Students’ intercultural meaning-making through a multiliteracies-informed pedagogy in an applied linguistics classroom

Abstract

This study examines how a multiliteracies-informed pedagogy supports the development of students’ intercultural meaning-making in an applied linguistics classroom in South Korea. Drawing on qualitative analysis of student learning journals, the study focuses on students’ engagement with issues of cultural representation, food colonialism, and digital media discourse. The findings indicate that students moved beyond conceptual understanding to engage in interpretive, evaluative, and reflexive meaning-making. Specifically, students demonstrated the ability to apply theoretical concepts to real-world contexts, recognise cultural representation and power dynamics, negotiate multiple perspectives, and position themselves in relation to intercultural issues. In addition, students developed critical awareness of digital platforms as sites where cultural meanings are constructed, circulated, and contested. These findings suggest that multiliteracies-oriented instructional design can support the development of intercultural competence by enabling learners to engage critically with culturally embedded, multimodal texts. The study contributes to applied linguistics by providing classroom-based empirical evidence of how intercultural meaning-making can be fostered through reflective and analytically oriented tasks in digital media contexts.