Language practices of Chinese doctoral students studying abroad on social media: a translanguaging perspective

Abstract Existing research has recognized the important role of translanguaging in linguistic education. Recent studies have begun to turn attention to translanguaging practices on social media. This study contributes to this growing body of literature by examining translanguaging strategies and functions deployed by Chinese doctoral students studying abroad on the social media platform Little Red Book. A netnography approach and computer-mediated discourse analysis are combined to analyze the data. The findings reveal that Chinese doctoral students employ various translanguaging strategies online, including multilingual, multi-semiotic, and multimodal strategies, to achieve a range of pragmatic functions. The multilingual strategy consists of using Chinese characters, English words or phrases, English abbreviations, English acronyms, Chinese pinyin acronyms, and Chinese pinyin initials; the multi-semiotic strategy involves the use of emojis and hashtags; while the multimodal strategy incorporates photos. The study also explores the motivations behind the use of translanguaging on social media by these students. The results indicate that social media provides translanguaging space for Chinese doctoral students studying abroad to creatively make full use of their linguistic repertoire. In doing so, they are able to demonstrate their doctoral identities, their socialization abilities, and attitudes of language playfulness.