Roundtable 2

Roundtable Title

Multilingualism & Mobility

Speakers

(Chair)Dr. Yue Ellen Zhang

Prof. Fan Gabriel Fang

Dr. Sal Consoli

Dr. Mostafa Nazari

Abstract

This roundtable examines how multilingualism, mobility, and emerging technologies shape language learning, teaching, and professional identity across diverse educational contexts. Bringing together perspectives from Hong Kong, Europe, and Iran, the session explores how learners and teachers mobilize linguistic, cultural, digital, and life experiences to participate more agentively in classrooms and wider communities.

It consists of four talks (10 minutes each):

(a) Prof. Fan Gabriel Fang examines Teochew-speaking university students’ experiences of English-medium instruction in China, revealing both English’s academic and professional value and the marginalization of Teochew where English and Putonghua dominate, advocating EMI practices that recognize students’ full linguistic repertoires,

(b) Dr. Mostafa Nazari presents a study of four English teachers in multilingual Iran, showing how teachers’ multilingual repertoires support interpersonal identity construction, enable flexible positioning across interlocutors and contextual languages, and encourage greater investment in learners’ multilingual resources,

(c) Dr. Yue Ellen Zhang explores how cross-border multilingual teacher in Hong Kong can be empowered to invest in multimodal GenAI-mediated teaching practices and teacher identities agentively through digital multimodal composing, translanguaging, and GenAI-mediated practices (Zhang & Dikilitaş, 2025; Zhang, 2026), and

(d) Dr. Sal Consoli’s intervention draws on the concept of Life Capital (Consoli, 2022) to explore how language learners’ histories, relationships, emotions, values, and aspirations influence engagement with language learning in an increasingly mobile, digital, and interconnected world, highlighting how learners carry accumulated experiences across linguistic, cultural, educational, and technological spaces.

The roundtable concludes with a Q&A session centred on two questions:

(a) At EdUHK, we nurture educators and social leaders who are intellectually active, socially caring, and globally aware. How can the presenters’ research inform ways in which learners, teachers, and schools can work together to achieve this goal?

(b) Hong Kong is a vibrant multicultural community characterized by a unique blend of Eastern and Western influences. How can we foster new immigrants’ active participation in Hong Kong’s local multilingual and multicultural communities?

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