‘Fractalizing’ the MEC: Embracing the PAA model and 4T lenses through digital storytelling circles in higher education

The Multimodalities-Entextualization Cycle (MEC) (Lin, 2016; 2024) was initially introduced as a curriculum planning tool. It incorporates the 4Ts—translanguaging, trans-semiotizing, trans-knowledging, and trans-culturing—as pedagogical lenses to guide genetically informed artificial intelligence (GenAI) in transforming English medium education. Inspired by the New London Group's multiliteracies pedagogy (1996), the MEC is conceptualized as a dynamic pattern in human learning, facilitating the embedding of smaller MECs within larger ones across different times and spaces, similar to fractal patterns in nature. This approach offers flexibility for plurilingual, pluricultural teachers and students to address personalized learning and teaching goals both inside and outside the classroom, promoting the dynamic interplay of plurilingualism, affect, and agency (PAA).

This paper presents a case study that explores the fractalization of the MEC for personalized learning in Hong Kong, adapting multimodal meaning-making in the digital age (Lim & Querol-Julián, 2024). Employing design-based research (DBR), the study investigates digital storytelling as translanguaging (Linville & Vinogradova, 2024) for pedagogies of care (Anderson et al., 2020; Siu, 2025) in higher education. The teacher-researcher examines digital storytelling examples and scenarios that harmonize comfortable shifts between multiple semiotic modes in recursive cycles. The MEC was fractalized (Lin & Siu, forthcoming) as both a curriculum genre and AI-empowered heuristic tool within various digital storytelling circles (Lambert, 2012).

By triangulating iterative course design, MEC artifacts, informants' digital stories, interviews, and focus groups, the study demonstrates how fractal patterns of “smaller MECs within bigger MECs” support personalized learning without hierarchical structures among meaning-making modes. This fractalized approach introduces teachers and students to trans-semiotic digital storytelling practices, enabling fluid shifts between semiotic modes through the PAA model and 4T lenses. The paper concludes by highlighting the potential of the fractalized MEC as a theoretical model for integrating multimodal literacy into pedagogies of care in ELT for higher education. (300 words)

Keywords
PAA model, 4T lenses, Fractalizing the MEC, Digital Storytelling, ELT, Higher Education