The trans-turn in digital learning environments: What can we learn about creativity in language teaching?

The ‘Trans-‘ turn in Applied Linguistics – a positioning that questions the boundaries between languages and between modalities – has been gaining momentum in the world of heightened mobility. In particular, this trans-turn unsettles the role of language as a static, monolithic entity that can be named, and it challenges the ideological preoccupation of language as a dominant mode. Additionally, the ‘Trans-‘ perspective has begun to influence formal language teaching, however, its influence on the multimodal design of digital, self-directed language learning materials has yet to be accounted for. With the increasing use of digital resources for language teaching and learning, it is of crucial importance to understand the multimodal composition of these materials, and how learning objectives are realised through the strategic mobilisation of multilingual, semiotic resources. Technological affordances enable designers of teaching materials to mobilise a repertoire of modes, resulting in a wide variety of sign-making practices that display creativity across many assumed boundaries. Drawing on a series of language teaching videos and interview with the material designers (also teachers), our paper unpacks the ways in which the teachers conceptualise the online language learning environment, at times without full realisation of the potentials of semiotic resources. The complex interplay of available modes urges us to go beyond named categories and recognise the dynamic and fluid nature of semiotic resources in action. This paper aims to discuss the potential of language teaching that integrates multimodal, embodied activity that goes beyond the linguistic modes by investigating a specific learning context in which teachers can only interact with an imaginary audience in the teaching process mediated by the screen. This learning context poses a set of affordances and constraints to the material designers/teachers in terms of the selection and mobilisation of resources, and pushes creativity crossing different language and modal boundaries.