Towards Culturally Sustaining English Language Teaching in Hong Kong: Drawing on Funds of Knowledge, Translanguaging, and Multiliteracies

This paper argues for a culturally sustaining approach to English language teaching in Hong Kong. Although English education is often shaped by exam-oriented instruction and English-only assumptions, many students engage with English through popular culture, digital media, and everyday multilingual interactions. The paper explores how English learning can be understood as a multilingual and multimodal process grounded in students’ existing linguistic, cultural, and literacy resources. Bringing together funds of knowledge, translanguaging, and multiliteracies, it argues that these perspectives offer complementary ways of understanding culturally sustaining English language teaching. Funds of knowledge foreground the resources learners bring to the classroom, translanguaging highlights how those resources are used in learning, and multiliteracies broaden how meaning can be made and expressed. The paper concludes by considering implications for classroom practice, including the integration of students’ out-of-school experiences, translanguaging, and multimodal approaches to literacy and assessment.