“Insufficiently Korean” to strategic meaning-maker: textual transpositioning and multilingual identity work

Abstract Educational institutions continue to position multilingual capabilities as deficiencies requiring remediation rather than strategic resources deserving recognition and nurturing. Current translanguaging approaches focus primarily on spontaneous spoken interactions, leaving unexamined the sustained creative production through which multilingual writers develop strategic awareness of their complete linguistic repertoires. This paper introduces textual transpositioning as a framework for reconceptualising multilingual writing instruction. Drawing on a 6-month collaborative dialogue methodology, we examine how one multilingual author created Kimchi is for Everyone , a picturebook that orchestrates Korean and English resources without compartmentalisation. Through sustained dialogue, we analysed how strategic capabilities emerged through this creative process. Our analysis identifies four enabling conditions that counter institutional constraints on multilingual meaning-making: extended timeframes for experimentation, multimodal affordances welcoming diverse semiotic resources, personally meaningful purposes connecting to identity transformation, and dialogic spaces where intuitive practices become articulated strategies. Findings reveal textual transpositioning as fundamentally different from spontaneous translanguaging. Where spontaneous translanguaging responds to immediate communicative demands, textual transpositioning enables the deeper, more deliberate consideration of semiotic choices and identity positions that extended creative production affords. The author’s deliberate disruption of linguistic hierarchies, making Korean visually prominent whilst developing accessible presentation systems, demonstrates capabilities that monolingual frameworks render invisible. This framework offers educators an alternative to remediation-focused approaches, demonstrating how language and literacy instruction can recognise and nurture migrant and multilingual students’ existing strategic capabilities.