Multimodal Writing for Promoting Multilingual Adolescents' Writing Growth: An Integrative Research Review

This integrative research review explores in what ways multimodal writing, a newer writing approach, can promote multilingual adolescents' writing growth. This research review finds that multimodal writing benefit multilingual learners in providing flexibility in meaning making process, expanding and deepening learners' understanding of writing in contemporary technology and multimodality rich society, supporting learners to establish their positive writers' identities, as well as helping teachers easily identify learner's needs and facilitate the process of scaffolding writing. Therefore, writing growth is multidimensional and iterative. The current review further discusses how prior researchers understand and interpret writing growth in the context of integrating multiliteracies and multimodalities in writing education, which challenges the narrow definition of writing as mainly grammar and vocabulary skills. By examining the potential of multimodal writing, the research review questions the monolingual and monomodal approach to writing instruction, and highlights a possible way to help multilingual learners who are often silenced in writing classrooms to gain agency, reclaim voices, and draw upon their rich semiotic resources for expression. This review ends with some future research directions, pointing out the necessity of building up teachers' knowledge and skills in implementing this type of writing activity to prepare learners in response to expanding territories of literacy and skills needed for success in the future.