The Visual and Multimodal Research Forum is a student run platform for academic discussion on multimodality and open to all postgraduate research students and other researchers at UCL Institute of Education and elsewhere. Participation is free. Please contact Sophia Diamantopoulou, Forum Coordinator, at sdiamantopoulou@ioe.ac.uk for any queries.

Date: Tuesday 12th of July, 5:00-6:30 pm

Venue: UCL Knowledge Lab, 23-29 Emerald Street, WC1N 3QS

Work in progress seminar: Using a multimodal approach to investigate translanguaging in online Chinese learning

Jenifer Ho, PhD Student in Applied Linguistics, UCL Institute of Education

Online language learning platforms are now highly popular. With significant parts of these platforms being available for free to anyone with Internet access they have considerable impact on foreign language learning. In this session I will present a multimodal approach (Kress, 2010) to research how two learners of Chinese remember the form, meaning, and pronunciation of Chinese characters in two online language learning platforms: Memrise and ChinesePod. Through screen recordings and interviews the study documents two types of learning practices of 12 participants over a period of 4 weeks. By adopting a multimodal approach to data collection and analysis, I illustrate how learners use translanguaging as a process to help scaffold their learning. While a lot of studies in translanguaging focus on linguistic practices in multilingual classrooms, only a number of them examine translanguaging in written form in online contexts, therefore there is a need for the use of new research methodologies to research this kind of new environment. This study aims to open a new venue for research and challenge existing understanding on language learning.