Promoting Foreign Language Enjoyment Through Displaying Affiliation in Collaborative Digital Multimodal Composing in Hong Kong ESL Classrooms: Insights From Translanguaging and Transpositioning Perspectives

ABSTRACT Studies on classroom interactions suggest that displaying affiliation through linguistic and multimodal resources could promote positive emotions like enjoyment, thereby enhancing engagement and enthusiasm in second/foreign language learning. Foreign Language Enjoyment (FLE) scholarship indicates that these resources may signal FLE and highlights the importance of translanguaging in promoting enjoyment. While Digital Multimodal Composing (DMC) tasks are often perceived as enjoyable, how students engage in translanguaging and transpositioning to display affiliation, thus fostering enjoyment in collaborative DMC process, remains underexplored. This paper employs translanguaging and transpositioning perspectives to explore how students display affiliation in small‐group interactions in collaborative DMC processes in English‐as‐a‐Second‐Language classrooms. Multimodal Conversation Analysis and Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis were used to analyse students’ small‐group interactions and video‐stimulated‐recall‐interviews, respectively. The findings suggest that students’ mobilisation of diverse resources and transcendence of predefined roles enable them to create a translanguaging space for them to engage positively with peers, and that contributes to FLE. This paper argues that displaying affiliation in small‐group interactions is a process of translanguaging and transpositioning. By foregrounding the affective dimension of DMC, it is suggested that DMC offers not only new writing experiences but also serves as an emotionally supportive pedagogy that promotes FLE.