Conceptual framework of translanguaging in mediated action: The case of #Bilingualparenting on social media

Abstract

This paper develops a conceptual framework for translanguaging in mediated action, applying it to the analysis of how bilingual parenting is constructed on social media. Translanguaging, understood as situated and embodied meaning-making, has often been examined in educational contexts but less so in mediated environments. Here, the study extends the notion of translanguaging in action to digital spaces, where parents document and perform multilingual family life through videos and posts on platforms such as TikTok and Instagram. These online practices involve both embodied semiotic resources (e.g., speech, gesture, gaze, ambient sound) and disembodied ones (e.g., on-screen text, visual design, music), which together express and shape language and media ideologies. The paper proposes that these ideologies emerge not only from platform affordances, but from socially and culturally meaningful choices that parents make when portraying bilingual parenting. Using the translanguaging-in-mediated-action framework, the analysis explores how parents’ posts reflect complex negotiations between multilingual fluidity and monolingual norms. Findings show that translanguaging appears as an instinctive communicative repertoire in children’s everyday interactions, while parents act as curators and mediators who transform family language practices into public discourse genres. Through these performances, bilingual parenting becomes both a private routine and a public identity practice, contributing to evolving understandings of multilingualism in digital communities. The study demonstrates how mediated action enables new forms of parental authority, expertise, and community engagement, extending translanguaging research beyond face-to-face contexts to include the dynamic, multimodal, and ideological dimensions of social media as a translanguaging space.