Multimodalities and Chinese Students L2 Practices: Positioning, Agency, and Community [Hardcover]

Multimodalities and Chinese Students L2 Practices: Identity, Community, and Literacy explores the complex relations and interactions among multimodality, positioning, and agency in increasingly digitized, multilingual, and multicultural contexts. Min Wang uses interview narratives, WeChat exchanges, and class observations and field notes of three Chinese international students lived experiences of English learning to show that these L2 learners recognized and appropriated multiple modes and digital tools for their L2 literacies practices. They used multimodalities to position themselves as L2 users who are confident, able, and competent, but sometimes also struggling and ambivalent. The practice of meaning-making, remaking, designing, and redesigning demonstrated their agency as L2 learners. Positioned as cultural and social beings, these L2 learners presented their self-understandings and self-representations through symbolic and material artifacts, interactions with local and non-local people, and engagement in WeChat discussions and ELI learning. They assumed rights, obligations, and expectations in order to become legitimate community members. In the process their agency was promoted, negotiated, or sometimes limited by micro-social structures and ongoing interactions.Min Wang is assistant professor of TESOL in the department of education specialties at St. Johns University.

As a timely response to L2 learning in the globalized and digitalized world, the book offers fresh insights into empowering young adult L2 learners to exercise agency to gain membership in different communities of practices and provides educational researchers and practitioners with implications for promoting culturally relevant pedagogies in the ecology of L2 classrooms. Journal of Pragmatics

Min Wangs fine-grained case study of three Chinese learners of English in the USA provides much insight into the way international students navigate complex transnational identil£$