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.