Composing Print Essays versus Composing across Modes: Students' Multimodal Choices and Overall Preferences

The current study presents results from students' engagement of composing print essays and composing across modes on the same topic. It builds on the premise that print-based reading and writing should complement and coexist with multimodal pedagogy. A group of Taiwanese adolescent students were invited to complete one print essay and one multimodal product on the same topic of "My favorite place in the world". For their multimodal product, students were required to use at least two modes (e.g. words and image, sounds and words) in any medium (e.g. video, collage, scrapbook or website) of their choice. It was found that the most frequently used medium for students' multimodal projects was video which incorporated words, sounds and visuals. Most students felt that for the topic of "My favorite place in the world", their multimodal products helped them to convey their ideas better because they provided the audience with more sensory information. To conclude the paper, a few future research directions are outlined to help move the research of multimodal composing forward.