The construction of translanguaging space through digital multimodal composing: A case study of students' creation of instructional videos

Abstract

This paper investigates students' creation of a translanguaging space through engaging in digital multimodal composing (DMC). Engaging in DMC is an act of translanguaging whereby students mobilise a range of resources in their repertoires, including spoken and written language, image, sound effects, also bringing with them their identity and experiences. Focusing on how four bilingual undergraduate students at a Hong Kong university created an instructional video to explain abstract concepts related to multimodality to a lay audience, the study revealed that the process of creating instructional video requires students to mobilise a range of semiotic resources and orchestrate them in a way that the videos are creative, entertaining, and above all, demonstrative of their theoretical and practical knowledge of multimodality. The findings of the study suggest that students' beliefs and experiences of academic essays and presentations, together with their out-of-class exposure to popular YouTube video genres contribute to the creation of a translanguaging space which affords a safe and supportive environment for students to creatively and critically transcend socio-historically defined registers, genre norms and conventions, as well as the distinction between knowledge ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ of the classroom. This paper concludes with pedagogical implications of adopting DMC in classrooms.