MOBILIZING MULTI-SEMIOTICS IN INTERCULTURAL COMMUNICATION: ASIAN INTERNATIONAL STUDENTS’ EXPERIENCE OF USING ENGLISH AS A MULTILINGUA FRANCA IN A TAIWANESE UNIVERSITY

While much existing literature has shed light on the linguistic experience of Asian international students (ISs) in Anglophone contexts where English is the primary language for academic learning as well as for their social life outside the classroom, little research has explored Asian ISs’ English use in a non-Anglophone context where both English and the local language are advocated as the academic lingua franca. Informed by the recent theoretical evolution of English as a lingua franca (ELF), which foregrounds the multilingual nature of communication in a super-diverse world (Jenkins, 2015), this research examines ISs’ experience of using English as a multilingua franca (EMF) in their social and academic interaction at an internationalized university in Taiwan--a non-Anglophone country where English is frequently, but not always, used as the contact language. Drawing from a qualitative methodology, data were collected through background questionnaires and semi-structured interviews with four ISs and were analyzed inductively to map out the ISs’ EMF interaction with their peer students and university faculty. The analysis shows that these ISs were able to creatively utilize their multilingual and multimodal repertoire to achieve mutual understanding and comity. Furthermore, they manifested an intercultural awareness in their EMF communication as they were able to strategically manage their language use to accommodate their interactants’ language proficiency, personal backgrounds, and ideologies. These findings invite TESOL educators to expand learners’ communicative repertoire and cultivate multi-semiotic language users to facilitate the interaction of the diverse student demographics brought by the internationalization of higher education.