An Examination of Translingual Practices on a Mobile Application

Abstract

This article reports Korean speakers’ experiences with naturally occurring translingual transliterations in a noneducational online contact zone to support improvement of English pronunciation. Use of the Korean and English alphabets in pronunciation transliterations and application users’ meaning-making are analyzed using Canagarajah’s (2013) macrotranslingual strategies for negotiation. Findings show that the nonstandard transliterations could easily deliver pronunciations to a broad audience and stimulate the participation of users, who draw on diverse resources to strategically negotiate their footings to make meaning, often referring to their linguistic knowledge or experiences in certain countries. Patterns around transliteration and negotiation suggest two major implications for classroom pronunciation instruction: using students’ existing resources to address crucial features of intelligibility such as vowel quality and suprasegmental features in transliterations, in addition to segmentals, and eliciting students’ active involvement in meaning construction. Furthermore, English teachers might challenge their students’ acceptance of prevalent monolingual standards in pronunciation and establish their translingual sensitivity to cultural/linguistic diversity.