“Thanks, shokran, gracias”: Translingual practices in a Facebook group

Abstract

The affordances associated with networked multilingualism (Androutsopoulos, 2015) have led social media scholars to replace traditional notions of code-switching with broader concepts such as translingual practices. In an attempt to further our understanding of online multilingual linguistic practices in the context of educational telecollaboration, we examined a series of interactions taken from a larger online ethnography of a global community of English as a foreign language (EFL) educators. We describe and illustrate how, when, and why participants drew on their multilingual repertoires within a Facebook group, created by two EFL teachers for their students and where English served as the primary shared linguistic resource. Taking a computer-mediated discourse analytic approach to analyzing data that included a total of 1,206 posts and comments on the group’s Facebook page, ethnographic interviews with the teachers, and online documents from their telecollaboration, we found that although this group was discursively constructed as an English-only zone by the teachers for their students to practice English, all participants—especially the teachers—eventually broke this rule, as they drew on both Spanish and Arabic for a variety of purposes, such as selecting an addressee, establishing solidarity, and modeling intercultural sensitivity.