Volume 9, Issue 2-3 -

This introductory article serves two purposes. Firstly, it provides the background for the set of 11 articles that appear in the special issue of this journal and summarizes the articles along a number of dimensions. All the articles address aspects of multilingualism as subjectively experienced and they all make use of visual methodologies. Secondly, it subjects the articles to two meta-analyses. The first one compares and contrasts the studies by site: production, image and audiencing. The second one, in contrast, classifies the studies by the research strategy chosen by the researchers: looking, seeing or designing. The article concludes by pointing to future directions in research on multilingualism as lived, and suggests a visual turn.

This paper reports on a study, which suggests an alternative use of drawings in language classrooms. The study uses young children’s drawings about learning English as an innovative way of investigating their perceptions of what it means to learn a foreign language. The images of language learning constructed by the children in their drawings may provide us with insights into their own personal experience of language learning. In order to understand what sense they have made of the language learning process, the participants were told to draw a picture of themselves as learners of English. A qualitative image-based interpretative research approach was used in the analysis of the drawings. In order to verify the interpretations of the drawings, informal interviews were conducted with each student individually following the drawing session. The findings provide us with a window into the students’ minds and help us to develop a framework for understanding young learners’ language learning beliefs. The paper ends with a discussion of the findings, the implications for language classrooms and suggestions for future research.

Child language development occurs in a given environment, complete with explicit and implicit regulations, intervening actors with their coherent or contradictory intentions, and specific resources for speakers. The main research question of this contribution is: What can drawings as parts of School Language Profiles tell us about the multilingual environments of bilingual families and schools? The analytical framework of spatial and language practices provides a means to talk about how and why certain expressions are chosen and which influences are mentioned in relation to school and family. In particular, the focus is on how heteroglossic spaces are constructed through local/spatial/language practices and how these constructions are represented in the drawings of children. The drawings were collected in a bilingual school in Austria, with Slovene and German as languages of instruction. Children’s drawings present a fine-grained perception of their multilingual surroundings and we see how children refer to home/school in their drawings and distinguish language realities. Findings indicate that language regimes and goals of families and school are in close relation to each other, have influence on each other but do not necessarily always complement each other. This means that in analyzing heteroglossic realities, both cannot be regarded as separate (or separable) spaces.

In the climate of shifting language policies and constant influx of native English-speaking teachers to South Korea, the question of what constitutes a “good” language teacher (GLT) arises. To this end, the present study examines how 577 young English learners (K-6th grade) come to demonstrate their understanding of GLT by making use of visual images and written narratives. A social semiotic, multimodal approach to analysis is employed to scrutinize how these textual and visual narratives construct and/or presuppose a certain image of teacher identity and, as a result, display societal ideologies (Jewitt 2009). The findings yield two dimensions with regard to the objects associated with GLTs, an emotional/abstract dimension and a teaching-related dimension, and the differing use of these objects in relation to teacher gender indicating students’ awareness of teacher roles and gender. Moreover, the ways in which learners place themselves in the storied worlds seem to provide evidence for how teacher identity is, in fact, co-constructed with the notion of learner identity. Thus, the study underscores the complex nature of GLT identity construction and further highlights the benefits of using both textual and visual methods to gain better insights into learners’ beliefs about, attitudes towards, and perspectives on teachers, students, and language learning.

This study visually explores the process of identity (re)construction experienced by a pre-service EFL teacher as she designed and implemented English activities at Brazilian state schools. The theoretical framework draws from language teacher development, and narrative concepts on professional identity, teacher knowledge and context. Visual narratives, contextualized by written and oral narratives, are analysed for their holistic-content, taking into account a critical visual approach and a narrative inquiry methodology. The pre-service EFL teacher, whose experience is the focus of this paper, developed a metaphor to describe her process of identity (re)construction: the invisible English teacher. Stories of designing and implementing her own materials, and being part of different teaching landscapes play an important role in her search for visibility as an English teacher.

This paper aims to investigate the beliefs of student teachers on a distance teacher education course about being an English teacher in Brazil. The theoretical framework of this paper is based on studies about beliefs in language teaching and learning (Barcelos and Kalaja 2011. Introduction to beliefs about SLA revisited. System 39(3). 281–289), and distant teacher education (Borg et al. 2014. The impact of teacher education on pre-service primary English language teachers . London: British Council). Data were collected in a supervised teaching practicum course in an English Language and Literature Distance Programme provided by a federal public university in Brazil. The data stem from visual narratives and meta-narratives posted on two online discussion forums. It is expected that the results of this study will contribute to advancing research on the use of visual materials in the investigation of beliefs, and that they will foster the debate on the contributions of visual narratives to teachers’ reflections, particularly in distance teacher education settings.

This paper analyzes visual and multimedia narratives produced by learners of different age groups and linguistic and cultural backgrounds to explore (a) their beliefs and practices of foreign language learning; and (b) visual metaphors used by learners in hand-drawn and computer-mediated texts. The texts were collected from language learners from primary school to university in Sydney, Berlin, and Hong Kong. These learner narratives add new dimensions to our understanding of learners’ beliefs and practices: what learners think learning a particular language involves, what they hold to be true and what they actually do. While using interviews and written texts is an established practice in narrative inquiry research, only a few studies have adopted visual data. The findings point to three implications. First, drawing instructions to learners directly influenced how learners represent their learner beliefs. Second, while self-composed language portraits and photographs encourage reproduction of meanings across modes, stock visuals are more likely to be used to create juxtaposed meanings. Finally, the idea of kawaii was used as a visual metaphor when discussing negative emotions, which may point to a new component in digital and visual expression.

This paper uses visual methods to explore how teenagers in two different European countries (Finland and Greece) personally relate to their first language and to English, which is widely used in the everyday lives of young people in both countries. Our data comprise sets of self-made visualizations in which 14- to 16-year-old teenagers depict their personal relationship to their first language (Finnish/Greek) and to English. Theoretically and methodologically, we subscribe to socio-culturally oriented research on (foreign language) literacy and language learning and recent studies on multilingualism. Overall, by offering a detailed account of the variety of representation forms and meaning-making symbols employed by our participants in their visual products, our analysis in this paper highlights the common but also diverse perceptions, values and attitudes that young people from two different European contexts bring to their practices and their encounters with English and other languages in their lives. By revealing the personal meanings and values attached by teenagers to English, our analysis also provides indirect insights into the multiple ways English is locally encountered, appropriated and drawn upon by young people in two different countries to serve their own purposes.

In this study we draw on three analytic frameworks (Goffman 1981. Forms of talk . Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press; Rose 2007. Visual methodologies: An introduction to the interpretation of visual materials . London: Sage; Warburton 1998. Cartoons and teachers: Mediated visual images as data. In John Prosser (ed.), Image-based research: A sourcebook for qualitative researchers , 252–262. London: Routledge) to explore how multilingual children in a rural Ugandan primary school use visual and linguistic modes to create billboards messages about HIV/AIDS. Although HIV/AIDS education is required curriculum in public schools, and outside of the classroom students are exposed to various national public service announcements (e. g., on radio and television, and as billboards), there are still considerable cultural barriers that hinder open discussions between children and their teachers and parents about HIV/AIDS-related issues. Our findings suggest that communicating the complex language of HIV/AIDS prevention requires students in this cultural context to go beyond the linguistic mode and draw upon the visual in order to achieve a fuller range of socio-affective expression, and conceivably, to affect change by reaching a variety of audiences on multiple levels of human meaning making. Implications for literacy educators in multilingual contexts, where pressing social issues intersect with culturally sensitive or otherwise “unspeakable” topics, indicate that the visual offers a less institutionalized and culturally-laden space for children to synthesize the messages in their environments and their own relationship to them.

The following article puts to work an affirmative approach to critical theory through poetic mappings of the process of crafting identity boxes with ESOL students from refugee and asylum backgrounds in a Glasgow-based college in Scotland (UK). The article takes as its starting point the work of feminist and neo-materialist thinkers who argue for an ontological re-orientation of our practices of inquiry. This involves the questioning of positivist research orientations, which regard language as mere second-order representations of a primary reality. We argue that such representationalist logic can implicate research participants in deficit orientations, especially when their embodied and often contested ways of being in the world defy purely linguistic or other ‘fixed’ cultural representations. With the aim to embrace epistemological uncertainty and prioritise our participants’ embodied self-articulations over our “rage for meaning” (MacLure 2013), we experimented with poetic mappings as neomaterialist, arts-based research tools.

The article analyses the experience of multilingualism in the South Korean context, focusing on the experiences of North Korean refugees. The research participants (N=2) are originally from North Korea, but now live in South Korea, where they face challenges in their adaptation to the new society, its linguistic landscape and its practices and positions with regard to language issues in society and in education. By combining verbal and visual means of data collection, we aim to analyse the multilingual trajectory of the research participants, their experiences of different languages and language learning and, further, the emotions that are attached to these. Our approach is socio-cognitive in that we seek to show how individual experiences intertwine with and refract the particular societal contexts and their ideologies.

This paper discusses and demonstrates the use of visualisation and visual methods in the description and analysis of the learning trajectories of long-term learners and users of an additional language (in this case, Mandarin Chinese). It draws on a longitudinal case study that investigated how the dynamic complexity and variety of long-term trajectories of learning an additional language can be described, represented and interpreted. The specific focus of this article is the visual timeline analysis method used in the study. The timeline method offers an innovative way of representing and comparing individual language learning chronologies in visual format. By progressively layering, along a time axis, visualisations of longitudinal data relating to a number of different aspects of the learning context, the method allows a simultaneous overview of multiple aspects of development over time. These information-rich representations can reveal insights into patterns of choices and development over time which are not easily perceived in text-based accounts.