Making as becoming: what multilingual writers do when they create a text

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A/Prof Julie Choi and Dr Andrea Truckenbrodt, Faculty of Education, The University of Melbourne

In this conversation, Dr Mobina Sahraee speaks with A/Prof Julie Choi and Dr Andrea Truckenbrodt about textual transpositioning and how multilingual writers make meaning through words, languages, images and other resources.

A: Language, voice and textual transpositioning

Mobina: What led you to develop the idea of textual transpositioning, and how does it help us understand multilingual writers and their voices?

Julie: My interest started with voice. During my PhD, I realised for the first time that I was a writer, an author. Because it was an autoethnography, I had to make meaning myself, around my own life, as someone who has lived in different places and written in different languages. I remember reading my writing and thinking, Wow, is this me? I sound so smart! [laughs]. Then it clicked: This must be what people mean by voice, your writing personality, how you sound on the page.

Coming out of my thesis, Professor David Nunan and I put together Language and Culture: Reflective Narratives and the Emergence of Identity, and I kept wondering where autobiographical and reflexive narratives sit in academic spaces. I was also piecing together artefacts from my past, like photographs and screenshots of old TV shows, so I started to think of my writing as a collage, bringing things together to create my voice, and not just through words.

When I later read Li Wei and Tong King Lee’s paper on transpositioning, it all made sense: the processual aspect, things happening in the moment, liquidity. Voice and identity aren’t static; they flow. One of the studies I read looked at lecturers in Hong Kong moving between positions, using different linguistic resources, performing, speaking and moving on the spot. I thought, Isn’t that what I’ve been doing in the written realm? Except I was doing it through an extended project of written words, print, images and other resources.

Andrea: That’s the key difference: time. In speech, you make those moves on the spot. Writing gives you time to reflect, make strategic choices, play, experiment and be creative, and to work through different iterations. Voice matters to me too, and David Nunan is also one of my academic heroes; it was his voice that attracted me to academic and professional literature. In the dialogues that shaped our understanding of textual transpositioning, we spent time discussing how we wanted our words to be received, without excluding practitioners or people with different academic backgrounds. Do you need unintelligible jargon and difficult constructions, such as the passive voice, to establish yourself as a serious academic? Or can you write like David, in a way that welcomes others?

Julie: Yes, voice and its impact on the reader really matter. But having produced a picture book, I also want to draw attention to the making. It isn’t simply a matter of putting images and words together. John Dewey (1934/1980) describes artists doing their thinking “in the very qualitative media” they work in (p. 16), and emotion becoming clearer as they give order to their material (pp. 77–78). For Dewey, expressing the self through a medium is a prolonged interaction in which both self and material take on a form they did not have at first (p. 65). So it isn’t as simple as having an identity and then putting it into the text. It’s in the making that I’m becoming somebody. When something doesn’t sit well, I think, no, that’s not me. With the kimchi book, much of it is reclaiming what I felt as a child: You’re not real, not a real Korean speaker; you’re this or that. I’m drawing on everything I know to make something, become someone and do something: making as becoming.

That’s also why liquidity appeals to me. Identity can sound fixed, whereas positioning is always in flux: how you place yourself and shift between positions.

Andrea: Yes, shifting and moving, and how we do that by drawing on multiple resources.

Julie: Exactly. Transpositioning research has mostly looked at speech, but it matters in literacy too, because so much of what students do is submitted as written text. So we’re building on that work to look at processes that unfold over time, like book-making and multimodal composing. I’m curious about what to call it. For now, maybe “generative texts” works: texts where things emerge through making.

Andrea: That’s what drew me to the term as well. I went back to my linguistic roots and thought of transpositioning in three parts: position, trans- and -ing. Position offers a different way of thinking about identity, particularly when identity suggests something fixed. The -ing captures the ongoing process and fluidity you’re describing. And trans- suggests the places between positions: multilingual, monolingual, German speaker, French learner. I can move between them, and some may not yet have been described. But positions aren’t only chosen; they’re also given to us. In some contexts, I might still be seen as a deficient speaker. If you needed an interpreter at the UN, I wouldn’t be your first choice, but I feel very comfortable using German and regard myself as a fluent speaker.

The opening of our conversation, loosely retold as a graphic novel, with ideas and lines shared among the three of us. Moving our words into a different mode, style and voice is itself a small experiment in textual transpositioning.

B: Languages and choices in Kimchi is for Everyone

Mobina: In Kimchi is for Everyone, you work with Korean, English, images and different roles. Could you take us through some choices that show textual transpositioning in practice, including how you want readers to encounter the languages?

Julie: One example is the hierarchy of languages on the page. In multilingual work, something always has to come first. When I did editing work for Alastair Pennycook and Emi Otsuji’s Metrolingualism book, transcribing their Market recordings was like writing a musical score: so many languages, people speaking over one another. How do you represent that on a page? Picture books raise the same question, and you answer it through semiotic choices, including modes and spatial arrangements.

Andrea: Picture storybooks are also about what you leave out. Space is limited, so both inclusion and omission matter.

Julie: Absolutely. I considered leaving things out for space or cognitive load, but I was lucky to have an illustrator who knew how to package it all so it isn’t overwhelming. Take the ingredients pages. I wanted English, Korean in hangeul and the pronunciation all there, because I wanted readers to know and say the Korean words even though the majority of the book is in English. Some spellings I had to invent. For jjok pa (green spring onion), for example, I used “jj”.

The ingredients pages: each item appears in English, in hangeul and in Julie’s own pronunciation spellings

Mobina: Why did you do that?

Julie: English doesn’t have the hard ‘j’ sound we make in Korean. ‘ch’ is closest, but it isn’t right either. ‘jj’ may not mean much to English speakers, but it flags a difference, and readers without a Korean teacher beside them might want to find out more. That’s better than saying, “We don’t have that in English, so we’ll turn it into ‘ch’.”

Andrea: That’s where you exercise agency and creativity. Academics might traditionally use the IPA because it’s universal, but audience matters. Textual transpositioning encourages us to consider both voice and audience: “What do I want readers to feel or to know?” Then I have to take a position. Do I want my culture on a pedestal, represented as a museum item or something understood only by insiders? Or do I want something else? When I read Kimchi is for Everyone, you come across as a generous host, welcoming me into the world of kimchi and Korean.

Mobina: There’s relationality there - our position in relation to readers.

Julie: Part of how I relate to readers also comes from being a language teacher and teacher educator, and that identity wanted its place in the book too. So sometimes I’m a teacher, setting a crossword with answers in the spellings I’d created. When my students make their own books, I want them to consider the same deliberate choices: colours, languages and their hierarchy.

Julie as teacher: a crossword built on the book’s own spelling system

Andrea: That’s the heart of it for me. You’re reflecting on what you choose, why and what effect another choice might have. It involves translanguaging, but the focus is on all the semiotic choices, and on the discussion and thinking that run through the process. The benefits are both metalinguistic and metacognitive, and in our view, textual transpositioning can help you understand yourself better. Just as you were characterised as ‘insufficiently Korean’, my mother described my German as sounding like an ignorant native speaker. To her I sounded native, but like an uneducated German speaker. Positionings such as these make you consider what position you want and how you realise that position textually.

Julie: Knowing how I wanted the text to work also gave me permission to play. The types A, B and C page was the most liberating. I thought, I can make this funny. Academic writing can be funny too (well, sometimes!), but a picture book let me experiment more freely.

Julie as humorist: the three types of people. Which one are you?

Andrea: You’re positioning readers too, but creatively and with humour.

Julie: I loved the freedom of a picture book, because each page could bring together a little bit of this and that, shaped by my positions as teacher, researcher and multilingual speaker. As a researcher, for example, I documented the kimchi-making step by step across the Day One and Day Two pages, drawing on Korean books I’d read and even Chinese poetry to trace early mentions of salted vegetables. I wouldn’t include anything I couldn’t defend. The science section went through about twenty versions before my illustrator suggested we keep the knowledge but lighten it up, with a happy gut for lactobacillus and the chilli and shrimp as best friends. Just brilliant!

Andrea: That shows the importance of feedback and of collaborating with knowledgeable others, like your illustrator. We also want all our learners to see that multimodal and multilingual options give them freedom to express meaning and personality.

Julie: And we can open up that space for students, but we need to be explicit, because they won’t do it naturally in formal settings. Shifting between positions raises questions about how semiotic resources work together, or don’t, and how genres blend for effect. You learn these things by authoring this kind of text. It’s in the making that we think, challenge, push and invent, so I encourage my students to focus on the making rather than on rules. I use models as inspiration rather than templates to follow: some structure to get started or when I’m stuck, then freedom to explore.

C: Creating opportunities for multilingual writing

Mobina: How can teachers create opportunities for learners to draw on their languages and other resources in writing? What support do learners, and teachers, need through that process?

Andrea: That’s what we’re working on now. In our next paper, we’re exploring textual transpositioning as a teaching approach, and as an analytical framework for seeing students’ languages and other semiotic resources as things they can deploy strategically, rather than as deficits that need remediation. We’re addressing secondary English teachers, a challenging audience. The English learning area doesn’t necessarily have a fluid conception of itself; it holds a hegemonic position, with almost no place for anything other than Standard Australian English. We’re proposing that it doesn’t have to operate monolingually. This isn’t a step-by-step technique. It’s a different way of thinking about texts, multilingual learners, English and teaching, and conceptual change doesn’t follow a recipe.

In practice, a book like Kimchi is for Everyone could work as a mentor text within a teaching and learning cycle. Students could analyse how it was made, explore the choices and consider the author’s positions. As they engage with other texts that use multiple languages, teachers and learners can ask, “What does the author want us to feel about this language? What would translating everything into English communicate?” Then students make their own artefact. Like a summative assessment, the finished piece is a snapshot of their thinking, an endpoint that lets them ask, “What have I learned from this process about myself, my languages and who I am as a writer?” That reflection is still part of transpositioning. Teachers need support here as much as students do, so we need to make these processes transparent for both.

Mobina: What assumptions about good writing should teachers reconsider when assessing multilingual learners?

Julie: It depends what we mean by good writing. In mainstream understandings, good often means entirely in English, in one register, voice and genre, which reflects an idea of control. I’d like to see more of students’ voices, which means supporting them to bring in material that matters to them. Leaving ourselves outside academic writing is a narrow practice, especially now that AI can produce formulaic writing for you.

I once looked at an assignment with Kailin Liu, a Year 10 EAL teacher, in which a student connected their learning with life experience. That wasn’t in the school’s criteria, so Kailin wondered whether to keep it. I asked whether it affected the student’s analytical thinking, which was in the criteria. Would removing it improve the writing? Probably not. Kailin came to see how much richer the work was with it in, and we’ve since written about her classroom in “Making multilingual students’ analytical thinking visible”.

Andrea: I agree, and that changes what we assess. If the process matters, self-assessment is key and should be reflective. A routine such as “I used to think... Now I think...” helps students identify change and what brought it about. Having made their own artefact, students can also respond to someone else’s: what worked, how they felt and what feedback they’d give the author. It’s author-to-author feedback, or what teachers would call peer feedback. Ongoing formative assessment matters too. During end-of-lesson discussions, students can share techniques, talk about authorial challenges and explain their decisions. Someone might say, “I wanted to hear how it sounded when a person who doesn’t speak Korean said it, so we tried and recorded it.” Assessment isn’t only marks. Something as personal as Kimchi is for Everyone would be difficult to grade.

Julie: When students make deliberate choices and document them, their rationale shows purposeful movement. That’s control too: “I’m controlling what I make.”

Mobina: So perhaps the issue is our assumptions about writing. Textual transpositioning draws attention to what we overlook when a single language and technical aspects dominate. It might also address inequities in assessing multilingual students, helping them show their meaning-making and creative potential.

Julie and Andrea develop the argument in full in their article in The Australian Journal of Language and Literacy (Choi & Truckenbrodt, 2026), listed below. Their next paper, on textual transpositioning in secondary English, is in progress.

About the authors

A/Prof Julie Choi

Julie Choi is Associate Professor in Language and Literacy Education at the University of Melbourne, where she leads the Arts-Rich Translanguaging Pedagogy (ARTP) Lab. A critical applied linguist, she explores how feeling, the body and creative making shape the ways multilingual people learn and express themselves. She works with teachers, students and multilingual families to create picture books and other arts-rich texts, and is the author of the multilingual picture book Kimchi is for Everyone.

Dr Andrea Truckenbrodt

Andrea Truckenbrodt is a Lecturer in the Faculty of Curriculum and Pedagogy at the University of Melbourne. She works as a teacher educator in the areas of Languages, English as an Additional Language and English. Her research and professional interests focus on multilingualism and multiliteracies, particularly the value and utility of picture books for teaching and learning at all levels.

Making as becoming: what multilingual writers do when they create a text

A: Language, voice and textual transpositioning

B: Languages and choices in Kimchi is for Everyone

C: Creating opportunities for multilingual writing

About the authors

Further reading

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