Teaching multimodal metadiscourse in academic English as a foreign language

Abstract

Even though both visual and textual elements create multimodal discourse, the former have received less attention (Kumpf, 2000) than the latter (Hyland, 2005) when teaching a foreign language. The hypothesis of this study is that teaching how multimodal metadiscourse is organized in academic writing may be beneficial if implemented in English for specific purposes. The objectives of this analysis are to identify the patterns of multimodal metadiscourse and to study if teaching the categories of multimodal metadiscourse could improve performance at communicating effectively in an increasingly multimodal world. Thus, a corpus of sixty-four academic papers on engineering written by native English speakers was compiled. Then, the visual and textual metadiscourse elements were classified with a tool and manually to identify patterns that could be used for teaching multimodal metadiscourse. Additionally, the frequencies of the textual and visual elements were identified. Tasks based on the results were proposed and carried out with an experimental group at Universitat Politècnica de València. The results show the patterns of multimodal metadiscourse, the classifications and the outcomes of the experiment with the students. Finally, conclusions shown that multimodal literacy is not implicit or associated to language proficiency, it should be instructed.