Digital Multimodal Composing as a Means of Creating a Translanguaging Space

The use of digital multimodal composing (DMC) in classrooms is gaining in popularity. It allows students to express meanings in a range of modes that goes beyond the use of language, at the same time drawing on the affordances of digital media as part of the creative meaning-making process. While considerable work has gone into the design and implementation of DMC in L2 or EFL classrooms (e.g., Hafner, 2014; 2015; Jiang, 2017), as well as perceptions of teachers in using DMC in their teaching (Hafner & Ho, 2020; Li, 2020), relatively little is explored in its use in providing a creative space for students to consolidate understanding of abstract knowledge in content courses. This creative space can be seen as a translanguaging space (Li, 2011) which is constructed by participants bringing together different dimensions of their experience and expectations into ‘one coordinated and meaningful performance’ (p. 1223). In this presentation, I present a case study of two groups of undergraduate students’ engagement in DMC which required them to create instructional videos for a layman audience which explain important concepts in multimodality (Kress, 2010). Based on an analysis of their instructional videos, semi-structured interviews and email correspondences with the researcher, this presentation unpacks how students perceive this DMC task as amateur experts, and what resources they mobilised to accomplish the task. The finding indicates that students’ beliefs and experience of doing academic essays and academic presentations, together with their out-of-class exposure to popular YouTube videos, contribute to the creation of this translanguaging space manifested in the form of instructional videos. This presentation will also address some pedagogical implications of adopting DMC in (language) classrooms.