Multimodal orchestration for social science–specific meaning – making flow in higher education

Abstract

The ecological view of languaging has been “de-centring the analytic focus from the language(s) being used in the interaction to the speakers who are making meaning and constructing original and complex discursive practices”, critically revisiting multimodal discourse analysis in EMI contexts with convergent issues amidst divergent contexts in Asia-Pacific regions. The ecological view of languaging also projects a niche-taking approach to re-examining the nexus analytical framework for integrating content and language in higher education through multimodal orchestration. This book chapter begins with a literature review on cultivating plurilingual Asian teachers and students’ creative authorial agency with the aid of multimodality through soft CLIL and hard CLIL in discipline-specific EMI tertiary education. The book chapter then reports on case study research conducted by the first author using nexus analysis to investigate the potentials and challenges in developing curriculum genres, such as the Multimodalities-Entextualisation Cycle, for multimodal orchestration in discipline-specific EMI tertiary classrooms in Hong Kong.