Generative Artificial Intelligence and Sociolinguistics [Invited Colloquium Theme]: Disrupting monoglossic classrooms with the Multimodalities-Entextualization Cycle: Translanguaging and trans-semiotizing in AI-embracing learning and assessment in EMI higher education [Colloquium Panel Paper 4]

Digital language technologies provide both affordances and constraints to uphold the harmony between
ordinariness and innovation in sociolinguistics interwoven with artificial intelligence (AI). The widespread
access of generative AI (GenAI) software, such as ChatGPT, provides user-friendly visual and textual content
creation for everyday life and academic registers and genres. The embedding nature of GenAI tools within
everyday mobile devices and familiar search engines has guaranteed technology-enhanced academic and
communicative productivity across dynamic language practice. However, on the other hand, such innovation
seems to put ordinariness in human nature at stake when plurilingual, pluricultural teachers and students may
romanticise their monolingual meaning-making experience with GenAI and inadvertently invent a
sociolinguistic Other (Said, 2003) for EMI higher education. This colloquium paper investigates the
innovativeness of tertiary students’ content creation in AI-embracing EMI classrooms. To leverage students’
strategic and ethical use of GenAI for translanguaging and trans-semiotizing learning and assessment in EMI
higher education, the Multimodalities-Entextualization Cycle (MEC) (Lin, 2016) is introduced as a
transformative curriculum genre in a 13-week EAP classroom designed for 86 plurilingual students in Hong
Kong. Data generation conducted in this participatory action research (PAR) focuses on tracing how the MEC
may potentially (1) co-create safe spaces for mobilizing plurilingual resources with GenAI tools and (2) raise
critical social semiotic/ multimodality awareness in AI-embracing EMI higher education. Through embracing
the innovativeness of AI with the MEC, tertiary students in EMI higher education gain access to dominant
symbolic resources while engaging in translingual and multimodal, multisensory knowledge-making. This paper
explores the MEC’s potential to challenge monoglossic educational spaces with a dual focus on ordinariness
and innovation in EMI higher education in Hong Kong.
Reference:
Lin, A. M. Y. (2016). Language across the curriculum & CLIL in English as an Additional Language (EAL) Contexts:
Theory and practice. Singapore: Springer.
Said, E. W. (2003). Orientalism. Penguin Classics