Edutainment Through Translanguaging Practices: A Multimodal Discourse Analysis of Short‐Form English Instructional Videos on Douyin

Recent research in applied linguistics has increasingly attended to translanguaging practices in digitally mediated contexts, yet relatively little is known about how translanguaging practices achieve edutainment within the context of the highly compressed short‐form videos as dynamic discourse on Douyin, China's localized counterpart to TikTok. Drawing on translanguaging theory and multimodal discourse analysis, the study analyzes a song video and a role‐play video for English language teaching. The findings show that content creators flexibly draw on diverse multilingual and multimodal resources. The orchestration of these translanguaging resources has created unique ways for the realization of edutainment in the song video and role‐play video, respectively. The findings also indicate that the use of diverse translanguaging resources in each type of video stimulates positive emotions. By providing the reconceptualization of edutainment, this study is positioned as a complementary study grounded in a specific empirical context. This study not only extends translanguaging scholarship into the dynamic context of short‐form videos on Douyin but also re‐examines the relationship between education and entertainment, enriching existing scholarly understandings of edutainment.