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Media Education is crucial in the digital age, yet educational interventions often remain fragmented and ineffective. This article presents a new approach to Media Education by adopting multimodal discourse analysis (MDA) as a research-action tool in schools. Specifically, it describes the objectives, methodologies, and results of a PCTO project entitled “Media Education and Active Citizenship 4.0” conducted between 2021 and 2024 with 200 high school students. This contribution illustrates how this methodology was employed to analyze discourse on climate change in the media, presented as a case study. The results show that while many students often reproduce the alarming media frame typical of multimodal discourse on climate change, MDA has enabled them to analytically process communicative strategies and create alternative representations. Despite the need for a more accessible metalanguage, the findings confirm the effectiveness of MDA in Media Education practices.

ESP students need to develop their multimodal literacy to become literate in today's professional spaces. For this purpose, ESP teachers should revisit pedagogy practices to best engage students in the navigation and construction of multimodal genres. As a case in point, we explore PechaKucha (PK) presentations. This multimodal genre consists of 20 slides, which are automatically advanced every 20 s. PK presentations entail a complex format that requires speakers to choose how to convey content, design suitable visuals, and engage audiences. The dataset for the study consists of 7 PK presentations delivered during a social event at an architecture conference. Adopting a multimodal discourse analysis lens, we analyse this set of PK presentations in terms of rhetorical structure and the way in which intersemiotic relations unfolded (synchronisation between speech and visuals and the modal density of slides). The analysis demonstrates that PK presentations entail an intricate multimodal composition consisting of three moves in which professional and personal narratives intertwine. The examination of intersemiotic relations reveals how speech and visuals interplay effectively to transmit meaning and engage the audience. The results of this study provide critical information to design a research-informed pedagogy to enhance ESP students' multimodal literacy. • PechaKucha (PK) presentations involve a complex dynamism of semiotic resources. • PK presentations are organised into set-up, topic development and closing moves. • Low modal density of slides and synchronisation of speech and visuals prevail. • Intersemiotic relations may favour audience's comprehension and engagement. • Research-informed pedagogy to enhance multimodal literacy in ESP contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The exponential increase of multimodal literacy in language learning in classroom contexts has insisted teachers reconstruct their roles. Teachers should be equipped with a number of different quality and ability to deliver meaningful lessons by incorporating technology and embedding moral education in the learning process. However, there is a void left out from many previous studies on integrating traditional art performance into English language learning which caters to the tasks aforementioned. Therefore, this qualitative descriptive study explores resources used by the English teacher to construct meaning to enhance students’ speaking skills. The data of the study were in the form the multimodal products to teach speaking skills. The data were collected through participant observations where one of the researchers played the role as the teacher. The findings reveal the use of different modes of texts including a printed comic page, a story audiotape, and printed puppet characters to help students gain confidence to speak in English and reinforce creativity and fluency in performing a puppet show in English. It was also evident that the activities chosen by the teachers have promoted the students’ enthusiasm in responding to the puppet story which enables them to learn some values from it while improving their speaking skills.

This article examines a culturally sustaining approach to learning about and enacting multimodal literacy instruction that was developed during a field-based reading methods course for elementary preservice teachers. Despite a large body of work exploring preservice teachers’ learning about multimodal literacies, few studies have explored their experiences incorporating multimodal literacies from an explicitly culturally sustaining lens, nor examined learning about multimodal instruction in field-based settings. In this qualitative case study, we explore the ways in which one preservice teacher’s experiences in a field-based reading methods course impacted her conception of multimodal literacies and her understanding of the cultural and semiotic resources of diverse students. The findings detail the culturally sustaining, multimodal literacy instruction that emerged from a mentoring dyad of the focal preservice teacher and a second-grade multilingual student, the preservice teacher’s developing conceptions of multimodal literacy, and the conditions of learning that facilitated her teaching and learning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study explores the literacy and social practices of a young Omani emergent bilingual child who is beginning to develop bilingualism and biliteracy in Arabic and English through social interactions. One case study of a four-year-old child and her family living temporarily for her father postgraduate studies in Canada is presented. Framed on socio-cultural understandings of literacy development, the study discusses the role of multimodal home practices in the emergent biliteracy development of the child and generates new understandings about children's social practices that are embedded in their daily lives. The study also explores the role of these cultural practices in navigating between two systems of language and culture. The findings make visible how children's engagement with the social context of home, whether physical or through digital media, can enhance their biliteracy development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study aimed to explore the multimodal literacy skills of pre-service Turkish teachers. Employing a quantitative research method, this study utilized a descriptive screening model. The research group, consisting of 215 preservice teachers from the Department of Turkish Language Teaching at a university in northern Turkey, was selected through simple random sampling, one of the random sampling methods. Data collected through the Multimodal Literacy Scale and Personal Information Form were analyzed based on various factors, such as gender, grade level, parental education, academic achievement, daily Internet usage time, daily reading time, preferred text types, number of books read per year, and participation in artistic activities. Descriptive statistics, independent t-tests, and one-way analysis of variance (One-way ANOVA) were used for data analysis. As a result of the research, it was determined that all dimensions of the scale were above average, except for Turkish teacher candidates' multi-layered literacy skills and self-expression skills using the multi-layered structure. Teacher candidates' multi-layered literacy skills; It was determined that they had similar characteristics in terms of gender, academic success, daily internet usage time, daily reading time, favorite text type, number of books read annually and artistic activities they participated in. Only the multi-layered literacy levels of teacher candidates differ significantly according to their grade levels. When these differences are examined, it can be said that the averages in the dimension of multi-layered literacy skills and making sense of the content used in the multi-layered structure increase depending on the grade level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As scholarly communication becomes more multimodal in nature, research articles embrace semiotic resources in appended genres such as the graphical abstract (GA). As an established genre in Chemistry research articles, GAs visually remediate chemical processes or research niche. However, this genre still remains in a peripheral area of English for Specific Purposes (ESP) courses as ESP practitioners mainly focus on textual modes. With limited opportunities to compose GAs, students foster genre remediation skills that are limited to textual genres only, ignoring the potential of reading-to-design skills. Upon student composition and critical reflections on GAs, as well as qualitative and quantitative data collection from a survey and interview involving professors, young researchers (YRs) and students, this paper examines rhetorical functions as well as image and text relations, while throwing some light on skills and challenges involved when GA composition is intentionally embedded in an ESP course, and discusses ensuing pedagogical implications. • Switching from reading-to-write to reading-to-design skills. • Embedding critical visual literacy tasks and student remediation of RAs. • Visual remediation awareness through student agency and reflection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: Academic discourse underscores the potential of digital gameplay in facilitating adolescents' acquisition of multimodal literacy. Despite the enduring appeal of digital games among this demographic, their pedagogical merits remain predominantly overlooked and underutilized. Thus, this investigation seeks to delve into the realm of Chinese secondary students' multimodal literacy acquisition facilitated by engagement with digital gaming platforms. Method: Employing a qualitative case study methodology, this research investigated the learning dynamics and outcomes observed within two distinct cohorts of students, totalling eight participants. These students engaged in a nine-session program situated within a classroom environment, characterized by collaborative gameplay, and structured game analysis. Central to this approach was the utilization of a metalanguage framework specific to digital play. Various data collection techniques were employed, encompassing participant observation, interviews, electronic portfolios, and field notes, all of which underwent thematic analysis for comprehensive interpretation. Findings: The results uncovered the nuanced learning dynamics and outcomes pertaining to students' multimodal literacy across functional, critical, and aesthetic domains. This was achieved through a detailed examination of digital gameplay, focusing on representation, engagement, and organization perspectives. Implications: This research provided empirical evidence supporting the recognition of digital games as legitimate and authentic texts that extend the narrative scope of students' literacy endeavours beyond traditional confines, thereby warranting increased pedagogical emphasis within literacy education settings. Such emphasis is essential for cultivating adolescents' multimodal literacy skills, priming them for adept critical engagement with future media contexts. Moreover, the study offers practical insights for educators, facilitating the assessment of digital gameplay as a form of literacy practice and its subsequent integration within multimodal literacy instructional frameworks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the mid-90s, a growing concern has emerged regarding text comprehension from a multimodal perspective. In the Chilean educational context, multimodality has been highlighted in the official programs of the Ministry of Education. The present study examines one of the official Chilean ELT school textbooks, investigating whether its reading comprehension questions align with the country's interest in developing multimodal literacy. This analysis employs Unsworth et al.'s (2019) taxonomy for classifying question types to examine 17 while-reading sections, comprising 216 questions. The findings reveal a predominant focus on questions that can be answered by reading the written text without looking at the pictures as well as a lack of images in several reading passages. These results highlight the crucial role that teachers play in complementing the school textbooks, enabling students to develop multimodal literacy as well as the necessity for textbook designers to recognize the pivotal role of images in comprehending multimodal texts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Signa is the property of Editorial UNED and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Signa is the property of Editorial UNED and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The 'multimodal turn' has led many education systems around the world to incorporate aspects of multimodality into their language curriculum as a response to the contemporary communication environment and new literacy practices of students. In this article, we present and examine findings from a study of the enactment of multimodal pedagogies by two primary level English language teachers in Singapore. Classroom data were collected, transcribed, and analysed in this case study research. We observed eight lessons by two teachers where viewing and representing skills were taught and interviewed the teachers for their reflections on their experience. The lessons were coded in terms of the classroom practices, the knowledge focus, the types of knowledge representations present (conventional or constructed), as well as the source of the knowledge representation (i.e. whether the knowledge was teacher-constructed, student-constructed or jointly constructed by both). Our findings indicate that there was a good balance between teacher and student construction of knowledge. However, most of the knowledge represented in the lessons was factual and procedural rather than conceptual. This suggests that students had few opportunities to critically explore and challenge the knowledge taught and were not guided sufficiently to interrogate the knowledge represented. Representing skills also received less emphasis than viewing skills in the lessons. We discuss the implications of our observations on teachers' professional learning and advance the argument on the need to pay more attention to multimodal pedagogies in literacy instruction given the incorporation of multimodality in the curricula. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Multimodality has gained burgeoning attention among scholars from miscellaneous disciplines, such as Linguistics, Discourse Analysis, Semiotics, Sociology, Anthropology, Cultural Studies, and Language Pedagogy. Nevertheless, little is known about the issue of what teaching materials students need to develop their multimodal literacy, notably in the Indonesian EFL milieu. Hence, this case study addresses this void by examining what type of teaching materials university undergraduate students need to cultivate their multimodal literacy. This study involved 99 undergraduate students from three diverse classes as the participants. The data were garnered through a qualitative survey and semi-structured interviews. They were analyzed using thematic analysis (Braun Clarke, 2006). The findings outlined the needed multimodal teaching materials by the students encompass praxis-oriented multimodal teaching materials, awareness-raising multimodal teaching materials, academic and professional orientation of multimodal teaching materials, simplified and understandable multimodal teaching materials, critical multimodal teaching materials, and visual-verbal relation-informed teaching materials. The shifting needs of communication, literacy, and 21st-century learning skills remain crucial as a nexus between literacy policies and practices in higher education contexts, especially in Indonesia. More importantly, this study attempts to promote the magnitude of multimodal literacy in language education.

Multimodal literacy is seen as an integral part of 21st century learning since children are growing with various modes of communication in their daily life. Despite its significance emphasized in the national curriculum, the study about multimodal literacy in English classrooms in Indonesia is still limited. This study aimed to expose the incorporation of multimodal literacy into English classrooms from the perspective of elementary and middle schools’ English teachers across Indonesia. This research was conducted through an online questionnaire distributed through WhatsApp. There were sixty-one English teachers from different regions in Indonesia who volunteered to participate. A descriptive qualitative approach was used to analyze the data to understand teachers’ perspectives and challenges of integrating multimodal literacy in English classrooms. The study revealed that the majority of participants had the awareness of multimodal literacy in the digital era. Moreover, they held positive attitudes towards the integration of multimodal literacy in English classrooms even though there were limitations, such as the lack of school facilities, teachers’ understanding in effective strategies and teachers’ skills in using technologies. The teachers also realized that multimodal literacy has been highlighted in the national curriculum, yet they have not fully understood the concept of multimodal literacy. This study contributes to the understanding of multimodal literacy in English classrooms, that despite the positive attitudes and opportunities to integrate multimodal literacy in English classrooms, there is still a wide area for improvement. Thus, teachers’ professional development should promote effective strategies to include multimodal literacy in English language classrooms in response to the curriculum reform.

Advances in digital and audiovisual communication have contributed to the remediation and emergence of genres (Luzón and Pérez-Llantada 2022, giving rise to new discourse practices. Against this backdrop, it becomes important to review ESP pedagogy to better prepare students to communicate effectively in professional settings. For this purpose, ESP teachers should move beyond traditional literacy to embrace multimodality and develop students' multimodal literacy. This study presents a multimodal genre-based approach to teaching PechaKucha (PK) presentations (Querol-Julián and Beltrán-Palanques 2021) and reports on students' learning experiences. This pedagogical approach allowed students to explore the genre of PK presentations and reflect on how to construct their own version. The recipients of this approach were 127 ESP students, of which 44 voluntarily completed a survey purposely designed to explore their learning experiences regarding the preparation and performance of a digital PK presentation. Findings suggest that students made a great effort to effectively construct a digitalised PK mainly because of the format requirements. The students were faced with the challenge of making decisions about what and how to represent ideational, textual, and interpersonal meanings through a PK. Finally, this study suggests that students seemed to have become aware of the complexity of expressing meanings through the multimodal genre of PK presentations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper contributes to the contemporary focus on literacy and digital stories in early childhood education and care (ECEC) institutions. When a group of young children create an animated story together, they might collaborate, both with their peers and with their teacher. By drawing on social semiotic multimodal perspectives as the theoretical framework, the purpose of this paper is to describe and explore how different modalities and narrative devices contribute to the development of an animated story created by six children (aged 4-5 years) and a teacher in collaboration. The study is a qualitative case study, focusing on contemporary events in a Norwegian kindergarten. The empirical material consists of video-recorded field observations of the process as well as the final product. Through an inductive exploration of the development of verbal narrative, three analytical strands are identified: i) verbal narrative in the final product, ii) multimodal narrative in the final product, and iii) narrative devices applied by the children during the process. The findings demonstrate the importance of including and considering the process, the product, narrative devices and all the modalities—in particular the kineikonic mode—when creating an animated story with young children. An implication of these findings is for ECE teachers and researchers to acknowledge and integrate all the various aspects that contribute to the final product when young children create animated stories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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In the wake of grim events such as Russian invasion on Ukraine, Taliban takeover in Afghanistan, the death of George Floyd in America and mosque shootings in Christchurch, New Zealand, all occurring amid the pandemic of COVID‐19, it became increasingly more important to recognise literacy work that promotes a critically informed and just society. Thus, through the lens of critical literacy and intersectionality, this study sought to examine how pre‐service teachers drew on critical multimodal literacy practices to create open educational resources (OER) or openly licensed comics that motivate local, global and/or transnational literacy education. Data collection took place at a four‐year public university in Upstate New York. They included student‐created comics, student reflections, researcher's fieldnotes and course syllabus. Findings from the study reveal that the pre‐service teachers incorporated either a local, global or transnational connection to enact a social change. Further analysis shows that the OER or student‐created comics inherently involve actions which are aligned with the three principles of social justice: redistributive justice, recognitive justice and representational justice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study aims to investigate the students' multimodal literacies by analyzing their presentation PPT slides in Business English reading class in two dimensions of discourse genre and multimodality. It discovers certain preferences and patterns in their multimodal semiotic practice as well as some drawbacks in the meaning-making process. Students tend to adopt visualizing genre over other genres to demonstrate factual events in their PPT presentations. They are inclined to use language and image more frequently than other semiotic modes in their PPT meaning making. Besides, their technology and media literacy needs to be strengthened in searching, criticizing, analyzing online information resources. Eventually it provides teachers with pedagogical scaffolds to teach the viewing and representing of multimodal texts effectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The development of teaching materials is one of the most important elements that can support the quality of the learning process, including foreign language learning. In contrast to technological developments, teaching materials for Arbeit am Text courses studied by students at Universitas Negeri Malang (UM) are still conventional and have not received sufficient attention for a long time. On the other hand, the course that focuses on German reading skills has an important goal, namely, to improve student literacy. Therefore, this study aims to develop multimodal-based teaching materials for Arbeit am Text courses. In this research and development, researchers used the ADDIE model (Analyze, Design, Development, Implementation, and Evaluation). Questionnaire sheets were delivered to the material expert as well as to the media expert to earn product validity. Besides, e-questionnaires were also filled out by students as users of the teaching materials arranged. Based on the data validation results, it can be concluded that the multimodal-based digital teaching materials for the Arbeit am Text course were declared to meet the eligibility requirements for media and material with respective percentages of 94% and 95.28% so they are included in the "very good" category. Likewise, the results of trials on users, namely students who took part in the lectures, had given very positive responses to the multimodal-based digital teaching materials designed by researchers. Researchers hope that multimodal-based digital teaching materials can be used widely, especially in learning the Arbeit am Text course, and can be used as a source of independent learning outside the lecture process.

In March 2020, when the pandemic hit the nation, elementary school teachers turned to bitmoji classrooms to sustain students’ learning. Multiple virtual replicas of classroom themes were instantly created and shared across social media spaces. The sudden craze prompted the four of us to investigate configurations of book shelves or, s(h)elfies (selfies of books) in bitmoji classrooms. We focused on s(h)elfies that display diverse books with a social justice theme. Using netnography, we examined bitmoji classrooms uploaded onto public Facebook groups for a year. We did critical case sampling, selecting unique cases to examine (Etikan, Musa & Alkassim, 2016). In this visual scholarly article, we provided our analysis of three s(h)elfies undergirded by socio-spatial (Comber, 2015) and multimodal theory (Kress and van Leeuwen, 2001). Our findings revealed that s(h)elfies in bitmoji classrooms is not just a trend, but also, a literacy practice.

Language is not only verbal, but multimodal of discourse analysis also play vital role in understanding the text. The term multimodal literacy has been created in 2003 by Jewett & Chris, behind the term is the premise that the idea of literacy must be reconceived in order to encapsulate the variety of meaning-making modes that play a special role in electronic or print multimodal. Technological advances have necessitated the development of reading and writing skills that go beyond what is known in dealing with traditional multimodal, in teaching language and exams, and in receiving the arts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the opportunities to learn about multimodal literacy promoted by the Bases Curriculares (2012) in Language and Communication subject for Chilean elementary education. Although there is consensus about the multimodal character of literacy practices, the school continues to focus mainly on reading and writing practices centered on mastering the verbal language. The analysis revealed that only 26.9% of multimodal literacy development opportunities are explicitly addressed, with more presence in the oral and reading domains and few opportunities for multimodal writing. Furthermore, the role of media, contexts, and metalanguage for learning the subject needs to be specified. This article discusses implications for educational policies and pays special attention to the role of multimodality in conceptualizing literacy in the context of the futures of education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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This paper offers a Multimodal (Inter)action Analysis study of how metadiscourse is used in university lectures. Metadiscourse is frequently employed in spoken academic discourse to guide the audience through the contents of the speech, thus becoming an essential element to foster comprehension in lectures. Although lectures have been largely researched under a multimodal eye, studies looking at the multimodal nature of metadiscourse are still scarce. In fact, previous multimodal explorations of metadiscourse in lectures point towards discrepancies in the attention given by lecturers to metadiscursive instances. In this study, six face-to-face lectures in fields within Humanities were analyzed to spot all instances of organizational metadiscourse. Next, the fragments containing such metadiscourse were further explored through a Multimodal (Inter)action Analysis to identify the structure of higher-level actions and the ways in which metadiscourse was integrated as part of the modal configurations of the actions. The analysis of higher-level actions using the foreground-background continuum reveals two main roles in the use of metadiscourse: an active one, in which metadiscourse is explicitly used to guide and engage the audience, as expected; and a passive one, in which metadiscourse is rather used as a filler in the background. These results contribute to reflecting on teaching practices and raising awareness on the importance of multimodal literacy for teacher training. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This contribution focuses on the role of spontaneous gestures in the comprehension of co-occurring phrasal verbs and idiomatic expressions by learners of English as a foreign language. The hypothesis at the basis of the work is that iconic gestures may assist in the understanding of semantically opaque expressions not only learners with typical development, but also learners with developmental dyslexia, who tend to have greater difficulty in processing figurative language and pragmatic meanings. An experiment was run covering 11 not-fully compositional verbs and non-transparent idioms as linguistic stimuli accompanied by iconic and metaphoric gestures, which were taken from authentic audio-visual materials. Two groups of Italian students, with and without dyslexia and consisting of 23 members each, from undergraduate courses at the University of Pisa were recruited for the experiment. Each student was exposed to the same stimuli via two different modes, namely audio and video, following different orders of presentation. The results seem to support the initial hypothesis, as highlighted by the better performance elicited through the visual mode where gestures were clearly visible, especially when learners with dyslexia were involved. Consequently, the study provides evidence in favour of a multimodal orientation and use of correlated strategies in the learning/teaching of English as a foreign language in general, and even more so when learners with dyslexia are present. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigates three young Chinese girls’ active play on TikTok as a way to engage in global communication during the Covid-19 lockdown in China. In particular, this paper aims to navigate how the girls position themselves in TikTok multimodal literacy play, as well as to inquire into how they practice literacy to deny, negotiate, and/or accept the beauty norms in TikTok virtual space. Situating and exploring these young girls’ stories, the author shares findings from multiple rounds of virtual interviews during the pandemic that highlight the girls’ creativity through multimodal literacy engagement on TikTok; their playful thinking that adopted the pandemic as a way of life and empowered the girls despite uncertainties, doubts, and tensions; and their complex beauty values negotiations embedded in the experiences of the girls’ vibrant interactions on TikTok. Inspired by the girls' literacy practices and gender negotiations, TikTok’s influences on norms of beauty and feminine appearance are discussed. Interrogating the limits of this platform, this work recognizes the possibilities of young girls’ multimodal literacy experiences while encouraging further negotiations, reimaginations, and growth in their celebrations of social media like TikTok. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The digital age requires each individual to redevelop new skills and many literacy skills in order to function in modern society. Therefore, new concepts are emerging in education that explain what all the skills are necessary in order to adequately perform certain activities in the online environment. One of the modern concepts is multimodality, which is inevitably accompanied by modes, multimodal literacy, and digital, as well as broader literacy. Multimodality is a communication phenomenon that relies on the use of modes, i.e., semiotic resources, whose role is to create meaning. Namely, mods include images, charts, sounds, colours, audio, videos, maps and so on. Their function is to help digital texts convey a specific message in an online environment. In all this, the key role is played by multimodal literacy, which is the ability to successfully work with texts that include different modes, as well as digital literacy, which includes the ability to search, locate, select and analyse digital information. Having in mind that both literacies are interconnected and complementary, the aim of this paper is to draw attention to the mentioned concepts as well as to present their importance for the realization of multimodality in education.

This contribution attempts to explore the new learning situations imposed by the global health crisis which has forced Algerian universities to change teaching and assessment methods. Our reflection emphasizes the different conceptions that students have of the types of teaching they receive. We also try to describe their motivational profiles as precisely as possible. Finally, we undertake some didactic reflections to promote the establishment of an acculturation of students to this multimodal literacy.

Multimodality in teaching is gaining more attention in contemporary research and scientific literature. It is a special communication that relies on modes, such as pictures, graphs, audio, videos, maps, etc. which by combination create certain meanings in order for the modes to be adequately combined, multimodal literacy is necessary. The aforementioned literacy in teaching helps students to create multimodal texts and tasks in a digital environment. Therefore, the aim of this paper is to examine how first and second-year students of Hispanic Studies at the Faculty of Philology in Belgrade manage in a digital environment working on a multimodal task, as well as how they use digital tools and the Spanish language. Student presentations were exhibited and recorded via the Zoom platform, and data were collected through the observations of the researcher. Also, the research method used for research purposes is the analysis of authentic teaching materials. First-year students presented a topic about health in Spanish via the Moodle platform, while second-year students presented and created their own virtual tour in Spanish using the Padlet platform. For the analysis of multimodal activities, the criterion related to the use of modes and the creation of multimodal texts was used. The results of the analysis showed that most students were successful in creating multimodal activities, that they used mods in a creative way and that in this case it was possible to implement this type of activity because the students of this faculty and the study program are adapted to frequent application of new technologies on assignments using the Spanish language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines students' identities in teacher–student interactions during an eight-week comic unit within a fourth-grade literacy classroom. Though researchers have increasingly studied how teachers incorporated graphic novels and comics into the school literacy curriculum, few have documented the social interactions that students' multimodal composing is embedded in. Using microethnographic discourse analysis, we traced the identity work of two case studies at different reading levels during whole-class discussions and writing conferences and how their teacher supported their positive identity development through discourse moves. In this article, we show that the teacher's dialogic approach to teaching provided both students with opportunities to position themselves and be positioned as expert and comic author. We encourage educators to use multimodal literacy to create a supportive learning environment that transforms verbocentric school literacy and students' identities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Given the notion that graphic novels have the potential for instruction, this study examines the questions: In what ways do local media specialists and English Language Arts (ELA) instructors use them in their classrooms or other educational settings? If instructors use graphic novels, how do their students respond to them? Have they experienced criticisms concerning the use of graphic novels as texts worthy of analysis and exploration in the classroom? Finally, what is the connection between research and the use of graphic novels in the classroom? In this qualitative study, the authors examined 14 responses from media specialists and ELA instructors working in schools in southeastern Tennessee. Additionally, they reviewed literature related to each of these questions.

This study explores teaching and learning with a range of texts — with a focus on comics — that highlight diverse identities and voices. I asked: What happens when a range of multimodal and nontraditional texts with prominent diverse identity representations are integrated into a 10th grade ELA curriculum? Data was collected in a culturally, racially, and linguistically diverse school with a 10th grade ELA teacher and six students as participants. The comics medium, combined with other media in multimodal text sets, provided opportunities to challenge normative curricula and for students to think about themselves and how they operate in their worlds.

Picture books discussed with pupils in primary school are considered multimodal texts, as they combine at least two communication codes (verbal and visual). A discussion involving picture books will normally be included in Slovenian language lessons, with pupils focussing mostly on the text. The visual aspect, which equally carries a message, is often neglected. The objective of the present case study that was conducted among fifth-grade primary school pupils in the 2018/19 school year was to explore how a cross-curricular approach to planning and executing the lessons in the Slovenian language and visual art can help pupils learn about the characteristics of the picture book as a multimodal text. We conducted a set of didactic activities entitled Getting to know the picture book, introducing selected picture books to pupils as part of their Slovenian language classes, which resulted in them developing their receptive skills while observing and defining the structure of the texts. In visual art classes, the pupils learned about the visual features of the picture book. As a productive response to the picture book discussed, the pupils were instructed to complete the following tasks: design a cover for their own picture book, design endpapers, illustrate their own poem, and produce their own leporello. The survey involved 21 pupils, a generalist teacher, and a researcher in art didactics. The case study was completed in five weeks. The data were obtained by means of initial and final testing, questionnaires for pupils, and participant observation.

Information literacy have been conceptualized by numerous researchers and organizations for a long time. Especially after the prevalence of ICT and screen-based digital communication tools which make a constant connection among people, information literacy has recently been re-conceptualized regarding the new culture, user agency, and text structure. Under these conditions, individuals are seen to make meaning of existing information resources and create new information resources as the parts of socialized information construction processes. Therefore, individuals are considered active designers of information resources. In this respect, this study aims to explore how individuals design information resources which are expected to have multimodal semiotic text structure. A qualitative descriptive method was adopted, and data was analyzed both quantitatively and qualitatively. 16 post-graduate Department of Information and Records Management students joined the study. 64 information resources (participant-generated texts) were analyzed. Results demonstrate that the semiotic structure of information resources is far from having high meaning-making potential and mostly dominantly monomodal instead of being multimodal. The study recommends that information literacy education should also focus on how to design semiotic rich and multimodal information resources to be effective contributors to information construction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper links Systemic Functional-based multimodal discourse analysis and English as a Foreign Language (EFL) teacher education through the workshop “Multimodal Literacy in the EFL classroom” (MLEFL). Drawing upon ‘multimodal analysis for critical thinking’ (MACT) pedagogy (O’Halloran et al., 2017) and the Systemic Approach to teaching critical viewing (Lim and Tan, 2017, Lim, 2018), MLEFL aims at involving student teachers (STs) in a transformative process through which STs with no previous instruction on multimodality are introduced to multimodal literacy. After being engaged in making meaning through various semiotic resources and conducting multimodal analysis with the use of a pedagogic metalanguage, STs complete a task of representing their new experiences via the process of creating a lesson plan aimed at promoting primary school students’ multimodal literacy. The paper presents MLEFL as a design for learning (Kress and Selander, 2012). It serves two purposes: to present the content and syllabus of the MLEFL workshop and to reflect upon its implementation and effectiveness. The paper reports on the qualitative findings from a small-scale research conducted with twenty pre-service EFL teachers who participated in the fourweek workshop in a virtual environment. It investigates STs’ perceptions shared in workshop evaluation forms and participation in the forum as well as their assignments for signs of learning. The analysis of the findings revealed differences in STs’ capacities (Kress, 2010: 175) which support the effectiveness of the workshop. Most STs created lesson plans which promote critical viewing, used the pedagogic metalanguage efficiently and explained the design of their activities with well-informed rationale. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The current paper discusses a pilot study with a focus on L2 learners' multimodal reading habits. More specifically, the study seeks to investigate (1) how second language learners read multimodal texts of different image-text relations, (2) which image-text relation builds a stronger visual or verbal mental representation of the text, and (3) whether age affects multimodal reading processes. In the present study, we focus our attention on students' reading practices of two types of multimodal texts which demonstrate the image-more-general-than-text and text-moregeneral- than-image relations (Martinec & Salway 2005) of visual and verbal representations of meaning. To do so, 70 B1 level Hungarian English language learners attend the research to read and respond to an online multimodal reading test. The preliminary results reveal that not all intersemiotic relations lead to a stronger mental model of multimodal texts; also, the generality of the mode and the degree of participant's visual involvement with the text affect both the processing and speed of reading and information recall. In addition, as far as the participants' age is concerned, adult second language learners spend longer time on reading multimodal texts and rely on images more frequently to respond to the texts. The present research may develop more comprehensive theoretical accounts of multimodal reading among L2 learners and inform pedagogical practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on issues of multimodal literacy practices in ESP higher education settings. In particular, the research explores how students become engaged in various literacy activities aimed at enhancing their critical-thinking skills and interpretation of images. For this purpose, two datasets consisting of video clips were extracted from a larger multimodal corpus and developed for teaching applications: one involved a UK live parliament debate and the other a US House of Representatives debate. The main objective is to identify the key verbal strategies reflecting persuasive, argumentative rhetoric and the non-verbal features accompanying these verbal utterances such as prosodic stress, body/head movements, gaze, gesture. Thus, the focus of the analysis is on how different semiotic modes of communication construct meaning, especially in terms of how they reinforce the construction of identity and ideological stance. The results were systematically categorized and applied on a practical level to a teaching unit on 'identity and ideology'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reports on an investigation into the reading path patterns in a children’s picture book. The primary investigation focused on the semiotic resources involved in the construction of meanings in picture books, i.e. language and image elements. These semiotic resources provide insights into the unfolding of the storylines in the observed picture book. In order to detail the roles of these resources, a picture book entitled Tacky the Penguin (Lester, 1988) was selected and examined by employing two methods: Kress and Van Leeuwen’s (1996, 2006) structure of information value and Royce’s (1998) Intersemiotic Complementarity. The results of the analysis suggest that the whole picture book is built from a page-by-page reading path that allows for a linear and non-linear reading path. While each page presents a different layout of information value, the general pattern leads to a linear reading path from the beginning up to the end of the picture book. The mapping of the reading path is reinforced by the interrelated meanings between verbal and visual resources on the page. Drawing on the analysis results, this paper offers the delve into the flow of information from the language and image resources in the picture books that can be used to inform practical use of picture books in EFL classrooms.