Examining How Business Professionals Express Their Home Culture Through Digital Multimodal Composing

Abstract

Internationally operating professionals communicate with interlocutors from a variety of linguistic and cultural (linguacultural) backgrounds, making linguacultural competence essential. One component of linguacultural competence is the ability to express one's home culture, which is essential because such expression requires understanding of one's own perspectives as a way of understanding other cultures. However, research has shown that Chinese professionals often struggle with expressing their home culture in English. To address this issue pedagogically, job‐experienced Chinese professionals were tasked with creating video presentations introducing their home cities to overseas business guests to prompt home cultural expression through digital multimodal composing (DMC). Adopting an instrumental case study design, this investigation used thematic analysis and multimodal content analysis (MMCA) to examine 68 video presentations. Contrary to previous investigations, this study's participants showed great facility in using English to express their home cultures in ways that were complex, highly localized, and sometimes contradictory. Unexpectedly, some participants represented selected colonial‐era architectural, commercial, or cultural influences as distinctive, attractive, and locally meaningful, revealing interdependent epistemologies of understanding. In light of this study's findings, I call for a broadened understanding of linguacultural competence to incorporate multisemiotic resources beyond written or spoken language to convey cultural meanings, a conceptual evolution that accommodates contemporary communicative practices.