Chapter 5 expands on Johns’s socioliterate view of writing development to integrate her view within the mutually beneficial fields of genre theory or analysis and broader fields such as Second Language Acquisition, rhetoric and composition studies. Using survey research, this chapter explores researchers’ writing strategies and resources to compose traditional and new digital genres in one or more languages. In acknowledging the pedagogical value of individual experiences accumulated in writing practices, this chapter also attaches value to ‘generic interdiscursivity’, as prior genre knowledge can scaffold the composing process of other genres, both written, spoken and hybrid, through strategies of connectivity across discursive practice. The chapter critically supports Gentil’s important claim of ‘biliteracy’ in genre practices, or the use of previous genre knowledge in one language to compose genres in other languages. Corpus data illustrate aspects of multimodal rhetoric and the construction of visual scientific arguments in multisemiotic genres and in multilingual genre sets.

Joanne Leal’s chapter investigates how far and how exactly cinema is able to offer a representational counterbalance to conservative notions of national belonging and exclusionary constructions of what social cohesion should mean. It considers these issues mainly within a Western European framework, asking what film can do to promote intercultural sensitivities within contemporary European contexts in which attitudes to the impact of globalization and particularly the transnational movement of people are often ambivalent and sometimes actively hostile. In particular it examines critical assessments of the positive intercultural impact of watching foreign cinema, the possible political effects of films which encourage empathetic responses to transnational tales contained in generically familiar forms and the critical potential of two kinds of film which uses less conventional cinematic means to represent a globalized social world.