Reclaiming a plurilingual voice in EMI classrooms: Co-creating translanguaging space through the multimodalities-entextualisation cycle

Phoebe Siu, Bong gi Sohn, Angel M.Y. Lin

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingChapterpeer-review

Abstract

In Hong Kong, plurilingual teachers and students are consistently socialised to uphold monoglossic principles reinforced through English Medium Instruction (EMI) education, under which a foreign standard variety of English (often called 'British English') functions as the supreme dominant language. To most plurilingual teachers and students, pursuing the finishing line in EMI higher education suggests inhibiting the use of their familiar linguistic and cultural repertories for the 'sacredness' of native-speakerism in English. Such ideological entrapment, however, still prevails in many EMI contexts in Hong Kong. This chapter, thus, begins with problematising the influences of (post-)colonial desires for colonial English (Lin & Motha, 2020) and the discourse of linguistic purism (Lin, 2006; Lin et al., 2020) permeating EMI higher education. In this chapter, we suggest a pathway to reclaim a plurilingual voice through documenting a case study of 72 plurilingual students enrolled in a 13-week Public Relations Writing course in a tertiary education institute in Hong Kong. The study traces how the Multimodalities-Entextualisation Cycle (MEC) (Lin, 2015a, 2016) was adopted by the teacher-researcher as a heuristic tool for co-creating translanguaging space (Garcia & Lin, 2016; Li, 2011) with her plurilingual, pluricultural community college students in Hong Kong who are natively fluent in Cantonese or Mandarin, but are obliged to use English as the target language for handling assessment, teaching, and learning in higher education. The significance of this study provides a discernible account of the roles of multimodal meaning-making resources on sustaining plurilingual, pluricultural voices of students and teachers in EMI higher education in a post-colonial city like Hong Kong, where traces of wrestling efforts on reconstructing (socio)linguistic citizenship (Stroud, 2001, 2009) from non-Anglophone perspectives through translanguaging are observed in the EMI tertiary classrooms.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationThe Power of Voice in Transforming Multilingual Societies
PublisherChannel View Publications
Pages189-210
Number of pages22
ISBN (Electronic)9781800412057
ISBN (Print)9781800412033
Publication statusPublished - 31 May 2023

Publication series

NameThe Power of Voice in Transforming Multilingual Societies

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