Multilingual Families in a Digital Age: Mediational Repertoires and Transnational Practices

ISBN-13: 9781032130248 / Angielski / Twarda / 2023 / 224 str.

Kristin Vold Lexander; Jannis Androutsopoulos

Opis

This book offers new insights into transnational family life in today’s digital age, exploring the media resources and language practices parents and children employ toward maintaining social relationships in digital interactions and constructing transnational family bonds and identities.

The book seeks to expand the boundaries of existing research on family multilingualism, in which digital communication has been little studied until now. Drawing on ethnographic studies of four families of Senegalese background in Norway, Lexander and Androutsopoulos develop an integrated approach which weaves together participants’ linguistic choices for situated interaction, the affordances of digital technologies, and the families’ language and media ideologies. The book explores such key themes as the integration of linguistic and media resources in family repertoires, creative practices of digital translanguaging, engagement in diaspora practices, and opportunities of digital communication for the development of children's heritage language skills.

With an innovative perspective on ‘doing family’ in the digital age, this book will be of interest to students and scholars in multilingualism, sociolinguistics, digital communication, language and communication, and language and media.

Recenzje

"This book crackles with innovation and promises a new future in multilingual family communication research.  Lexander and Androutsopoulos provide detailed discussions on how to document, analyze, and visualize the multilingual, multimodal repertoires of Senegalese diasporic family communication, highlighting digital communication as a “key enabler” of transnational family life."  -  Lyn Wright, Professor of Applied Linguistics/TESOL, University of Memphis, USA

"This timely book provides a much-needed empirical study of language and media practices in transnational families. Using four Senegalese families in Norway as a case in point, the authors examine how these transnational families engage with a wide range of semiotic resources, including multiple languages and media platforms, in the act of ‘doing family.’ The book provides a new integrated theoretical perspective, mediational repertoire, to understand the interactional dynamics underlying family relationships. This book is a definite must-read for researchers, students, and practitioners who work with family, language and media in cross-disciplinary contexts." - Xiao Lan Curdt-Christiansen, Professor of Applied Linguistics in Education, University of Bath, UK