What It Truly Means To be Multilingual: Affirming Kyopomal Over “Konglish” in Early Childhood Translanguaging

Abstract

ABSTRACT In bi‐/multi‐lingual and Two‐Way Immersion (TWI) programs, strict language‐separation policies often inadvertently marginalize the natural, fluid communication of emergent multilinguals, reducing their complex hybrid talk. Bridging the author's lived experience as a multilingual child with qualitative classroom research of first‐grade Korean–English students, this article challenges the monolingual gaze. Utilizing translanguaging as an overarching framework and Hybrid Semiotic Practice (HSP) as an analytical lens, the study documents how children strategically deploy their full linguistic, cultural, and embodied repertoires in peer interactions. The findings reframe these highly metacognitive, audience‐aware, and rule‐governed practices not as errors, but as Kyopomal—an agentive, community‐normed linguistic repertoire. By shifting the paradigm from “Konglish” to Kyopomal, this article offers actionable pedagogical implications for elementary literacy instruction, including cross‐linguistic wordplay. This research demonstrates that affirming these hybrid literacies is not merely an instructional scaffold, but an act of sociolinguistic justice that celebrates what it truly means to be multilingual.