Translanguaging and Trans-semiotizing Learning and Assessment in EMI Higher Education

In Hong Kong, to most bi/trilingual teachers and students, pursuing the finishing line in EMI higher education suggests trading off their familiar linguistic and cultural repertoires for the ‘sacredness’ of native-speakerism in English as the target language. Such ideological entrapment, however, may account for social inequalities in Hong Kong, blocking free flows of students’ and teachers’ multiple meaning-making resources. In this presentation we begin with problematizing the influence of a substance-based ontology permeating EMI education. We then explore how a process-based ontology (Ingold, 2010) may revitalise a “becoming” (Barad, 2007; Ingold, 2011; Hill, 2017) approach to translanguaging and trans-semiotizing assessment and learning in EMI higher education. To provide an empirical example, a case study of 75 bi/trilingual students enrolled in a 13-week English for Academic Purposes (EAP) course in Hong Kong is reported to trace how the Multimodalities-Entextualisation Cycle (MEC) (Lin, 2019; Liu & Lin, 2021) as a transformative curriculum genre allows for safe spaces for mobilizing plurilingual and multimodal resources for raising social semiotic awareness among bi/trilingual teachers and students to reclaim their voice in EMI/ EAP contexts, with implications for future research and pedagogical and assessment practices in Asia.
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