An Investigation of Prospective English Language Teachers’ Multimodal Literacy

Abstract

With the development of digital communication technologies, we are required to re-define the term literacy as “multimodal literacy”. The current generations, as digital natives, are literate not only in the conventional sense but in an innovative way which involves texts with static and dynamic images, gestures, audio, spoken language and written language. Citizens of today need to be able to comprehend meaning that is constructed through two or more communication modes. Likewise, it is equally important that teachers of the digital world need to possess multimodal literacy knowledge and skills. The teachers should be able to comprehend and interpret multimodal texts, and effectively design and communicate meaning through such texts and finally need to transfer this knowledge and skills to their students. This quantitative study aims to investigate multimodal literacy levels of 383 pre-service English language teachers at Gazi University, Turkey. The multimodal literacy of prospective teachers are assessed through the Multimodal Literacy Scale developed by Bulut, Ulu and Kan (2014) and the scores are evaluated in terms of gender, grade, and other background features such as internet use and parents’ education level. Conclusions are drawn and suggestions are made for the English language teaching programs.