Scaled semiotic resources in informal learning on Chinese social networking sites

1 Introduction

In the globalized internet age, school as the traditional and powerful agent of formal education is no longer the sole one. Formal learning environments such as schools increasingly have to compete with informal ones, as digitalized media greatly intensify informal learning and offer an important site for accessing information, acquiring knowledge, and sharing ideas with people around the globe (Dong and Blommaert 2016). This new type of learning is gaining prominence in China as mobile technology and social networking sites (SNSs) become more widely accessible and virtually ubiquitously popular in Chinese society. WeChat, the most popular SNS in China, has a strikingly huge body of users and has become one of the most important channels of information and communication for ordinary Chinese people. According to the “2019 WeChat Statistics Report,” the number of monthly active WeChat users grew to over 1.15 billion up to September 2019 (WeChat 2020). Apart from its function in interpersonal communication, WeChat has also consolidated the function of disseminating information and knowledge, and has increasingly become a major virtual space for young people to learn new knowledge and ideas. This kind of informal learning is mainly happening through the popular online platform called WeChat public accounts, which specialize in certain fields of knowledge, such as childcare and parenting, which caters to young or novice parents. According to WeChat official statistics, parenting is the favorite theme in public accounts of all kinds among middle-aged WeChat users (WeChat 2020). Some of such public accounts are very influential, with a huge number of subscribers/readers. They publish numerous articles on issues related to childcare, parenting, children’s English learning and other hot topics in which young and middle-aged parents are interested, so their influence on the practices and values of family education in current Chinese society cannot be ignored.

This study is based on three popular WeChat public accounts on parenting and education, especially on English learning, all of which are run by elite Chinese nationals living in Western, English-speaking countries such as the UK and the USA. Since the global mobility of people also involves the mobility of linguistic and sociolinguistic resources (Blommaert 2010: 4), the resources these public accounts holders have and bring across borders acquire indexical meanings and values which become essential for their great popularity among novice parents in China. Drawing on Blommaert’s (2010) conception of scaled resources, this study aims to uncover the patterns of semiotic resources mobilized by the WeChat public accounts to persuade their readers of their ideas on parenting and children’s English education and the ideologies underlying these ideas.

2 Resources, mobility, and scale

Blommaert (2010) places resources in a very important position in his sociolinguistics of globalization. He claimed, “I categorically opt for a sociolinguistics of resources, not of languages, and mobility is a central theoretical concern in this sociolinguistics of resources” (Blommaert 2010: 21). When people move across the globe, they bring their own cultural and religious practices, as well as linguistic and semiotic resources. When a language travels across localities and time, it can never be understood in exactly the same way as in its original sense. Mobility as “the dislocation of language and language events from the fixed position in time and space,” in effect, serves to insert language in “a spectrum of human action” which bears not only specific characteristics of certain spatial and temporal conditions, but also the imprinting of a whole set of “temporal and spatial trajectories” (Blommaert 2010: 21). In other words, language in mobility is not a static, stable, fixed, or homogenous thing as conceptualized in the more traditional linguistics and sociolinguistics such as Saussurean synchronic linguistics, but a kind of dynamic and heterogeneous semiotic practice deeply influenced by both the TimeSpace (a single dimension which locks together time and space in Wallerstein’s definition, cited in Blommaert 2010: 34) it is currently in and by all those it has come across. That is, language in mobility, as a kind of social action, has a social-historical dimension.

When languages as mobile resources move across places and time periods, they are, in effect, moving “through spaces which is filled with codes, norms and expectations” (Blommaert 2010: 32), that is, they move through different scales. Here Blommaert borrowed the notion of scale from the theoretical toolkit of World-Systems Analysis to refer to the layered nature of the semiotized space continuum that social events and processes occur in. The concept of scale offers us a vertical image of space as “stratified and therefore power-invested,” and “allows us to see sociolinguistic phenomena as non-unified in relation to a stratified, non-unified image of social structure” (Blommaert 2010: 34). In other words, scales should be understood as levels or dimensions “at which particular forms of normativity, patterns of language use and expectations thereof are organized” (Blommaert 2010: 36). It is a metaphor of social, historical, political, cultural, and ideological TimeSpace.

Linguistic and semiotic resources are scaled on different levels, some lower and some higher. Lower scales are momentary, local, and situated TimeSpace, whereas higher scales are timeless, translocal, and widespread (see Table 1). In social interactions, speakers with their semiotic resources could jump from one scale-level to another, for example, from the personal to the more collective, or from temporal to timeless, or from local to global, or vice versa. In the process of scale-shifts, TimeSpace is resemiotized and indexical meanings emerge. That is, when moving across TimeSpaces, interlocutors are involved in scale-jumpings which “provide rich indexicals for aspects of a real or imagined social order” (Blommaert 2010: 35).

In such a layered, stratified model of society, jumping across scales does not happen equally or indistinguishably to everyone. Power and inequality are at play. Semiotic resources are controlled and ordered by people’s place in the world or society. In this sense, their resources are “placed” in that they betray the locality from where they are drawn and in which they fit (Blommaert 2010: 101). The privileged individuals and groups have more access to various types of resources, and hence better opportunities to engage in scale-jumps across spaces.

The concept of scaled semiotic resources and the indexicality invoked by scale-jumping are highly relevant in the current study, because the semiotic resources in the parenting public accounts as informal learning sites move across TimeSpaces through SNS – virtual vs. real worlds, Chinese vs. English-speaking countries – and probably produce rich indexical meanings. Therefore, this study investigates the semiotic resources on different scales in the public accounts and analyzes how they are involved in the process of knowledge construction and dissemination, and what indexical meaning and values are invoked in the process.

3 Review of studies on semiotic resources in mobility

The contemporary large flows of people, languages, commodities, cultural practices, and knowledge across spatial, social, and real/virtual spaces are affecting the semiotic patterns of social representation. Therefore, the way semiotic resources interact in mobility needs more scholarly attention. However, there have generally been few studies on the semiotic resources used in contexts of mobility in the globalized world. Existing studies on semiotic resources have been conducted mostly in the educational domain, focusing on the functions and patterns of semiotic resources in various kinds of classrooms as a fixed, stable space (see, for example, Bjorkvall and Engblom 2010; Danielsson 2016; Heller 2016; Hultin and Westman 2018; Ranker 2014a, 2014b). Only a handful of studies have examined the scaled semiotic resources used by particular social groups in real-life situations marked by transnational or national mobility, such as immigrants, migrants, and international students. For example, Shin (2012) examined the ways wealthy Korean students in Toronto mobilize semiotic resources as strategies of distinction. Kozminska (2021) examined the intersection of ethnicity, class, and gender in situated acts of identification of Polish-speaking migrants in the UK. The most relevant study, with the present one, is Dong and Blommaert (2016), which focused on the use of semiotic resources by a group of elite migrants in China in an informal learning environment. They used the concept of scaled semiotic resources to explain the patterns of their middle-class identity negotiation through engaging in informal learning about cultural goods on global websites and SNSs. In general, these studies demonstrate that notions of “global,” “national,” and “local” linguistic, cultural, and semiotic resources can be transformed under the material, technological and semiotic conditions of globalization and its structures of stratification and inequality.

While these studies have shed some light on the functions and strategic use of semiotic resources in the identity construction of particular social groups, the scaled semiotic resources in informal learning in web media as an important site of knowledge provision and transmission remain largely unexplored. Informal learning, different from formal learning, which imposes higher thresholds and stricter assessment, depends more on individuals’ voluntary selection and willingness to share with their social circle. Successful operation of informal learning platforms in the webified, globalized world thus requires a larger degree of semiotic and ideological manipulation to foster customer loyalty and build larger readerships. This requirement is becoming increasingly prominent as mobile technology further affects the technological, semiotic, and ideological boundaries of informal learning as a social action.

The present study contributes to this research by examining how public accounts on parenting and education run by diasporic Chinese elites on Chinese SNSs deploy various semiotic resources on the local and personal, national, and global scales to construct legitimate knowledge and the image of expert-parents. After a general description of the shared patterns of the three public accounts, I will demarcate the semiotic resources into three scale-levels – personal and local scale, national scale, and global scale – following Blommaert’s (2010) notion of scaled semiotic resources. Then an elaboration on the semiotic resources on the three scales will be given. A close examination of semiotic resources allows me to demonstrate how in the mobile world of technologically mediated informal learning, power and inequality are at work to invoke intended indexical meanings and reproduce a stratified social structure.

4 This study

The data of this study are from three popular WeChat public accounts on parenting and education, especially on English learning. Their public account titles are “大J小D” (big J little D), “说说咱家娃” (talk about our kids), and “婴幼儿英语启蒙” (English initiation education for infants and young children). The last one changed its name to “安可妈妈亲子阅读” (Anke’s mom parent–child reading) in August 2021 while this study was in progress. Their registration information shows that the first two accounts are enterprise accounts, whereas the last one is a personal account. The different operational nature of the public accounts may explain the size of readership they attract: the first two accounts have a much larger number of subscribers than the third.

All three public accounts are run by elite Chinese living in Western, English-speaking countries such as the USA and the UK. This is not accidental. As a matter of fact, as the analysis in the next section will show, the experience in the English-speaking countries is a major advantage for them to circulate their ideas on education, since these countries have long been regarded as the most developed and advanced countries in the world. They have a huge number of subscribers, and almost every article published on their accounts have been read by over tens of thousands of people.

In the course of my research, I have followed these public accounts for over four years and read most of their articles and updates, providing me with deep familiarity with their ideas about parenting and education and their writing styles. The data for this study were collected and processed as follows:

• Step 1: All the articles published on the three public accounts were collected for a time period of 5 years from August 2016 to August 2021.

• Step 2: All advertorials and articles unrelated to parenting and education (such as marriage and housework) were excluded. Only the articles concerning parenting and education were included in the data. Special attention is given to articles on children’s English learning.

• Step 3: The articles in the data were carefully read and analyzed for this study, with a special focus on the semiotic resources on different scales the writers used. In the analysis, the trichotomy of local (personal), national, and global scale is drawn upon to demarcate the scaled semiotic resources. The semantic nature of the scales determines that the analysis is a content analysis.

A first cursory reading allowed me to find the common discoursal features and strategies in the three public accounts, for example, remarkably frequent reference to their personal experience with their own children, highlighting their educational background, citing the opinion of professors and pediatricians, and so on. The features are often realized through a combination of multiple semiotics modes, including Chinese texts, English texts, pictures, videos, and more which are all considered as semiotic resources in Blommaert’s (2010) sociolinguistics. In the second reading, these features were grouped into the three scale-levels mentioned above, and their indexical meanings and values were analyzed in context. In order to mitigate subjectivity in the content analysis, I performed the analysis twice: once in August 2021, and a second time in January 2022. The results of the two analyses were compared and integrated in the final writing-up.

5 Results

5.2 Semiotic resources on three scale-levels

In their articles, the writers deploy various semiotic resources, including images, verbal texts, audio, video, etc., to provide parenting knowledge to Chinese readers and also make their ideas convincing and attractive to the audience. These resources operate at different scale-levels which index “a stratified, non-unified image of social structure” (Blommaert 2010: 34). When the resources move across national boundaries and the real/virtual boundary in the SNS, the original forms of normativity and semiotic patterns that belong to specific scales are reorganized and resemiotized and produce rich indexical meaning. Specifically, the analysis reveals three scale-levels on which the semiotic resources operate and indexicality emerges, the local and personal scale, the national scale, and the global scale. The following section will elaborate on each scale of the semiotic resources.

5.2.1 Semiotic resources on the local and personal scale

In this study the most remarkable kinds of semiotic resources that acquire indexical meaning and values when moving across different TimeSpaces occur on the local and personal scale. The public account writers take advantage of objects and experiences in their daily life in the host country to construct the so-called knowledge and create a positive impression for the Chinese readers by invoking curiosity and establishing credibility, among other strategies. For instance, the learning materials and schoolwork of their children at local schools in the host countries are often used in their articles as evidence for their educational beliefs or as resources for English learning. The following picture in Figure 1 is a piece of homework of the writer’s son at a local school from an article by Chengzi about the sharp difference between Canadian and Chinese education. By showing the homework, which had illegible writing and noticeable spelling errors but still got teacher’s positive feedback, the writer constructed an image of Canadian education that does not emphasize standardization or rote memorization but strives to protect children’s motivation to learn. This “free” educational philosophy is admired by many Chinese who have experienced negative feelings in the rigid exam-oriented Chinese education system. Therefore, this piece of homework, along with a series of others, forms authentic, and hence valid and powerful, evidence for the author’s opinion on Canadian education in Chinese readers’ eyes.

Figure 1:

An example of a child’s homework in a Canadian school.

Figure 2 is from an article by Zheng. It shows a sign in a garden in the writer’s host country which reads “caution trip hazard.” The word “hazard” was the focus of discussion in that article, because the author was claiming that it was included in her English teaching. This sign was actually one of the eleven examples the writer used to endorse her English course by purporting that all the vocabulary she was teaching was authentic in the daily life in English-speaking countries. Other examples include various ordinary materials from everyday life in the UK, such as a snack package, a weekly newsletter from her child’s school, a sign about the discount policy at a used-furniture shop, a donation sign in a supermarket, a school-bus regulation, a schoolwork record, among others. These objects are mundane in their original TimeSpace frame – the local daily routines of a developed Anglophone country, and do not carry special value, either intellectual or economic. However, in the context of globalization and webification, when they are brought across national boundaries and the real/virtual line to be exposed to readers of an informal learning site in China as a developing Asian country, they move across semiotized spaces in which new indexical meaning and values are generated. These otherwise ordinary objects become involved in a process of knowledge construction and consumption in which English is a highly valued intellectual and semiotic commodity, and especially the varieties of English in the inner circle such as the USA and the UK have the highest prestige. These objects, pitched as authentic resources of English education, are welcome by the readers in China as a typical expanding circle country where chances of real-life English communication and of traveling and studying abroad are still scarce for the majority of the population.

Figure 2:

A sign in a garden in London.

Everyday life in a developed, English-speaking country makes a huge, advantageous resource repertoire for the Chinese public account holders writing on the topic of child education, especially with regard to English learning. Articles on the school life of their children in these host countries constitute a large percentage of their most popular hits. In the following are some examples of the article titles which highlight the everyday experience in the host countries. The translation and the number of views are given in the brackets. A more elaborate (but still far from complete) list is given in Appendix 2.

《美国老师训练大脑的方法, 竟然是做一张这样的卡片 … 》

‘The method American teachers use to train the brain is to make a card like this … ’ (Jessica, 2018-01-25, 65000 views)

《这家纽约幼儿园只做一件事, 却大幅提高孩子专注力》

‘This New York kindergarten does only one thing, but it greatly improves children’s concentration.’ (Jessica, 2020-05-21, 56000 views)

《没想到去个美国夏令营, 竟还偷师了这些育儿秘诀》

‘I never thought I’d take away these parenting tips from going to an American summer camp.’ (Jessica, 2019-09-05, 55000 views)

《没想到, 亲子阅读中最大的难点, 女儿幼儿园用“五根手指”解决了》

‘I never thought that the biggest difficulty in parent–child reading would be solved with “five fingers” in my daughter’s kindergarten.’ (Jessica, 2020-08-18, 99000 views)

《一个加拿大一年级小学生的废柴日常, 让老母亲焦虑到崩溃》

‘The scatty daily routine of a Canadian first-grader makes his old mother anxious to the point of collapse.’ (Chengzi, 2018-06-05, 100000+ views)

《老师居然严禁我陪孩子写作业 加拿大私校第一次家长会归来汇报》

‘The teacher forbade me from doing homework with my child: Report after my first parent–teacher conference at a Canadian private school.’ (Chengzi, 2018-09-07, 63000 views)

《加拿大的“编程夏令营”都学了什么?不能怪老父亲用力过猛, 只因熊孩子的乌龙太多》

‘What do children learn at a Canadian “coding summer camp”?’ (Chengzi, 2021-08-02, 23000 views)

《活久见, 居然可以这么学数学?加拿大私校体验报告5》

‘Now I’ve seen everything: Can you actually learn math like this? My fifth experience report on a Canadian private school.’ (Chengzi, 2018-10-23, 26000 views)

《看英国老师如何给孩子写评语 — — 安可伦敦学校第一学期情况报告单》

‘See how British teachers write comments for children: Report of the first semester at Anke’s London school.’ (Zheng, 2017-11-27, 6524 views)

《英国小学一年级英文课学什么?和安可一起走进英国小学课堂》

‘What do students learn in grade one English at a British school? A glimpse into an English class at a British school.’ (Zheng, 2018-10-26, 4391 views)

《在英国吃自助餐也能学到这么多重点核心英文!》

‘At a buffet in Britain, we can learn so much important English! (Zheng, 2019-04-18, 7311 views)

《英国公园里小小的游乐场都创意满满, 难怪孩子们这么喜欢!》

‘Even a small playground in an English garden can be so creative, no wonder the children like it so much!’ (Zheng, 2018-03-2, 2610 views)

From Blommaert’s (2010) perspective of semiotic resources in the age of globalization, this scale-jump can be seen as an instantiation of how local objects and experiences acquire global indexical meaning through global mobility. That is, otherwise ordinary or trivial objects such as a piece of schoolwork or a snack package in Western, English-speaking countries can become authentic and hence attractive resources for education and English learning for readers in China. In other words, they are resemiotized from local trivial objects to materials of knowledge construction which belong to a higher scale-level in the migration process in the globalized and networked contemporary world.

This change in value of local objects is a typical instantiation of Barthes’ mythical signification as “myth is a value” (Barthes 1972: 122). The local objects are signs with their own signifier and signified. The signifier is the form of the words on the garden sign, or the illegible writings on the schoolwork, and the signified is full, rich meaning in its original local context: it functions as a reminder to the visitors, or as a means to monitor students’ learning by the schoolteacher. However, these meanings are evidently not what the signs are meant to signify in the public accounts; instead, the signs are presented here in order to signify something else: The sign becomes a second-order instrument signifier for another signified, distorted and alienated from the first. The second-order signified is determined by the intention of the public account holders to provide useful ideas and resources about education or English learning for novice parents in China. To realize this intention, the holders construct articles with deployment of various semiotic resources in tactful patterns, which can be seen as higher-order signs in the mythical signification process. To put it briefly, the local objects are used as the point of departure of a mythical signification, which gives the intention a natural justification.

As myth is “the most appropriate instrument for the ideological inversion which defines this society” (Barthes 1972: 142), the mythical signification of the local semiotic resources bears an ideological trace and serves an ideological function regarding the unequal, stratified world system. In the contemporary world system driven by inequality (Wallerstein 2004:12), developed Western countries such as the USA and the UK enjoy dominance and hegemony, whereas developing Asian and African countries are in a peripheral and disadvantaged position. This inequality in power brings about inequality in ideology: Everything in Western countries, such as products, technologies, educational philosophy, and parenting practices, are perceived uncritically as superior and valuable by many people in developing countries. In this stratified image of the world system, when the ordinary local objects as forms of semiosis move from the center of the world system to the periphery, or in other words, move from the superior, developed countries “down” to the developing countries, they acquire indexical values. The other way around is impossible: Think about the prevailing trend of thought in Western countries that perceives “Made in China” as a sign of low quality.

In a similar vein, on the current global language market, English is the most valuable commodity and its American and British varieties are regarded as the most “legitimate and commodifiable” (Heller 2010) linguistic resources. In various ways, they can spread much more easily into non-English-speaking developing countries than the other way around. In addition to formal ways of language teaching and learning, the WeChat public account holders in this study also make use of informal channels as an attempt to commodify linguistic and cultural resources on the personal/local scale as signs of authenticity and use them as added value for distinguishing among standardized language-teaching products that have saturated markets in China. What is worth noting is that an economy of exchange is involved here, that is, the values attached by some to one form of semiosis – the everyday life experience in the center of Anglophone countries – may be not granted to others (Blommaert 2010: 38).

Seen from another perspective, the myth of the local ordinary objects in migration reflects the ordered-ness of indexicality, which can only be possible under the condition of an entrenched ideology of the unequal world system. Inspired by Foucault’s “order of discourse,” Blommaert raised the notion “order of indexicality” as a systematic pattern of authority, of social structuring, of control and evaluation, of inclusion and exclusion:

[…] we see that ordered indexicalities operate within large stratified complexes in which some forms of semiosis are systemically perceived as valuable, others as less valuable and some are not taken into account at all, while all are subject to rules of access and regulations as to circulation. (Blommaert 2010: 38)

In this sense, in the core of the conversion lies the order of indexicality which is influenced by power-driven social realities and ideologies about the world system.

5.2.2 Resources on the national scale

The resources the public account holders use to construct useful knowledge for their readers are on a less salient scale – the national scale. Specifically, the public account holders’ good bilingual literacy and educational and professional credentials acquired from the formal learning provided by the state-run universities and institutionalized workplaces in China represent resources on a higher scale – the national scale. In the following I will elaborate on their educational and professional background, bilingual literacy, and social capital respectively.

5.2.2.1 The educational and professional background of the public account holders

The educational and professional backgrounds of the public account holders serve as the basis for the establishment of their credibility as providers of knowledge and ideas on the informal learning platform. Although their identity as mothers of young children plays a significant role in their popularity as parenting practitioners, their master’s degrees and professional experience in renowned companies are essential for the construction of an education expert image. For instance, Chengzi has a master’s degree in mathematical education from a prestigious university in China and her husband is “a real scientist” with a doctorate and postdoc experience. She sometimes invites her husband to contribute articles on education from a scientist-daddy’s point of view. Their good educational background establishes their credibility on the topics of education. Different from Chengzi’s sensible and humorous style, Jessica displays her strong entrepreneurial qualities and learning ability in a new field – parenting – by referring many times to her past work experience as an executive at a renowned multinational corporation in the food industry. In her profile she explicitly states that her ideas are “smart parenting with wisdom from entrepreneurial human resources experience” (运用企业带人的智慧的聪明育儿方法). She also creates an image of an expert-mother who has kept “learning parenting knowledge for six years” by mentioning many times her experience in learning brain science courses at an American institution. In fact, many of her articles contain the key phrase “学育儿” (learning parenting) in the titles and/or in the beginning part. Similarly, Zheng spares no effort to take advantage of her master’s degree in education from a prestigious British university and her teaching experience at a leading language school in China in order to promote her so-called “High-end English” courses. In fact, these educational credentials are included in many of her articles. The following example is one of such article titles.

《英国学习生活经历和13年英语教学经验让我反思, 幼儿英语启蒙缺什么?怎么办?》

‘My experience of studying and living in the UK and 13 years of experience in English teaching make me reflect upon what is lacking in early childhood English education. What should we do to cope?’ (Zheng, 2018-09-07, 12000 views)

5.2.2.2 The good bilingual literacy of the public account holders

The WeChat public account writers’ bilingual literacy is essential in their success in that it bridges the resources, practices, and ideas between Chinese readers and everyday life experiences (especially learning experiences) in the Western, English-speaking countries which are perceived as novel, advanced, and attractive by many Chinese. Their bilingual literacy, though it may be further improved in their host countries, has its foundation laid in their long-term education in Chinese schools and universities, since they had completed advanced education in China and/or acquired work experience before they moved abroad.

For example, Jessica often uses multiple images showing English mottos or quotations with philosophical wisdom in her articles. Figure 3 is an example of one of these images, which reads “Anger is only one letter short of danger” with the words “anger” and “danger” highlighted. It appeared in an article entitled “Just can’t help yelling at the children: Where are you on the four levels of parents’ emotion management?” In this article, Jessica explains the four levels of emotion management on the parents’ part during child rearing. Apart from three pictures showing angry women, she embedded two images showing English mottos in the article. One is shown in Figure 3, and the other reads “Self reflection & self correction is the highest form of self learning & healing.” As the English images are in good coordination with the writing semantically and also enjoy great visual salience in the Chinese texts, they are able to invoke rich meanings which index wisdom, a better understanding of family education, intellectual superiority, and even moral perfection.

Figure 3:

A motto in English from Jessica’s article “Can’t help yelling at the children.”

The importance of the writers’ bilingual literacy in their popularity as parenting knowledge providers is further shown in another example from Chengzi’s article entitled “What a Canadian fifth-grader spends a whole semester on: you’d never guess it.” When talking about her son’s classes on the Canadian political system (especially elections) in a local Canadian school, she shared her son’s speech manuscript for the class election (see Figure 4). The speech was written in English, and Chengzi annotated the central idea of each part in red Chinese characters for the ease of the readers. The bilingual samples like this one serve multiple functions, such as establishing the writer’s credibility and indexing ingenious Western educational ideology and practices that are sharply different from Chinese. They are well received by the Chinese parents, especially those who do not have access to the opportunities to travel/study abroad or give their children alternative ways of education to the Chinese system. Many readers expressed their admiration for this Canadian way of teaching politics in the comments.

Figure 4:

A Canadian elementary schoolchild’s election speech manuscript.

The bilingual samples as controlled and regimented objects form semiotic practices that connect two largely different semiotized TimeSpaces: the Western educational concepts and practices going on in their situated space and time on the one hand and Chinese readers of the virtual public accounts on parenting as an informal learning platform on the other. The semiotic resources are dislodged from the former situation and resemiotized in the latter. This is a typical instantiation of Blommaert’s (2010) sociolinguistics of mobile resources.

5.2.2.3 The social capital of the public account holders

Another aspect of semiotic resources on the national scale is the public account writers’ social capital. That is, they make use of their social community of Chinese elites and elite-related resources as knowledge sources to attract subscribers to the parenting learning platform. For instance, Jessica included an interview series with elites in her public account. Most of her interviewees are Chinese elites who are parents and successful in child-related areas or in their own fields. They include writers with national or international fame, publishers, chief-editors, a CEO, a psychologist, a translator of children’s books, a singer and presenter, among others. These elites are very likely to be accepted as experts and hence credible sources of knowledge and information for the readers of the WeChat public account as an informal learning platform. Different from Jessica, who is socially active and has a wide social network, Chengzi mainly uses her husband, who is “a real scientist,” to provide information on education as a scientist-daddy: she has a special column on her public account for her husband – “Mr. Juicer’s special column.” As a professional English teacher, Zheng’s social capital often comes from her students, since the main purpose of her public account is to promote her English course – the so-called “High-end English.” What is special about her course is that it is not designed for Chinese children, but for the Chinese mothers who want to help with their children’s English learning. Zheng invites some successful mother-learners to share their experiences. Many of the mother-learners are well educated and some of them are educational practitioners themselves. Their own educational and professional credentials add weight to their endorsement for Zheng’s English course, although they are all identified as someone’s mother.

In sum, cultural capital acquired on the national scale (including educational and professional credentials and good bilingual literacy) and social capital, as a kind of symbolic asset, can be turned into semiotic resources by the public account holders to build an expert-mother image and hence a reliable and authoritative provider of knowledge on parenting and education. What is worth special attention here is the conversion between capital and resources. The cultural capital (educational credentials, good bilingual literacy, etc.) the elites have obtained from formal learning in Chinese institutions can be turned into semiotic resources in another TimeSpace (the informal learning platform on SNSs), which in turn converts them into more material, cultural, and social capital for the elites. The semiotic representation reproduces the stratified social structure (Bourdieu 1986).

Since Blommaert’s concept of scale reflects an ordered, stratified image of society, power and inequality are in play in every process of scale-shifting. Scale-shifts are ordered, selected processes, accessible to some but not others. This inequality becomes more evident when we realize that not every Chinese person who happens to travel to the USA or the UK is able to make use of the ordinary objects in their daily life to construct learning resources to attract a strikingly huge number of readers and acquire more material and social capital in turn. The privileged backgrounds of the public accounts holders acquired from Chinese educational systems provide the premise for their ability to engage in scale-shifts in semiotic deployment and benefit from them.

5.2.3 Resources on the global scale

In the analysis, we also found abundant resources operating on a global and transnational scale, such as the technical literacy of the WeChat public account holders and their appeal to scientific discourse to back their view.

5.2.3.1 Technical literacy

First of all, it is this technical literacy that makes it possible for the SNSs to become a new important channel of communication and knowledge acquisition that transcend national borders and time-space limits in the first place. With technical and digital developments such as email and SNSs, literacy has become even more essential in being able to claim the right to speak (Moje and Luke 2009: 432). People with good technical and digital literacy, such as the public account holders, are able to participate in a variety of spaces in both real and virtual worlds and assert themselves as legitimate and even authoritative sources of information. Here we need to be aware of the invisible mechanism of power in the digital age which allows some people to speak more, write more, produce more ideas, and benefit more, while the masses can only consume what is provided to them. The public accounts holders with good digital literacy produce legitimate knowledge on parenting and education, while the mass readers consume it.

5.2.3.2 References to scientific discourses

Although technical literacy is the premise for the popularity of the SNSs, more specific and targeted to the public accounts as an informal learning platform is the fact that the authority of modern scientific paradigm has been widely accepted globally. In their writing, these public account holders use extensive references to scientific discourse as a particular register indexing membership of expert groups. Since science is highly valued on the global and transnational level, the public account holders make every effort to build connections with scientific discourses or communities (people, practices, and knowledge) to gain authoritativeness and credibility for their opinion. This appeal to science is realized in three strategies:

1. highlighting their affiliation and experiences with international academic institutions;

2. citing research findings to support their opinion;

3. building connection with professional or scientific communities.

The three strategies are explained with examples from the data in the following. Firstly, the public account holders often highlight their affiliation and experiences with international academic institutions to give an international and advanced touch to their ideas. For example, Zheng often mentions her identity as a postgraduate student specialized in education at a prestigious UK university. In fact, it is written at the beginning of the profile of her public account so that readers can see it at the end of every article! In a similar vein, Jessica often mentions her experience of learning brain science courses under American professors as an elicitor of her own opinion in her articles. Two article titles are given below to illustrate the point.

教授问了一个问题, 每个人都答错了, 这个能力必须从小培养》

‘The professor asked a question and everybody gave a wrong answer: THIS is a skill that needs to be developed early on’ (Jessica, 2018-11-06, 100000+ views)

《哈佛教授说, 5岁能讲故事的孩子, 今后学习成绩不会差》

‘The Harvard professor said a child who can tell stories at 5 will not underachieve at school in the future’ (Jessica, 2017-02-04, 100000+ views)

Chengzi is slightly different in that she does not have a degree or any formal learning experience from institutions in Western countries. However, her master’s degree in mathematical education from a prestigious university in China qualifies her to give comments and advice on mathematical and science education to Chinese parents.

Secondly, citing research findings is another important strategy for these public account holders to build a connection with the science world and consequently to generate favorable indexical meanings related to science. For instance, Jessica frequently cites the official documents of the American Academy of Pediatrics to gain authoritativeness for her view. Similarly, Chengzi often cites research findings to back her view. Many of her articles contain the phrase “research/studies show […]”. In the following article about potty training, she writes:

当然如果孩子本来都表现得好好的, 但是出现频繁尿床的情况, 也要注意找一下原因, 一方面可能是生理原因, 譬如尿路感染等尿路疾病, 一方面可能是心理原因, 有些研究表明, 被虐待、被霸凌、或家庭发生很大变故的孩子, 都更容易出现尿床现象。(Chengzi, 2021-11-16)

‘Of course, if your child is doing quite well, but suddenly begins frequently wetting the bed, it is also important to look for the cause. It might be physiological causes such as a urinary tract infection. It might also be psychological causes: some studies show that children being abused, bullied, or suffering from major upheavals in their family are more likely to wet the bed.’ (Chengzi, 2021-11-16)

Zheng also cites academic books and theories to support her opinion. An example is shown in the following title:

从《幼儿教育心理学》看高端英语怎么学 (Zheng, 2017-02-06)

‘How to learn High-end English? Thoughts from Psychology of early childhood education’ (Zheng, 2017-02-06)

Thirdly, the public account holders manage to build connections with professional or scientific communities. Zheng claims her ideas about children’s English learning are the result of her research and discussions with her British professor at London University in some of her articles (for example, see the article on 25 November 2021). Jessica often packages her views in the voice of her American professor or her daughter’s teacher. She also highlights her experience of taking care of her premature-delivered daughter with the guidance of American pediatricians. She understands the tactics of associating with scientists and experts so well that all her books are entitled in a similar format:《跟美国儿科医生学育儿》(Learn about childcare and parenting from American pediatricians), 《跟美国幼儿园老师学早教》(Learn about early education from American kindergarten teachers), and 《跟早教专家学儿童潜能开发》(Learn about developing children’s potential from experts in early education).

The ability to create associations with science represents a semiotic resource on a higher global scale and involves power and inequality in light of its non-exchangeability across groups. Blommaert’s (2010) notion “order of indexicality” provides a good explanation here. If we accept that forms of semiosis are socially and culturally valued, then traces of power struggle and authority can be found in their evaluation (Blommaert 2010: 38). Scientific discourse belongs to semiotic resources on higher scale-levels that is not equally accessible to everyone. Such access is an object of inequality. The access to the language and resources on higher scale-levels is “produced, attributed value and circulated in a regulated way” (Heller 2008: 50). In other words, different people have different accesses to linguistic and sociolinguistic repertoires. The right repertories for one to succeed in the modern, globalized, webified knowledge economy are only accessible for some, but not others. The holders of parenting public accounts on Chinese SNSs evidently belong to the group with the right sociolinguistic and semiotic repertoires.

6 Discussion and conclusion

The public accounts on parenting and education on Chinese SNSs run by diasporic Chinese display strategic use of various semiotic resources to attract the knowledge-seeking parents in China. Analysis reveals shared patterns in their shifting of semiotic resources on different scale-levels across different TimeSpaces, that is, across both national and real/virtual boundaries. Seen through the lens of scaled resources and mobility in Blommaert (2010), the semiotic resources they use can be demarcated into three scales: personal, national, and global. On the personal scale, the ordinary objects in the public account holder’s daily life in their host countries are resemiotized as authentic and attractive knowledge resources. On the national level, the cultural capital of the public account holders (such as educational credentials and bilingual literacy) and the social capital they have acquired at the national scale-level are used as important means to establish an expert-mother image. On the global level, they mainly make reference to scientific discourse to establish the validity of their messages and ideas, as scientific scholarship is a globally recognized authority of knowledge production and dissemination. The strategic deployment of semiotic resources across scales or TimeSpaces invokes rich indexical meanings, for example, indexicality to membership of expert groups.

The value change in the semiotic resources across spaces can be viewed as mythical signification in Barthes’ (1972) sense. The semiotic resources function as the start of departure of bourgeois myths embedded in the unequal contemporary world system and are also well consumed by the knowledge-seeking parent-readers on the Chinese SNS. The bourgeois nature of the myth becomes more visible when we consider that a tendency on Chinese SNSs. The subscribers of public accounts tend to be more text-inclined and have a better education than those of Douyin (抖音) or Kuaishou (快手), who are generally less well educated and favor visuals. As Barthes keenly pointed out, “some myths ripen better in some social strata: for myth also, there are micro-climates” (Barthes 1972: 150).

A key characteristic of the indexicality is its ordered-ness – order of indexicality that operates on a higher plane of social structuring of power and inequality. As Blommaert (2010) points out, the evaluation of forms of semiosis as social and cultural products involves power relations and inequality. The different modes of semiosis are given different values, systematically give preference to some over others, and exclude or disqualify particular modes (Blommaert 2010: 41). Therefore, a piece of schoolwork by a schoolchild in a Western country can become an attractive exemplar of education on the informal learning platform in China. This order of indexicality plays a key role in the success of WeChat parenting public accounts, as they bridge and commodify forms of semiosis across scales on Chinese social media as a virtual, informal learning space.