Transcultural awareness and multimodality in YouTube videos among international students in higher education, Thailand

Abstract

YouTube is one of the biggest and most popular global online video sharing and social media platforms. Owing to its multimodal features and rich user generated contents covering hugely diverse themes, it has the power to bring together billions of viewers from across countries and continents. This results in the blurring of linguistic and cultural borders leading to the  creation of a dynamic and vibrant space where English serves as the preferred medium of communication across languages and cultures. This paper examines YouTube and how its users have transformed it into a  “transcultural space” that becomes a repository of highly multilingual and multicultural contents presented through multimodal resources. The term “transcultural” is adopted in this paper to reflect the complexity of cultures. While the popularity of YouTube has exponentially grown in recent years, little is known about its transcultural nature. This study employs a mixed methods approach to investigate how transcultural awareness is represented and constructed by the research participants aided by the multimodal resources of YouTube videos and the use of English as a lingua franca (ELF). It deepens our understanding of the role of YouTube towards the construction of the transcultural in a multimodal context. The findings of the study carry significant implications for ELT pedagogy whereby the multifaceted online platform can be mined to enrich cultural and language learning experience.