Digital Multimodal Composing: How to Address Multimodal Communication Forms in ELT

Abstract

Digital media play an undeniably influential role in contemporary communication, facilitating new kinds of multimodal forms of representation. However, ELT pedagogy does not always take these multimodal aspects of communication into account in a systematic way. One pedagogical approach that has been developed for this purpose is ‘multimodal composing’ or ‘digital multimodal composing’. This approach caters to the needs of English language learners in the digital age by engaging with multimodal forms of communication in digital media which are ‘embedded’ alongside the reading and writing tasks that make up the core of traditional approaches to ELT. In this article, I provide an overview of scholarly work that has been done in developing this approach. Drawing on a case study of English language learners in Hong Kong, I demonstrate what the approach looks like in practice and suggest how it might be implemented in other contexts, balancing multimodal forms of communication with the traditional demands of the English language curriculum.