Multiliteracies on Instant Messaging in Negotiating Local, Translocal, and Transnational Affiliations: A Case of an Adolescent Immigrant

I n recent years, there has been an increasing amount of research devoted to understanding how young people are incorporating digital media into their everyday lives and the kinds of literacy learning and socialization that take place with the use of new media (e. of literacy and socialization with new media has dealt relatively little with young people whose first language is not English or who have allegiances to multiple linguistic communities, despite their current demographic importance in the United States. Although digital media, and the Internet in particular, has been conceived as a global technology that provides social and information linkages across geographical space, research has rarely examined the technoliteracy practices that young people of migrant backgrounds use to develop and maintain social relationships and affiliations across countries. This is despite the fact that migrancy and new forms of media and technologies are both indicative of larger patterns of globalization and transnationalization of our societies suggested in regard to research of literacy learning among migrant students, not only is the transnational character of literacy in these students' lives an underexplored area of research, but also such literacy is " increasingly shaped by the potential and the continuously shifting realities created by newer forms of technology, particularly those that extend our communicative reach " (pp. 124–125). In this article, I present a case study derived from a larger qualitative comparative study of the transnational digital literacy practices of immigrant youth of Chinese descent. The central research questions in the larger inquiry are as follows: (a) How do migrant youth of Chinese origin use digital media to negotiate social relationships with diverse linguistic and cultural communities across countries? and (b) How does participation in multilingual and transgeographic online networks affect youths' literacy use and learning; in particular, how are diverse linguistic resources mobilized to develop social networks across countries? This case study presents analysis of the use of instant messaging (IM) by an adolescent Through an in-depth case study of the instant messaging practices of an adolescent girl who had migrated to the United States from China, this qualitative investigation examines the development of multiliteracies in the context of transna-tional migration and new media of communication. Data consisted of screen recordings of the youth's digital practices, interviews, and observations. Data analyses included qualitative coding procedures and orthographic analysis of the use of multiple dialects and languages in the youth's instant messaging …