Chapter 5: Translanguaging as a (Meta)Cognitive Tool for Navigating and Learning in the Multilingual Online Environment

In this chapter, we challenge the common perception of English centrism in the online world, acknowledging the increasingly diverse situations of digital literacy practices in a today’s multilingual environment (Barton & Lee, 2013; Lee, 2017). Our critique of such linguistic status-quo is motivated by the idea of multilingual online users’ complex translanguaging practices. Informed by resource approaches to the pedagogy of language and literacy, we view translanguaging as a metacognitive tool that is useful and valuable to learners in a multilingual online setting. To describe the nature of translanguaging situated in online reading, we use bilingual students’ think-aloud data from our empirical study of adolescent bilingual learners’ use of comprehension strategies and translanguaging strategies in online reading. The verbal excerpts represent how the learners use their two languages as they identify and learn from multilingual texts online. We close the chapter with a discussion of scientific and pedagogical implications for translanguaging as a tool for learning and relevant literacy practices on the multilingual digital media environment.