Constructing Cross-Cultural Meanings Across Nested Timescales Through Digital Video Composing in an EFL Context

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Abstract

This qualitative case study explores how Chinese adolescent EFL students engage in cross-cultural meaning-making across multiple, interacting timescales through digital video composing (DVC). Drawing on Lemke’s (2000) theory of heterochrony, the analysis examines how students mobilize multimodal resources—linguistic, visual, and embodied—across referential (past, present, future) and organizational (micro, meso, macro) timescales to introduce their hometown culture to imagined exchange students from the United States. Data from eight student-produced videos reveal that students engaged in temporally distributed, trans-semiotic meaning-making, remixing elements of cultural identity to construct layered narratives about JingTing Mountain through representations of its past, present, and imagined future. DVC functioned as a semiotic bridge, connecting ritualized, place-based practices with broader sociocultural discourses.

Author

• Qianqian Ma, University at Buffalo - SUNY