Collaborative creativity in ESP: co-developing trans-semiotic agency through the Multimodalities-Entextualisation Cycle

In Hong Kong, high priority is set for using English Medium Instruction (EMI) as a strategic agenda for internationalisation in higher education. To accommodate the global flux of virtual communication in post-pandemic eras, content subject specialists face both opportunities and challenges in the teaching of professional communication and disciplinary practice, not only in English, but also in newly emerged hybrid genres. To leverage tertiary students’ familiar social semiotic resources for disciplinary meaning-making (Danielsson, 2016), this participatory action research (PAR) adopted the Multimodalities-Entextualisation Cycle (MEC) (Lin, 2016; 2020) as a curriculum genre (Christie, 2002; Lin, 2016) in a 13-week English for Special Purposes (ESP) classroom for Public Relations and Communication in a higher education institute in Hong Kong. Research questions focus on investigating the role of using the MEC in (1) facilitating heteroglossic teambuilding and (2) promoting translanguaging/trans-semiotising practices in group-based assessment tasks designed for ESP. Data generation methods include gathering plurilingual, pluricultural students’ communicative portraits, Media Kit multimodal composing logs, video-aided oral presentation records, along with conducting focus group discussion and semi-structured interviews with student informants. Research findings elucidate potential benefits and constraints for plurilingual, pluricultural tertiary teachers and students to co-develop collaborative creativity (Swain and Lapkin, 2002; Li, 2018; Jones; 2019) and trans-semiotic agency (Siu & Lin, 2022) in ESP. Moving beyond the logocentric boundaries in ESP classrooms which focus on using English for discipline-appropriate meaning-making, the teacher-researcher used the MEC curriculum genre to propose a trans-semiotic approach to advancing assessment and learning in ESP with the aid of technology-enriched multimodality and translanguaging space (Li & Lin, 2019; Lau & Viegen, 2020). To sum up, this book chapter provides an empirical example for translating SFL-inspired multimodality theories into student-friendly orchestration of digital resources and hybrid texts for sustaining collaborative creativity and trans-semiotic agency in ESP classrooms.