This research explored how three newly arrived Chinese ELI students interacted with multiple modes and tools to (re)construct multiple identities. It also examined to what extent multimodality influenced these three ELI students' identity negotiation. Having conducted interviews, observed class interactions, and collected documents, such as WeChat discussion exchanges, this research found that these three ELI students experienced embarrassment in different contexts and had difficulty to claim their identities due to limited English proficiency. However, the use of multiple modes and tools helped them gain access to communities of L2 literacies practices, in which they (re)constructed viable and ideal identities as culture brokers, deep and creative thinkers, information providers, and competent L2 learners and users. This research also suggests that Chinese students' Chinese names and keepsake improved their agency, which empowered them to employ multimodality to participate in different communities of practices to develop identities.

Multimodalities and Chinese Students’ L2 Practices: Identity, Community, and Literacy explores the complex relations and interactions among multimodality, positioning, and agency in increasingly digitized, multilingual, and multicultural contexts. Min Wang uses interview narratives, WeChat exchanges, and class observations and field notes of three Chinese international students’ lived experiences of English learning to show that these L2 learners recognized and appropriated multiple modes and digital tools for their L2 literacies practices. They used multimodalities to position themselves as L2 users who are confident, able, and competent, but sometimes also struggling and ambivalent. The practice of meaning-making, remaking, designing, and redesigning demonstrated their agency as L2 learners. Positioned as cultural and social beings, these L2 learners presented their self-understandings and self-representations through symbolic and material artifacts, interactions with local and non-local people, and engagement in WeChat discussions and ELI learning. They assumed rights, obligations, and expectations in order to become legitimate community members. In the process their agency was promoted, negotiated, or sometimes limited by micro-social structures and ongoing interactions.

An interdisciplinary, peer-reviewed publication, Journal of International Students is a professional journal that publishes narrative, theoretical and empirically-based research articles, study abroad reflections, and book reviews relevant to international students, faculty, scholars, and their cross-cultural experiences and understanding in higher education. The Journal audience includes international and domestic students, faculty, administrators, and educators engaged in research and practice in international students in colleges and universities. More information on the web: http: //jistudents.org

The Journal of International Students (JIS), an academic, interdisciplinary, and peer-reviewed publication (Print ISSN 2162-3104 & Online ISSN 2166-3750), publishes scholarly peer reviewed articles on international students in tertiary education, secondary education, and other educational settings that make significant contributions to research, policy, and practice in the internationalization of higher education. visit: www.ojed.org/jis

While language socialization research has yielded rich insights in understanding international students' language learning and socialization experiences in the instructed academic settings (Duff, 2010, 2019; Duff, Zappa-Hollman, & Surtees, 2019), fewer studies have examined the learning and socialization occurred outside the classrooms (Reinhardt, 2019). As Reinhardt and Thorne (2017) pointed out, focusing on the language socialization in the instructed L2 settings might be limited in (1) describing and capturing second language learners' language and literacy practices outside the classrooms, and (2) tracing their complex identity construction and performance across formal and informal, online and offline environments. Therefore, there is a strong need to investigate how their out-of-school language and literacy practices inform/mediate their language learning and socialization in the academic discourses (Kobayashi, Zappa-Hollman, & Duff, 2017).This dissertation set up to portray a comprehensive picture of four Chinese international students' socialization experiences in the U.S. higher education context. Guided by second language socialization framework (Duff, 2010), this ethnographic study traced four Chinese undergraduate students' multilingual and multimodal literacy practices within and outside the First-Year Writing (FYW) class in a U.S. university over an academic year. Data including individual interviews, class observations, social media posts, and written assignments were collected and analyzed using thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2006).The findings showed that central to their socialization experiences is my participants' exertion of individual agency to achieve their goals, the construction and negotiation of different identities, and their participation in different communities across various spaces. The study demonstrated that the instructors, their parents, the writing center consultants, the American students, and others they encountered in the informal spaces were all important socialization agents. The interactions with these agents greatly affected how my focal participants positioned themselves and how they negotiated the imposed identities. Their identities then guided their decision-making and socialized participants into different practices, values, and communities. For example, my participants constructed identities as a video editor, an emergent business professional, an intelligent and knowledgeable student, and a bodybuilder in different spaces. More importantly, these identities empowered them to challenge the imposed identity of being the deficient English language learners in academic settings. Therefore, the findings presented that participants were not "passive" novices; instead, they agentively and strategically leveraged linguistic and semiotic resources developed in literacy spaces to navigate academic challenges in the FYW classes and steered their language socialization to positive directions.

Jim Cummins is Professor and Canada Research Chair in the Curriculum, Teaching and Learning department at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education.

Multimodal Literacy challenges dominant ideas around language, learning, and representation. Using a rich variety of examples, it shows the range of representational and communicational modes involved in learning through image, animated movement, writing, speech, gesture, or gaze. The effect of these modes on learning is explored in different sites including formal learning across the curriculum in primary, secondary, and higher education classrooms, as well as learning in the home. The notion of literacy and learning as a primary linguistic accomplishment is questioned in favor of the multimodal character of learning and literacy. By illustrating how a range of modes contributes to the shaping of knowledge and what it means to be a learner, Multimodal Literacy provides a multimodal framework and conceptual tools for a fundamental rethinking of literacy and learning.