Gongyeh in Public Relations: Mobilising students’ collective agency in CLIL through the Multimodalities-Entextualisation Cycle

In Hong Kong, Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) emerges in numerous English across the Curriculum contexts, motivating non-Anglophone teachers and students across academic disciplines and institutional levels to develop dual content-language awareness. With digital genres emerge after the global pandemic eras, teachers and students in EMI higher education can no longer sustain effective communication with logocentric written modes alone. International scholars supporting multiliteracies and multicompetence across curriculums and disciplines have called for attention to mobilise students’ collective agency (Swain et al., 2015) in CLIL through technology-enriched multimodality. To fill the research gap in leveraging students’ familiar social semiotic resources in talking across the curriculums, this participatory action research (PAR) in a 13-week EMI tertiary classroom introduced the Multimodalities-Entextualisation Cycle (MEC) (Lin, 2016; 2020) as curriculum and assessment genres for supporting “gongyeh” (literally means talking in Cantonese) in Public Relations-specific Media Kit production and oral presentation. The MEC and Gongyeh (a video-making dialogic feedback application) are adopted as pedagogical intervention to improve collective agency and multimodality-driven context-awareness in Media Kit production and oral presentation. Research questions focus on understanding tertiary students’ first-hand experience on the ways multimodal design applications may promote dialogic teaching/ learning in Public Relations-specific logic-in-inquiry. Data collection covers gathering students’ communicative portraits, Media Kit production logs, video-aided oral presentation records and dialogic feedback, along with focus group discussion and semi-structured interviews. Research findings elucidate some benefits and challenges teachers and students may face when using an innovative design application to co-create social semiotics resources for disciplinary meaning-making (Danielsson, 2016). Research and pedagogical implications pinpoint at translating SFL multimodality theories into student-friendly orchestration of multimodal texts and resources in Public Relations, highlighting learner-centric socially equitable assets for advancing talking across the world for plurilingual, pluricultural teachers and students in global EMI tertiary education.