanghai. In the par- linguistic and semiotic resources in constructing her si-
ticular exchange examined here, Kaiyee is positioned as multaneous affiliations across borders. A transnational
a potential returnee to Shanghai whose perceived privi- view on migration and digital communication, there-
leged status as a future college graduate with foreign fore, provides the analytical vantage point for seeing
citizenship would benefit both Rong and Kaiyee herself how Kaiyee’s multiliteracies development involves par-
in staking out their entrepreneurial careers in Shanghai. ticipating in an expanding set of linguistic and semiotic
Her dual-subject positions as someone who was a native practices associated with diverse communities across
of Shanghai and might “come back” to the city (line 17) her native and adopted societies.
and as someone who has residency rights in another Indeed, Kaiyee’s linguistic and literate iden-
country (line 19), as constructed in the IM text, marks tity cannot be simply encapsulated in our traditional
Kaiyee as a potential transnational actor who could mo- problematic of majority–minority relations or in the
bilize her multiple ties in crafting her future pathway. shuttling between and tension between the dominant
societal language (standard American English) and her
home language (which might easily be interpreted as
a monolithic “Chinese” language rather than the mul-
Discussion and Implications tiple Chinese dialects that she navigated both locally
This study examines how an immigrant youth uses IM and transnationally). Her linguistic and literate rep-
to negotiate social relationships with multiple linguistic ertoire includes standard American English, hip-hop
and cultural communities across countries and how her English, the Shanghainese dialect that she used in her
participation in these multilingual and transgeographic family, Cantonese and Mandarin that predominated
online networks affects her literacy use and learning. As in her immigrant community, and both Mandarin and
an in-depth case analysis, the aim of this study was not Shanghainese that connected her to people and events
to generalize from its findings but to expand and pro- in China, particularly her hometown Shanghai. Such a
vide alternative visions of literacy development and sug- linguistic and literate repertoire is associated with the
gest some productive analytical perspectives for further diverse multilingual mileux experienced by the youth
comparative study, particularly in regard to understand- across local and translocal social spaces.
ing the relation of language and literacy development to Moreover, these languages were often used in mixed
new forms of ethnic and linguistic diversity mediated and blended forms in her IM writing as she navigated
by digital communications. the complex linguistic and semiotic economies within
As discussed earlier in this article, the multilitera- which her social networks were embedded. These lin-
cies perspective has emphasized the need to broaden guistic and semiotic economies include the cachet of
our understanding of literacy to account for the multi- African American Vernacular English and hip-hop ver-
plicity of textual practices associated with cultural and nacular in the multiethnic urban American youth cul-
linguistic diversity and multimedia communication in a ture, the historical dominance of Cantonese in a local
globalizing society. Such diversity of textual practices is Chinese immigrant community that was at the same
particularly salient in transnational contexts, as people time multilingual and multidialectal, and the new as-
negotiate relationships across local and distant territo- sertion of Shanghainese writing in electronic discourse
ries using multiple languages and modes of communi- in a sociopolitical environment where the Shanghainese
cation (Jacquemet, 2005). This study builds upon these dialect had been suppressed as a medium of literacy.
perspectives by examining the multiliteracies that are Hence, the multiliteracies of Kaiyee’s IM practices in-
developed in the context of transnational migration and volve not only crisscrossing multiple digital interfaces,
digitally mediated networks. Our analysis of the case of genres (adolescent banter, rapprochement, career talk),
the focal youth shows the diverse sets of networks that and modes of communication (verbal and visual modal-
she developed and sustained through IM and other on- ities, different networking and technological platforms)
line media—networks that include her local peer group as observed by researchers of digital literacy (Kress,
in a Chinese immigrant community, online affinity re- 2003; Lewis & Fabos, 2005) but also reading and
lations with English-speaking Asian American youths writing across these surfaces, genres, and modes with

Multiliteracies on Instant Messaging in Negotiating Local, Translocal, and Transnational Affiliation: A Case of an Adolescent Immigrant 393
respect to the multiple linguistic and cultural communi- textual resources are derived from diverse linguistic and
ties, each with its prevalent and valued forms of linguis- cultural communities across national borders. We also
tic and semiotic practices, in which she participated. need to consider how these textual resources mediate
Given our analysis of Kaiyee’s negotiation of the young people’s access to different kinds of knowledge
complex semiotic practices in her digital networks that come from diverse communities across local and
across countries, I suggest that for further development translocal spaces. In the case of the focal youth, her
in our understanding of language and literacy learn- textual exchanges on IM with her peers in China had
ing among migrant and multilingual youths, research- enabled her to maintain interpersonal relationships and
ers would need to take into account translocal forms of keep abreast of the social and economic changes in her
multilingualism mediated by networked technologies hometown across long distances. Her digitally mediated
and an expanded view of the literate repertoire and cul- textual activities were also used to facilitate her ability
tural resources of migrant youth. to navigate across the multiple communities that she af-
filiated with in the United States, including her local
Translocal Multilingualism and Literate community and an urban youth environment.
An expanded view of the literate or textual resourc-
Repertoire Across Borders es of young people of migrant backgrounds would lead
Building on prior research of literacy practices in trans- us to reconsider how our educational practices may en-
national contexts of migration, as discussed previously hance the literacy development of these young people
in this article, this case study of a Chinese migrant and leverage their linguistic and cultural repertoire as
youth shows that the linguistic and literate repertoire resources for learning. In other words, how may we
of this youth needs to be understood not only with re- envisage literacy education that recognizes the affilia-
spect to the local migrant community with which she tions that young people of migrant backgrounds have
was affiliated but also in relation to her transnational with diverse linguistic and cultural communities and
connections and social ties. At the same time, this youth promotes their ability to draw from the social and tex-
was developing and enacting her social and symbolic tual resources in these communities for their learning?
affiliations with the pan-ethnic category of Asians and This question is especially pertinent among youth who
multiethnic urban youth culture in American society bring with them experiences and perspectives that are
through an online affinity environment. An important derived from their multiple identifications across coun-
finding of this study is that the multilayered and mul- tries, although these experiences and perspectives often
tilingual identifications of this youth across social and go unacknowledged in our educational institutions. As
geographical spaces were maintained and developed si- Lo Bianco (2000) suggested, “Like spoken language, di-
multaneously through the use of multiple semiotic and versity in the plural literacy practices of minority chil-
communication tools. In other words, what we see in dren is often relegated to the margins of their lives. Yet
the case of this youth is that a digital medium, like IM, they have within them the power to open up new intel-
works in conjunction with other modes and contexts lectual worlds which are, at the moment, linguistically
of communication—face-to-face exchanges with her lo- and intellectually closed to us” (p. 101).
cal peers, the history of relationship with her peers and The intellectualization of the cross-border and mul-
family in Shanghai, online game and discussion forums tilingual resources of migrant students is especially
with her Asian American peers and online friends in relevant in the context of a networked society. As dis-
China—to constitute a dispersed set of multilingual cussed earlier, a range of researchers of new media and
networks from which the youth developed various so- literacy have pointed out that the literacy associated
cial and linguistic resources that are functional in her with knowledge making in our contemporary world is
life. Such synchronic movement across social networks increasingly mediated digitally through various kinds
also represents the desire of the youth to develop the lit- of social, cultural, and semiotic networks (e.g., Gee,
erate repertoire that would enable her to thrive in mul- 2007; Jenkins, 2006; Lankshear & Knobel, 2007; Luke,
tiple cultural and linguistic communities and mobilize 2003). In particular, building on the work of technol-
resources within these communities. ogy theorist Michael Schrage (2001), Lankshear and
The increased intensity and expanded scale of mul- Knobel argued that digital technologies may be better
tilingual transactions that are carried out in tandem conceived as enabling new forms of relationship to de-
across local and translocal settings and diverse com- velop rather than simply providing access to vast bodies
municative media provide the context for rethinking of information. In other words, the value of the Internet
the kinds of literate resources or “funds of knowledge” and new technologies may lie less in their myriad arrays
(González, Moll, & Amanti, 2005) that young people of of searchable information and more in their potential to
migrant backgrounds may bring to our schools. We need enable the (re)designing and (re)configuring of social
a broadened understanding of how these young people’s relationships to facilitate new ways of producing and

394 Reading Research Quarterly • 44(4)

sharing knowledge. As we have seen, the youth in this mediated literacy practices in different migratory con-
study was already using digital media to facilitate her texts. In cases where a lack of technological infra-
participation in multiple social and cultural communi- structure or close personal ties to the place of origin
ties across borders and to design her relational networks (especially for youth who migrated at an early age) limit
to gather linguistic and semiotic resources. A pedagogy the extent to which these youth engage in direct inter-
that draws on the multilayered affiliations and literate personal communication across borders, researchers
repertoire of youth migrants like Kaiyee would need to could explore how some of these youth participate in
consider how these social, cultural, and semiotic net- transnational online activities through accessing social
works can be mobilized to enhance learning. and information websites based in their native countries
Although this study does not provide an empiri- (J.S. Lee, 2006). Among youth who are second genera-
cal basis for offering pedagogical recommendations, I tion or migrated early in life, there is some indication
would simply venture briefly to speculate that one pos- from sociological and media studies (H.M. Lee, 2006;
sible approach to redesigning social relationships to pro- Panagakos, 2003) that their transnational digital net-
mote knowledge making is to leverage the cross-border works may be more dispersed across a wider migrant
social networks and multilingual literate repertoire of diaspora than simply clear bilateral ties between the
youth migrants as intellectual resources for approach- countries of origin and settlement. Hence, empirical
ing problems from multiple perspectives or vantage studies with a diverse range of participants would pro-
points. Such an approach would involve a transnational vide a broader picture of the transnational character of
framing of relevant curriculum topics (e.g., immigra- the literacy practices of youth migrants and children of
tion, the global economy, environmental health) that immigrants. These and other investigations of the litera-
would allow students to mobilize their developing skills cies of transnational digital communications of migrant
in multiple languages to learn about these issues from youth hold the potential to expand our vision of how
various local, translocal, and transnational points of young people of diverse backgrounds are engaging with
view. We could ask students to gather perspectives on new media technologies and to contribute to the design
how these issues are affecting the diverse communities of pedagogies that leverage the linguistic and semiotic
with which they are affiliated in the local setting; how resources of these young people to make literacy educa-
these issues are represented in the U.S. media; and how tion not only more relevant to the experiences of trans-
they are portrayed in the print, satellite television, and national and multilingual youth but more relevant to a
online news media in the students’ countries of origin globalized future that many youth will be living in.
and perceived through the experience of the students’
friends and relatives in those countries. Other schol- Notes
ars of immigration and education have also noted the What I call an entry here is a typed message that is transmitted
1

when a user hits the return key on the computer. It is the most
importance of drawing on the transnational experience
basic message unit that is brought to the attention of one’s IM part-
and multilingual skills of immigrant students to enlarge ner and that may prompt a response from the partner. Others who
the range of perspectives and textual resources that are approach IM discourse from perspectives of conversation analysis
used for knowledge making in a global era (Sánchez, have called this message unit a “turn” (Baron, 2004) or an “utter-
2007b; Suárez-Orozco & Sattin, 2007). ance” (Jones & Schieffelin, 2009). Because there are messages that
may only contain an iconic representation (e.g., a smiley or emoti-
Further research conducted at diverse geographi- con, or an ellipsis that indicates pause or hesitation), the status of
cal sites with participants who come from a variety these messages as utterances in a conversational sense is debatable.
of migratory backgrounds, nationalities, ethnicities, Given that the focus of analysis of the IM exchanges in this article
socioeconomic statuses, and genders would allow us is on linguistic and orthographic representation rather than con-
to understand the different ways and extent to which versational turn-taking, I use the term entry as a basis for a quanti-
tative description of the number of message units of IM exchanges
youth migrants negotiate transnational relationships that were included in the study. I use the term subsequently in this
and literacy practices through the use of new commu- article when I discuss the extent of presence of particular linguistic
nication technologies. Although migrants residing in and orthographic features across a corpus of message units.
industrialized nations may enjoy relatively convenient Kaiyee used the pinyin method to input Chinese characters on the
2

and affordable access to the Internet, their likelihood of computer, as did many of her peers who came from China and had
learned the pinyin system of romanization for Mandarin early on
communicating across countries is also dependent on in their schooling. Common pinyin implementations on the com-
the extent to which their friends and family living else- puter allow the user to input Chinese characters by entering the
where can gain access to the attendant mode of com- pinyin of a Chinese character and then presenting the user with a
munication technology. Hence, comparative studies of list of characters with that pronunciation that are prioritized based
youth migrants who originate from different countries on the linguistic context of the sentence and prior usage statistics.
Because the pinyin method is available on many widely used com-
and different parts of a country (e.g., rural vs. urban) puter operating systems, Kaiyee could switch the language mode
with varying technological infrastructures would shed of an IM message from English to Chinese with the touch of a con-
light on the constraints and opportunities of digitally trol key. Kaiyee used the pinyin method as well to enter characters

Multiliteracies on Instant Messaging in Negotiating Local, Translocal, and Transnational Affiliation: A Case of an Adolescent Immigrant 395
 for the other Chinese dialects (Cantonese and Shanghainese) that Dyson, A.H., & Genishi, C. (2005). On the case: Approaches to lan-
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pinyin contains most of the characters in these dialects. A newly Erickson, F. (1986). Qualitative methods in research on teaching. In
designed input method based on Shanghainese romanization was M. Wittrock (Ed.), Handbook of research on teaching (3rd ed., pp.
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Academy of Education postdoctoral fellowship. Any opinions, find-
Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
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Multiliteracies on Instant Messaging in Negotiating Local, Translocal, and Transnational Affiliation: A Case of an Adolescent Immigrant 397