Reconceptualising Motivation as Material‐Semiotic Entanglements: Translanguaging in Graduate TESOL Education

ABSTRACT Multilingual students in Anglophone universities often operate in survival mode. While translanguaging supports learning, critical gaps remain in understanding how translanguaging pedagogies transform and sustain motivation in English‐dominant contexts. The L2 Motivational Self System, the dominant motivation framework, assumes bounded target language proficiency, yet translanguaging involves unbounded linguistic repertoires that challenge L2MSS's foundational assumptions. This study examines how translanguaging shapes three graduate TESOL students’ motivational orientations at an Australian university. We collected visual motivation trajectories, interviews, and multimodal artefacts, including language portraits, memes, multilingual books and videos, along with written reflections from three students who engaged with arts‐rich translanguaging pedagogy and continued beyond the initial subject. Students’ motivational orientations transformed from compliance‐based engagement towards critical stances on language ideology. Through the findings, we reconceptualise motivation as material‐semiotic entanglements emerging through interactions among materials, ideologies, institutional structures and personal histories. We extend L2MSS by showing translanguaging reshapes ideal selves toward multilingual repertoires, suggesting reconceptualisation as LX Motivational Self System. Our findings highlight how motivational possibilities within arts‐rich translanguaging pedagogies emerge in institutionally privileged contexts, prompting a critical examination of what these pedagogies accomplish when students benefit from well‐resourced programmes with multilingual flexibility.