From Creativity to Critical Literacies: Adopting Translanguaging and Trans-semiotizing classroom interactional strategies in EAP classrooms for Design Majors in Hong Kong

Current educational studies (e.g., Chen, Tsai, & Tsou, 2019; Liu, Lo & Lin, 2020) have addressed advantages of translanguaging pedagogy at English-medium instruction (EMI) higher education, investigating how students’ familiar linguistic and cultural resources (e.g., L1, pop culture) and multimodalities (e.g., gestures, facial expressions, visual images) can be leveraged to support discipline-appropriate meaning making with heteroglossic (Bakhtin, 1981) communicative repertoires. This paper reports a case study conducted by a teacher-researcher adopting translanguaging (TL) and trans-semiotizing (TS) classroom interactional strategies for promoting creativity and critical literacies in a 13-week English for Academic Purposes (EAP) curriculum genre for 75 Design tertiary students in Hong Kong. This study involves data collection from multiple sources of information, ranging from multimodal mind-maps, focus group discussion, semi-structured individual interviews, to course documents and assessment samples provided by consented student informants. Research findings explicate how collaborative agency and creative inquiries developed among plurilingual, pluricultural tertiary students across socio-economic backgrounds may promote polyphonic (Bakhtin, 1984) meaning-making in some process-based third space co-construction beyond monolingual EMI assessment frameworks. In addition, data from this study demonstrates how TL-TS friendly classroom social interaction may support plurilingual, pluricultural tertiary students' identity affirmation when reflecting on a wide variety of social issues from a discipline-related perspective in the target language, i.e., English. This study yields significant pedagogical implications for advancing our understanding of collaborative agency, creativity and critical literacies that motivate tertiary students to co-create multimodal meaning-making resources and reclaim their plurilingual, pluricultural voices in face-to-face EAP classrooms, revitalizing socio-emotional learning in post-pandemic eras.