Translanguaging space through pointing gestures: Multilingual family literacy at a science museum

Translanguaging theory highlights the dynamic use of multiple languages and communication modes by multilingual people in their daily experiences. Museums are informal family learning spaces where multilingual families use languages and other semiotic resources to create learning opportunities for their children. Using a microethnographic approach to discourse analysis and multimodal interaction analysis, I examined how a multilingual family uses translanguaging practices to organize their family learning in museums and the role of pointing gestures as part of their translanguaging repertoires in multilingual family learning. The analysis of two literacy events highlights that a child and his mother translanguaged with various semiotic resources to organize museum performances, joint attention, and telling, and that pointing gestures played a role in constructing a translanguaging space as they organized the two performances. Pointing involved the family in reading signage texts and allowed the mother to translate them for the child. Viewing translation as part of the translanguaging repertoire, this study recognizes the importance of the role of pointing gestures in constructing family learning at museums, enriching children’s schooling and literacy learning in classrooms. I argue that recognizing pointing as a critical component of translanguaging allows educators to develop strategies that leverage families’ unique repertoires to support multilingual students’ language and literacy learning.