ABSTRACT
Technological advances and globalization have created numerous opportunities for online informal language teaching/learning. What emerges with this trend is that teaching languages online has become an increasingly common commercial practice. While previous research has explored how learners rely on a wide range of digital affordances to facilitate their beyond-classroom language acquisition, the question of how online language instructors draw on various multimodal resources to create content with both a marketing and a pedagogical focus has not been adequately addressed. Taking a social semiotic approach, this study analyses a Douyin video on speaking to an immigration officer and how the content creator deploys multimodal resources to advertise his language lessons and simultaneously to provide language instructions. The analysis identifies two strategies used in the video to attract followers: constructing English as a valuable skill and establishing expertise, during which specific varieties or types of English are commodified. It is also found that translanguaging, despite being perceived negatively in the video, serves to facilitate the commodification of English and is adopted as a pedagogical approach.
