“Wearing Only Our Skin”: the multimodal literacies classroom as a living arrangement

Purpose Literacy research exploring multimodal composition and justice-oriented children’s literature each have rich landscapes and histories. This paper aims to add to both of these bodies of scholarship through the emerging assemblage of Studio F, a fifth-grade classroom. The authors share poststructural analytic encounters with attention to the unexpected multimodal relationships and the justice-oriented talk and texts that emerged, as well as the classroom conditions that produce them. Design/methodology/approach The authors think with assemblage theory to examine the newness that emerged as one small group of students wrestled with the emerging instances of racism present in Freedom Summer by Deborah Wiles. Findings Together, the living arrangement of bodies, materials and discourses created openings for students’ explorations of race and racism. Originality/value This paper offers teachers and researchers space to rethink what is possible in the literacy classroom when the authors re-envision classrooms as vibrant assemblages, support emergent multimodal composing processes and follow students’ critical encounters toward justice-oriented literacies.

Vlog-Based Multimodal Composing: Enhancing EFL Learners’ Writing Performance

For most learners of English as a foreign language (EFL), there has long been a lack of effective opportunities to practice English writing skills. However, the recent development of social networking services (SNS) provides new possibilities for these learners to practice writing English in a meaningful way. Meanwhile, with the popularity of social media in language learning, writing is unnecessarily in the form of plain text, and multimodal composing based on text and additional modes such as audio, video or images has been a new form of writing activity instead. This study integrated SNS-based multimodal composing activities into secondary and higher education, with the aim of determining its effects on learners’ writing performance. Two classes in senior high school Grade 10 and four in college were recruited, three as the control groups without using SNS-based multimodal composing, and others as the experimental groups. While all classes’ writing performance improved between pretest and posttest, the gains in overall writing competence by experimental groups and the gains in three detailed aspects (readability, lexical complexity and syntactic complexity) by college students were significantly larger. Progress in detailed aspects, on the other hand, was different across different groups. These findings are discussed in relation to specific characteristics of multimodal composing and SNS-based learning that enables learners to improve writing performance.

Comparing the characteristics of EFL students’ multimodal composing and traditional monomodal writing: The case of a reading-to-write task

Although digital multimodal composing (DMC) is receiving increasing attention in language classrooms, the extent to which it contributes to students’ writing practices is controversial. In order to understand the affordances of DMC compared to traditional monomodal writing in school contexts, it is pertinent to compare DMC and traditional writing using academic integrated-skills tasks. The current study aims to investigate the relationship between the quality of Korean high school students’ multimodal composing and that of the same students’ traditional monomodal writing, as well as content and language alignment. Thirty-one Korean high school students carried out a summary-reflection task through DMC and traditional monomodal writing. After reading a short fable by Aesop, students summarized and reflected on the text. While students used only one mode in traditional writing (i.e. English text), they utilized multiple modes in DMC (e.g. pictures, movies). Students’ task outcomes were scored using analytic rubrics, and texts were coded in terms of the content and linguistic features students retrieved from the text (i.e. alignment) and their degree of reflection. The results showed that there were no statistically significant differences in the quality, content and language alignment, or amount of reflection in writing outcomes between students’ DMC and traditional monomodal writing.

Where is the Support? Learning Support for Multimodal Digital Writing Assignments by Writing Centres in Canadian Higher Education

Writing centres play a vital role in supporting all forms of student academic writing in higher education (HE) institutions, including digital writing projects (DWPs)—multiliterate and multimodal, often video-and-audio-based projects, produced using digital technologies. The importance of writing support for multimodal composing is evident in emerging research on both the multi-skilled practices of writer-designers and the conceptual shifts involved in their adoption. Currently, no research exists regarding the Canadian context of writing centre support for DWPs. To address this, we conducted two surveys: one of 22 Canadian writing centres asking about DWPs prevalence, technology and skills readiness, and DWP awareness; and one of faculty at a large Canadian university, asking about DWPs prevalence and frequency and types of DWP assignments. We find a significant disconnect between the number of DWPs being assigned by faculty and the number being supported in writing centres. We also find a significant lack of writing centre preparedness for supporting DWPs. This paper calls, with some urgency, for writing centres to invest in the reality of student writing in Canadian HE, to begin developing instructional materials, equipment, and skilled staff to support DWPs.