An investigation of postgraduate Business students' multimodal literacy and numeracy practices in Finance: a multidimensional exploration

Abstract

Empirical research studies of finance have investigated students' performance in Principles of Finance courses and the effect of class attendance on students' performance. Similarly, accounting research has been directed at readability of accounting narratives and lexical choices. However, no published study has explored and analysed the multimodal literacy and numeracy social practices of international students in a core business module, and within a multidimensional research framework. This study is of interest as most international ESL/EFL students in Australia and elsewhere are enrolled in business programmes. This paper explores the literacy and numeracy social practices of 10 first-year Master of Commerce Accounting international students in a Principles of Finance module. It is underpinned by the proposed multidimensional framework which is framed by Halliday's systemic functional linguistic theory and by O'Halloran's multisemiotic framework for the analysis of mathematical symbolism. The findings are presented in terms of (1) the epistemologies of Principles of Finance, (2) a Systemic Functional Multimodal Discourse Analysis (SF-MDA) of the experiential meanings in students' capital budgeting management reports, and (3) a description of the actual practices the participants engaged with to complete the assignment and their explanations of their texts. Implications of these findings and the research framework presented. The SF-MDA contributes to the description of experiential meaning in financial tables and graphs. It indicates a potential research tool for the systemic functional analysis of multimodal finance and accounting discourses. The multidimensional exploration of participants' literacy practices presented here could also provide a framework for similar investigation across a broad range of educational settings.