Using Multiliteracies to Engage Learners to Produce Learning

Abstract

Students engage with different texts according to their social and private contexts which include web-based stories, interactive stories, hyper narratives in computer games, internet, podcasting, online news, e-mail, text messaging, MSN, Facebook, Twitter, Skype, and weblogs. These new practices fundamentally change perspectives of students' learning process in the classroom as they are being integrated as part of the global world through the mass media, internet, the multiplicity of communication channels and social networking. This paper discusses these changes and postulates key findings of a case study that investigated the effectiveness of the multiliteracies pedagogy in an ESL classroom in Malaysia. This study had documented a series of lessons using the multiliteracies approach which evaluated 37 Chinese ESL students' learning outcomes through the Peer Review Forms (PRF). The results gleaned from the PRF highlights the positive engagement of students' multimodal literacy practices and highlights the need for teachers to use Information and Communication Technologies as learning tools to promote positive learning outcomes which engage students' interest. The implications of this study suggest that the multiliteracies theory has the potential to advocate pedagogical practices that are engaging.