Multilingual interaction in chat rooms: translanguaging to learn and learning to translanguage

Abstract

In this chapter, we analyse the co-construction of meaning by university students in romance language (RL) chat rooms, in an online platform focused on multilingual language practice and learning. This communicative situation can best be described through the concept of ‘intercomprehension’, i.e. a multilingual and multisemiotic communicative practice between speakers of different languages (in this case, typologically related languages), and will be analysed using a translanguaging lens, which is embedded in a heteroglossic perspective. Such an analysis invites us to perceive fluidity in the borders between languages and inside individuals’ repertoires. In this particular multilingual learning situation, where participants communicate to learn and learn to communicate in RL chat rooms, we will observe speakers’ double orientation towards translanguaging, i.e. the interconnection between ‘translanguaging to learn’ and ‘learning to translanguage’. The results demonstrate a strategic use of translanguaging skills (with specific affective, cognitive and social goals), together with the subjects’ explicit agency when engaged in intercomprehensive communicative practices.