‘Fractalizing’ the Multimodalities-Entextualization Cycle: towards a theoretical model for integrating multimodal literacy in bilingual teacher education

The Multimodalities–Entextualization Cycle (MEC) was introduced as a curriculum-planning tool to disrupt monoglossic spaces by enabling translingual, multimodal, and multisensory meaning-making. This paper reconceptualizes the MEC as a dynamic, recursive pattern in human learning and positions it as a generative curriculum genre of embedded cycles, in which smaller MECs nest within larger ones across time and space–much like fractal patterns in nature. This flexibility allows bilingual teachers and students to weave small MEC cycles into lessons and everyday activities to address immediate learning needs. Drawing on examples and scenarios, we show how this ‘smaller-within-bigger’ pattern can support lifelong learning without fixed hierarchies among semiotic modes (e.g. speech, writing, images, gestures). An empirical study of English for Academic Purposes classrooms in higher education in Hong Kong illustrates how students at different performance levels engage with the fractal MEC, demonstrating its practical value for bi- and multilingual academic literacy development. Viewing the MEC as a recursive, fractal pattern invites teachers and learners to approach learning as a dynamic, trans-semiotizing journey that moves fluidly across modes in repeating cycles. We conclude by outlining the potential of the fractalized MEC as a theoretical model for integrating multimodal literacy into bilingual teacher education.