Korean Middle School EFL Emergent Bilinguals’ Transactional Meaning-Making Regarding Multiculturalism through Translanguaging in Book Club Discussions

This case study explores how middle school EFL emergent bilinguals transact with a multicultural picturebook, The Name Jar, and how they make sense of diversity and multiculturalism in translingual book club discussions. This study also aims to push back against the common misconception that secondary EFL emergent bilinguals are English learners with limited proficiency and thus with limited meaning-making repertoires to transact with literature written in English. Appreciating the participating Korean middle school EFL emergent bilinguals’ creative meaning-making repertoires based on translanguaging or intermixing named languages and semiotic repertoires enabled the participants to traverse between Korean, their developing English, and visual and verbal modes. Such a non-threatening classroom environment also encouraged the participants to easily reconnect themselves to their sociocultural knowledge, past and present, thereby boosting the social nexus activated within the live circuit built between the participants and the picturebook. A series of book club discussions regarding identity crisis as a linguistic and racial minority also prompted the participants to imagine alternative perspectives and possibilities of their realities and the society.