Developing university students’ multimodal communicative competence: Field research into multimodal text studies in English

Abstract

Reconsideration of Hymes' concept of communicative competence within a multimodal perspective implies that learners of a foreign language should develop a metalanguage that enables them to talk about how semiotic resources are co-deployed in specific texts and to relate their insights to these texts' contexts of situation and culture. This article reports on how research into multimodality, developed within Halliday's systemic functional framework, has been integrated into a university syllabus for text studies in English through a specific course designed to achieve this goal. In other words, students engaged in text analysis activities using analytical tools that guided them in the exploration of the complex array of semiotic resources that contribute to a text's meaning, but within a wider-ranging syllabus whose ultimate goal is to promote overall communicative competence. The article describes instruments for multimodal text analysis and sample materials created for the course. It then draws conclusions about the feasibility and benefits of an approach to text studies in English that fosters multimodal communicative competence, which naturally has an important metacommunicative component as it encourages reflection on texts.

Introduction

The use of authentic texts in language teaching is nothing new; what is new are the frameworks and models through which language practitioners use these texts in the language classroom. With the onset of the communicative approach in the 1970s, many (e.g. Cook, 1981, Little et al., 1988, Morrow, 1977, Wilkins, 1976) advocated the use of authentic texts, such as radio and television broadcasts, recipes, leaflets and advertisements, which were slowly introduced into the language classroom. These texts were considered “as a main source of the target language input” (Little, Devitt, & Singleton, 1994: 43), that were particularly useful in helping learners understand the language used, as well as the target culture, and “the means by which [the learner] can bridge the gap between classroom knowledge and an effective capacity to participate in real language events” (Wilkins, 1976: 79). At present, these materials are still present in the language classroom, but with the rapid spread of research into multimodal discourse that has ultimately been triggered by the rise of digital genres and media, their use in many contexts goes beyond a linguistic component and embraces other semiotic resources with which language functions (e.g. images, gestures and movement).

The intention of this article is to contribute to research into multimodal pedagogies in the context of English language teaching and learning in higher education. In particular, it provides a proposal under which upper-intermediate students of English as a foreign language at university level are provided with analytical frameworks and methods for multimodal text analysis developed within Halliday (1978) social semiotic approach to communication (e.g. Kress and van Leeuwen, 2006, Baldry and Thibault, 2006, Eggins, 2004). The proposal includes genre-focused activities whose ultimate goal is to raise students' awareness of the multimodal nature of meaning-making in English in today's world.

The article is arranged as follows: Section 2 reviews the literature most relevant to this study in an attempt to interpret the term multimodal communicative competence (Royce, 2002, Royce, 2007), which represents the main focus of this article. Section 3 provides a description of the objectives of the study and the learning context in which this course was carried out, while Section 4 describes two classroom applications created for the course based on two authentic multimodal texts, namely a procedural text and a pedagogical animation. Finally, Section 5 draws some conclusions about the feasibility and benefits of the multimodal approach in the course, and suggests future steps for its further implementation.