‘I feel unbalanced’: bridging emotions, creativity, and translingual pedagogy with EMI students

ABSTRACTRecent research on stakeholders' emotions in English-medium instruction (EMI) higher education settings has demonstrated the importance of engaging students with their emotions about the impact of EMI on their lives. This article presents a pedagogical intervention bridging emotions, creativity, and translingual pedagogy with EMI students in Qatar. Through a semester-long project, students engaged with translingual mentor texts, which served as models for ways of sharing perspectives and emotions about different named languages and through translingual practice. Students then crafted their own translingual literacy narratives, drawing upon their full linguistic and semiotic repertoires to explore their emotions about their relationship with English and Arabic. Lastly, they transformed their written narratives into a multimodal, multilingual video. This project enabled students to actively explore and understand how their emotions are influenced by broader sociohistorical discourses. Given the shifts in Qatar's educational language policies and discourse surrounding language and identity, students expressed a complex array of emotions, especially pride and shame, which led to feelings of both belonging and alienation. This article contributes to a deeper understanding of the emotional landscape and tensions surrounding EMI and demonstrates how emotions research can be effectively applied in EMI higher education settings through pedagogical interventions.KEYWORDS: Emotionscreativitytranslingual pedagogyEnglish medium instructionEnglish language teaching AcknowledgmentI would like to express my heartfelt appreciation to the student participants for willingly sharing their valuable work and insights.Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).