Agency in the act of redesign: multiliteracies and epistemic positioning in an EMI reading course

As English-medium instruction (EMI) expands in higher education, reading plays an increasingly central role in students’ academic participation. However, EMI research often frames reading primarily as a linguistic or comprehension challenge, overlooking how learners engage with texts to construct disciplinary knowledge. Drawing on sociocultural and multiliteracies perspectives, this study reconceptualises reading as a process of semiotic design and examines how students interpret and redesign sustainability-related texts multimodally in an EMI context. The study was conducted in an elective Reading Skills course at a public university in Türkiye and involved four undergraduates enrolled in EMI programmes. Data included student-produced infographics, written reflections, and semi-structured interviews. Using reflexive thematic analysis alongside social semiotic multimodal analysis, the study traced how students transformed source texts into redesigned multimodal representations. Findings position reading as situated interpretive practice shaped by students’ lived experiences, disciplinary orientations, media habits, and ethical positioning. Multimodal redesign emerged as a key site of learner agency, where students enacted epistemic and representational decision-making through selection, emphasis, and modal orchestration. Across cases, learners organised knowledge through distinct epistemic logics, namely statistical, distributional, procedural, and chronological, demonstrating how multimodal redesign reconfigures disciplinary meaning and challenges deficit views of EMI learners as linguistically constrained readers.