Mobilising students’ collaborative dialogues in public relations through a digital Gongyeh platform

In Hong Kong, Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) emerges in numerous professional communication training contexts, motivating non-Anglophone teachers and students across academic disciplines to develop dual content-language awareness. This chapter reports participatory action research (PAR) which adopts the Multimodalities-Entextualisation Cycle (MEC) (Lin, 2016; 2019) as a transformative curriculum genre in tertiary classrooms. Gongyeh, a video-making dialogic feedback design application, was introduced to two academic cohorts of Public Relations majors (N=88 in total) to promote active engagement in collaborative dialogues as a source of second language learning (Swain and Watanabe, 2019) and knowledge construction within the MEC. Research questions focus on tracing tertiary students’ first-hand experience on the ways a multimodal design application may promote reciprocal multilingual awareness (Windle et al., 2023) in Public Relations-specific logic of inquiry (Green et al., 2020). Data generation was triangulated with Media Kit production logs, video-aided oral presentation records and dialogic feedback, along with focus group discussion and semi-structured interviews. Research findings elucidated the dynamic roles of reciprocal social semiotic resources on disciplinary meaning-making (Danielsson and Selander, 2021). The results sheds light on the pedagogical transformation of dialogic patterns in a digital English medium instruction (EMI) environment and highlights how a digital application may advance SFL-inspired understanding of multimodality for professional communication in digital age.