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This article seeks to explore intercultural communication among a group of students with diverse linguistic and sociocultural backgrounds in an English-medium transnational university in China, focusing on multilingual students' practices and perceptions of English as a lingua franca (ELF). Informed by an expanded understanding of translanguaging from a spatial perspective, this study explores multilingualism, multimodality, and spatiality in linguistic practices related to ELF in an international education context. Drawing upon multiple data sources including ethnographic observations, interviews facilitated by language portraits, recordings of interactions, and policy documents, findings of the study show that ELF communication was understood and practiced by multilingual students as a translanguaging act based on (partially) shared repertoires and beliefs about language and communication. It is also found that the monolithic and monolingual model of language policy in English-medium higher education ran counter to the students' daily communicative practices and language development needs. Implications are suggested for how international universities can account for translanguaging in fostering linguistic diversity and preparing students for the practical realities of a multilingual world.

This study, adopting the Foucauldian lenses of citizenship, investigates how a group of students understand the prevailing social discourses and how such understanding and perceptions influence students' sense of citizenship and coping strategies. Drawing on in-depth individual interviews with 28 participants from six universities in Hong Kong, the findings suggest that multiple factors have impacts on the university students' sense of citizenship, including the media as technologies to shape citizenship, the essentialized ideological differences as an apparatus of intervention to shape and act upon individuals, and the legitimacy and discordance of opinions among individuals within both physical and virtual communities. The participants were found to gradually develop an awareness of the discursive construction of the social. They were found to search for their sense of citizenship through (a) opting for one ideological stance and/or keeping silent to avoid being othered within the social discourses existing at the social, community, and family levels; (b) adopting different coping strategies when dealing with their confusion towards conflicting comments; or (c) developing news reading literacy and coming to the realization of the role media plays in discursively constructing new citizens and exercising influence over existing and potential members of communities. The implications of the findings for curriculum design and policy making to develop support measures to facilitate students' positive learning and whole-person development are discussed.

The advancement of English as an instrument for the internationalization of higher education has foregrounded English as an academic lingua franca (EALF), and the case of China is no exception. This study focuses on the process by which EALF has been interpreted and negotiated across university policies and local practices in China's internationalized higher education. Drawing upon nexus analysis and multisource data, the study traced the discursive (re)location of EALF across different scales of social activity related to multilingualism at an English-medium transnational university in China. Our analysis illustrates the tension between English and other co-existing languages, as presented in educational language policies and as perceived and practiced by multilingual students in the local communicative context. The findings also show an interactive policymaking process through which students and university administrators opened ideological and implementational spaces that linguistically and semiotically pluralized communicative scenarios at the internationalized university in focus.

This qualitative study investigates the language socialization experiences and identity construction of a group of Chinese students when they interact with their international peers, in a transnational university in China. This study is informed by the recent critical ethnographic sociolinguistics studies (e.g. Blommaert 2010), language socialization (Duff 2007; Schieffelin and Ochs 1986), and the post-structuralist conceptualization of identity (Norton 2000). Drawing on interview and observation data, this study finds an asymmetrical power relationship between Chinese students and their native-English-speaking peers in conversations, which precipitates the separation of the two groups on campus and pushes Chinese students into a vulnerable ESL speaker positioning. This study indicates that the asymmetrical power relationship, in spite of its existence, tends to be hidden under the cloak of intercultural difference and taken as a natural and granted convention. Moreover, the findings suggest that the intercultural communication in this transnational higher education context provides a space for reciprocal language socialization in which the Chinese students are empowered to construct a multilingual Chinese identity, which opens up possibilities to interculturalism.

This qualitative study investigates the interplay between the ethnic and academic identity construction of a group of university students with South Asian backgrounds in Hong Kong. The findings indicate that ethnic identity and ethnic socialization have protective and facilitative effects on learning motivation and academic achievement. It is found that these ethnic minority students receiving tertiary education, holding congruent views of ethnic and academic identity, display a sense of agency and critical reflectivity of both the host society and their heritage communities and see facilitating community uplift and developing a more positive social image of ethnic minorities as their generation's responsibility. Reconstructing an ethnic identity and developing new social images therefore motivate them to pursue academic success. The findings indicate that the South Asian students figured out ways in which to interact with the outer world and set up new roles and spaces (i.e., a heritage community with more positive social image). The findings shed light on how to provide better opportunities for and assistance to ethnic minority students when they pursue higher education.

This study explores transformations in the cultural identities of a group of pre-service teachers from mainland China during their educational experiences in Hong Kong, and how these transformations subsequently impact their professional identity. Individual and focus group interviews were conducted with 16 cross-border pre-service teachers from a teacher education institution. Findings demonstrate that 1) the participants recast their extant ideologies and cultural beliefs in response to multiple influences in their new context, enabling them to move beyond pre-established teaching values to re-construct their teaching identity; and 2) some participants constructed a bicultural and multilingual identity to gain legitimacy in the host context. The findings indicate that a more supportive context that provides more room for cultural awareness should be co-constructed by local and non-local pre-service teachers, institutions and policy makers. The study extends understanding of the interconnected relations between teacher identity and historical and social discourses.

Drawing on the notions of scale and space, this paper investigates identity construction among a group of mainland Chinese cross-boundary students by analysing their language choices and linguistic practices in a multilingual university in Hong Kong. The research illustrates how movement across spaces by these students produces varying index values for languages and influences their language usage, which becomes emblematic of individual and group identities. The research demonstrates that the values developed in their place of origin may have influences on their identity construction and peer communication in the host context. Finally, it shows that these students use their multiple linguistic repertoires to project multilayered identities and gain legitimacy in peer interactions. (Contains 1 note.)

This qualitative study investigated the impact of online education on the learning and peer interaction experiences of students from eight universities in Hong Kong over the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. It employed an expansive and spatial notion of translanguaging to explore the process by which students drew on the affordance of virtual communication environments to communicate, study and develop new identities. The findings suggested (1) the students strategically mobilised manifold multimodal resources to constitute their communicative repertoires that facilitated smooth intercultural communication and academic success; (2) such communicative competence centralized the mediating effect of digital semiotic systems and thus might empower the students with disadvantaged language skills; and (3) through translanguaging acts the students developed a virtually translocal identity with an expanded experience of internationalisation of higher education whereby the increasingly interwoven physical and virtual spaces bring extended social networks, learning resources, and career opportunities. The implications of the findings were discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While English as a medium of instruction (EMI) is becoming a global phenomenon across higher education contexts, little attention has been paid to the instructional experiences of EMI teachers. Informed by a spatial perspective, this study explored how a cohort of Chinese university teachers navigated their EMI instructional settings. Different from the conventional discourse that depicts EMI teachers as deficit due to their being nonnative speakers of English, this study shows that the teachers were able to capitalise on their spatial repertoires for alternative ways of meaning making in their EMI classrooms. Instead of reducing EMI into an English-only space, the findings show that the teachers constructed EMI as three major spaces, including a space for drawing upon local experiences as spatial resources, a space for redefining internationalisation, and a space for translingual pedagogy practice. Through the construction of these spaces, the teachers reclaimed their legitimacy of being EMI teachers. The findings lend further support to refute the monolingual bias in EMI practice and call for attention to how EMI teachers can act as agents in reconstructing EMI instructional settings as spaces for multilingual and multimodal meaning making. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

English as a medium of instruction (EMI), as a major agenda of language policy and planning and characterizing internationalization of higher education, has been increasingly adopted in global contexts. EMI teachers' language and teaching practices in situated classroom contexts and the possible pedagogical challenges they encounter have not gained sufficient research attention in relation to the expansion of EMI. This qualitative study explored the experiences of nine EMI teachers from different disciplines in Chinese universities through investigating their linguistic and pedagogical practices in EMI teaching, the challenges they encounter, and how they co-ordinate semiotic resources with the affordance of the EMI context. The findings suggested that the teachers a) achieved professional development when developing different teaching materials for and perspectives on the same phenomenon to facilitate the understanding of students from various backgrounds; b) co-ordinated semiotic resources with an affordance of the EMI context to facilitate teaching, with the understanding that language is not merely language, but also a factor influencing knowledge construction, a lens for interpreting knowledge, and a part of the event or issue; and, c) attempted to integrate content/language in learning, despite lacking CLIL-related professional training. The implications for language policy and EMI programme development are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This qualitative study investigates how migrant students from mainland China attending Hong Kong universities, as scale makers, negotiate and construct new scales and identities by utilizing their sociolinguistic resources, and how their scale making is related to such social categories as history and politics. The findings suggest that (re)scaling practices are beyond hierarchically-ordered indexical regularities, but develop and change as a shifting category, and can be considered a construct that allows for negotiation and creation of meanings. The participants show their agentiveness in defining a translocal space that advocates hybridity to their advantage. It is also found that the participants established new tacit norms and organized their identities with reference to experiences and attitudes local students lacked. Under the force or influence of political, social, economic, and interpersonal factors, rescaling practices were continuously in play, and norms were re-constructed by language users. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• University students transfer habitus and capital across fields during the pandemic. • They expand habitus and capital by utilizing affordances of digital technologies. • They enrich multimodal digital literacies in online learning and communication. • They revalidate multilingual capital against a regime of English monolingualism. The COVID-19 pandemic has brought various challenges to the education domain globally. This study examines how a group of non-local university students studying at EMI universities in Hong Kong adjusted to the dominant online mode of learning and communication based on their lived experiences in learning and intercultural social networking during the pandemic. Employing the theory of digital literacies and Bourdieu's concepts of habitus and capital, we show how students expanded, redeveloped and transferred existing awareness, knowledge, competences and practices to engage in a range of digitally mediated academic and social activities in this condition. We conclude by discussing how the findings may inform refinement or readjustment of digitalized/zing international higher education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]