Using Multimodal Pedagogy to Teach Languages Online

The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020 immediately exposed inequities among students and teachers in terms of technological access and pedagogical skill. Educators responded to this new reality by modifying their teaching and interactions with learners and by seeking opportunities for introspection, reflection, and transformation. The field of teacher education was also affected by the pandemic. This chapter presents the transformation of an in-school face-to-face pre-clinical language teaching and learning experience at the elementary school level into an innovative virtual hands-on online one-on-one language pre-clinical teaching and learning experience. It also includes how teacher candidates (TCs) participating in this program designed and taught highly engaging multimodal virtual lessons, the pros and cons of teaching in this type of setting, and the lessons learned though this experience.

BEYOND TRADITIONAL LITERACIES: A MULTIMODAL-BASED INSTRUCTION TO FOSTERING STUDENT DIGITAL LITERACY LEARNING

The fourth Industrial Revolution (IR 4.0) marked by artificial intelligence and cyber-physical systems has transformed the landscape of education including English literacy instruction. Some literacy educators claim that the success of students’ today as millennial kids (Gen-Zs) and future employees has been linked to digital literacy. This term is defined as the skills associated with using digital technology to enable users to locate, organize, understand, evaluate and create information and using those skills to solve problems in technology-rich environments. This study attempts to investigate the extent to which multimodal pedagogy helps improve students’ digital literacy skills in an English for Specific Purposes (ESP) setting in a vocational higher education. A theoretical multimodal semiotic approach along with multiliteracies pedagogy is served as the overarching guideline in the overall instructional procedures grounded specifically from the principles of learner-centeredness, constructivist learning, and social interaction. A qualitative case study approach was adopted to provide an in-depth explication and analysis of students’ literacy development. Data collection included classroom observations and students’ digital artefacts. In the course of the study, the students were engaged in the creation of two digital projects of different genres: digital information report in the form of text-image creation and digital persuasive talk in the form digital video production. The key findings of this study suggest that multimodal pedagogy is an effective instructional method for digital literacy learning in that several aspects of digital literacy had proven to be significantly improved.

Multimodal Pedagogies in Teaching English for Specific Purposes in Higher Education: Perceptions, Challenges and Strategies

The rapid growth and renovation from print-based to multimodal information has still not received sufficient attention from the field of English for Specific Purposes (ESP). In fact, a multimodal pedagogy is a new evolving educational concept and practice. It is regarded as a source of creativity and modernity for both teachers and students. It actually refers to the paradigm revolutions in teaching based on what could be useful, effective and relevant to students’ needs and interests and its development will ground the principles of student-centered approach. In essence, multimodal pedagogies work across the linguistic and visual modes to fulfill the purposes of the text and the context in order to appropriately organize, develop information and ideas, and convey meaning. The present paper advocates the need to reconsider ESP through multimodal practice to ensure new opportunities of interactive learner engagement. This means that language learners should learn how to exploit semiotic modes beyond the verbal message in order to effectively enhance their awareness and facilitate comprehension. In short, this paper will briefly define modes, the issues of how multimodal environments can affect ESP and how multimodal modes can have an impact on students’ motivation and teacher-student interaction.