Translanguaging in self-praise on Chinese social media

Abstract

Self-praise is very common on social media, and various translanguaging strategies are often used by internet users in online communication. Most of the existing studies on self-praise have centered on strategies for self-praise, ignoring the multimodal communication styles involved. On the other hand, although translanguaging has attracted significant research attention in linguistics and multilingual education, few studies have explored translanguaging in a specific speech act. Therefore, this study investigates the translanguaging practices involved in self-praising in Chinese netizens’ social media by analyzing 300 Chinese microblog posts containing self-praise. The results indicate that there are three major categories of translanguaging strategies in self-praise in microblogs, namely multimodal, multilingual and multi-semiotic resources, with various sub-strategies involved in each category. The study also discusses the possible factors motivating Chinese netizens to deploy translanguaging practices to self-praise on social media. This study contributes to the body of research on translanguaging pragmatics in social media communication.

Self‐praise on social media WeChat Moments in L1 and L2 Chinese

“…In contrast, facial emojis are more universal across cultures and thus are easier for L2 learners thanks to positive transfer. More pragmatics research on nonlinguistic aspects of learners’ pragmatic practices is warranted (Ren & Guo, 2022b; Sampietro et al., 2022), reflecting the need to expand the definition of pragmatic competence to include multilinguistic, multi‐semiotic, and multimodal resources (Ren, 2022b).…”

“…Thus, individuals must bear their audience in mind when they publish posts on WeChat Moments. The study followed the participant perspective in researching self‐praise (Ren & Guo, 2022a, 2022b); that is, the posts about self‐praise were chosen by the WeChat users themselves, ensuring that they intended to praise themselves when posting the contents on WeChat Moments.…”

“…Ren et al. (2022a) analyzed young Chinese people's attitudes toward translanguaging strategies in self‐praise on Weibo (Ren & Guo, 2022b). The findings showed that young Chinese people generally perceived the use of translanguaging strategies in self‐praise on Weibo as appropriate.…”

“…In summary, previous research has examined pragmatic strategies for self‐praise on various social media platforms, including in English on Twitter (Dayter, 2014) and Instagram (Matley, 2018) and in Chinese on Weibo (Ren & Guo, 2020, 2022b; Ren et al., 2022a) and WeChat (Ren & Guo, 2022a). However, to date, self‐praise practices between L2 learners and native speakers have not been explored.…”

“…In addition to pragmatic self-praise strategies, preceding studies have also explored the translanguaging strategies involved in self-praise (Ren & Guo, 2022b;Ren, Guo, & Li, 2022a). Ren and Guo (2022b) examined Weibo users' translanguaging strategies in self-praise, which can be divided into multilingual, multimodal, and multi-semiotic resources, with various sub-strategies in each category. analyzed young Chinese people's attitudes toward translanguaging strategies in self-praise on Weibo (Ren & Guo, 2022b).…”