Developing university students’ multimodal communicative competence: Field research into multimodal text studies in English
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.
Section snippets
Literature review
Undoubtedly, constant advances in communication technology have revolutionized our ways of interacting and led to the emergence and diffusion of new text genres, especially multimodal ones (Cambria et al., 2012, Campagna et al., 2012). The affordances provided by social media platforms, such as Facebook, Twitter, and WhatsApp, allow us to combine different modes of meaning to fulfil a number of communicative purposes, including sharing our feelings, narrating either wonderful, terrifying or
Objectives
This article provides two examples of classroom applications which illustrate how a multimodal approach to discourse analysis can prepare students of English as a foreign language at university level and assist them in the understanding of multimodal texts and genres characterizing contemporary society. The goal is to help them develop their multimodal communicative competence and become more competent text users as advocated in the Introduction of this article. The article shows that the use
Fostering multimodal communicative competence: two classroom applications
The following subsections describe two activities created for the course which illustrate the methodology and tools used to foster the multimodal communicative competence of the students attending the second-year English Language course. The activities focus on two texts exemplifying two different genres: the first text is an extract from The Simpsons™ House by LEGO1 and exemplifies what the instruction genre has typically turned into in the
Conclusions
The study presented in this article has provided a pedagogical proposal illustrating how research into multimodality, developed within the Systemic Functional Linguistics framework, can be integrated into a university syllabus for text studies in English to foster multimodal communicative competence.
The analysis sessions carried out in class, as the one illustrated in Section 4.2 vis-à-vis the Pedagogical Animation genre, showed that over the course the students developed a greater awareness of
Funding
This research has not received any specific grant from funding agencies in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.
Disclaimer
The copyrights of Fig. 1 are owned by the LEGO group.
Acknowledgements
I am very grateful to Anthony Baldry for commenting and proofreading this article.
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