Weaving Love and Grief: Korean High School Students’ Meaning Making Journeys through Translingual and Dialogic Practices with a Picturebook

This case study illustrates how translanguaging and dialogism can be enacted in Korean English language teaching (ELT) through literature written in English. Forty-five 10th-grade Korean high school emergent bilinguals engaged with The Rough Patch, a picturebook depicting themes of love, grief, and healing, across five 50-minute English classroom sessions that I taught. Guided by translingual (Korean-English) and dialogic practices, students discussed the visual and textual elements of the picturebook, and later produced creative written responses that blended Korean, English, and visual images. These written responses revealed how these emergent bilinguals grappled with love, loss, and grief as evolving and interwoven emotions, demonstrating the capacity of translanguaging and dialogic classroom practices to deepen literary engagement. By situating translanguaging and dialogism as pedagogical practices, this study challenges the dominance of monolingual norms in Korean ELT, where correctness and Standard English are often prioritized. The findings suggest that when emergent bilinguals’ meaning making repertoires are recognized as legitimate resources, literature classrooms can move beyond narrow linguistic aims to foster empathy, recognition, and creative possibility, offering a model for bridging theory and practice in ELT contexts.