Multimodal Literacy Practices Research Articles

CLIL teacher online professional development in translanguaging and trans-semiotizing: a pedagogy of multiliteracies

ABSTRACT Theories of translanguaging and trans-semiotizing have gained relevance in the design of learning in CLIL classrooms. However, while many studies have shown the benefits of these pedagogies, scarce research has explored CLIL teacher professional development (PD) in this field. In this paper, I intend to measure the effectiveness of an online pedagogy of multiliteracies, which embraces translanguaging and trans-semiotizing, to enhance CLIL teachers’ semiotic awareness to design learning experiences that improve students’ comprehension. The study was conducted on a multicultural group of 200 CLIL teachers from Spain, Colombia and Ecuador. They worked with primary and secondary students in multilingual contexts where a Spanish dialect, or a co-official, an indigenous or a Creole language was the L1, and English the L2. The data were collected from two sources, an initial survey and a final essay. The content analysis of the dataset revealed that the learning intervention positively influenced teachers’ pre-existing beliefs and PD. They showed a more accurate conceptualisation of translanguaging and trans-semiotizing, were more aware of their multimodal literacy practices to make new content comprehensible in CLIL classrooms, and identified potential improvements in their communication processes related to the two concepts.

“Bold of them to assume I want to wait until I'm older to do what I love:” One teens' activism and civic engagement online

AbstractThis paper explores the social media literacies of Dakari, a 16‐year‐old Black teen reader, writer, and activist, within a broader 3‐month multi‐case study on diverse teens' online literacies. The focus is on Dakari's multimodal literacy practices related to social justice activism and civic engagement. The study highlights how social media platforms empower youth, exemplified by teens like Dakari who utilize these spaces to influence culture, practice critical literacies, and establish civic identities. Examining Dakari's case, three key themes emerge: (1) addressing systemic racism, (2) driving change as a content creator, and (3) challenging the idea that one must wait until adulthood to make a difference. The study highlights the transformative potential of youth of Color's social media literacies, suggesting a reimagining of educators' roles to recognize and respect teens' online literacies while fostering youth identity and political engagement. It is imperative to reshape teaching methods for justice and social change in the digital age. This involves supporting student literacy development and acknowledging the timely language and literacies of youth in social media contexts.

Recovering multilingual children’s literacy loss through multimodal literacy practices in a pull-out program

The global COVID-19 pandemic has significantly impacted various aspects of human life, including hindering language and literacy skills development in multilingual students. This study aims to explore multimodal literacy practices among multilingual primary school students in an English pull-out program. Data sources encompassed students’ artifacts, photos, videos, field notes, and semi-structured interviews, collected from July to December 2021 following the Indonesian government’s reversal of its school closure policy. The research reveals that the pandemic has impeded language and literacy skills development, particularly in writing skills, as students heavily rely on screen typing with auto-correction assistance. Consequently, students' proficiency in constructing grammatically correct English phrases has diminished, impeding effective communication in English in the multilingual school community context. In response to this literacy issue, the joint cooperation school has implemented diverse multimodal literacy practices in its English pull-out program to mitigate language and literacy setbacks. Multimodal composition emerges as a potent tool for language learning, encompassing reading, writing, and speaking skills. Notably, multimodal composition facilitates multilingual children in connecting with their home language and cultures within the target language, aiding in the recovery of writing and pronunciation skills. This study contributes valuable insights for designing English pull-out programs tailored to multilingual students in joint-cooperation schools, addressing language and literacy delays induced by the pandemic.

Critical Multimodal Literacy and Oral Proficiency Development

This descriptive case study aimed to investigate the impact of critical multimodal literacy in English classes, which included the use of parody films and metaverse-based User-Created Content (UCC) related to disability, on Korean university EFL learners’ conventional literacy and awareness of disability. Data were collected from three participants with varying English proficiency and educational backgrounds over a two-month period, with weekly sessions lasting two and a half hours. A combination of qualitative and quantitative methods, such as questionnaires, interviews, group discussions, reflective papers, and metaverse-based UCC productions, was employed to assess the effectiveness of critical multimodal literacy in English speaking and disability education. Korean EFL students, influenced by Confucian culture, tend to hesitate when expressing their opinions publicly. In response, this research proposes using avatars to create alternative textual representations of their viewpoints instead of recording personal video presentations. This innovative approach aims to evaluate changes in students’ attitudes towards disabilities and improvements in their oral communication abilities. The overall findings indicated that (1) The critical multimodal literacy practice, employing parody films based on fairy tales in the classroom, plays a significant role in the development of conventional literacy among Korean adult EFL learners. (2) The practice of critical multimodal literacy, which involves using parody films of fairy tales that address disabilities, helps EFL learners broaden their perspectives on disabilities and modify their social behaviors. (3) Attitudes and reactions toward disabilities varied according to the individual experiences of EFL learners.

Let's Learn from Them: Using the Integrative Multimodal Literacy Assessment Tool to Support Instruction for Young Children

AbstractMany children bring rich multimodal literacy practices into their classrooms, with experience weaving between paper and digital texts. In order to support children's multimodal meaning making, teachers need first to understand the multimodal practices that children bring into the classroom in order to then develop instruction that builds on, and extends, children's existing literacy practices. This article presents a tool to assess young children's multimodal literacies. The Integrative Multimodal Literacy Assessment (IMLA) evaluates children's multimodal meaning making through a questionnaire and performance activity. In this article, we first describe the tool and explain how to administer it in diverse classroom contexts. We then share findings from a pilot study, using the IMLA, conducted in two urban preschools as an example of how teachers might use the tool in their own classrooms.

Family literacies as peacemaking: Representations in Children’s literature

This paper presents an analysis of the discursive contours of peacemaking within families as represented in children’s literature. We turned to the Jane Addams Children’s Book Award (JACBA), which recognizes literature that engages children in thinking about peace and social justice. We analyzed the 2015-2021 collection of twenty-six award winning books for younger children. We found at least ten pathways of peacemaking that families engage in through their multimodal literacy practices. Drawing on family-centric peacemaking episodes, we present analytically rich portraits of how peacemaking unfolds at textual, ideational, and interpersonal levels across time, space, and generations. We argue this analysis provides us insight into the historical, political, and social realities that inform students and families’ lives in early childhood literacy classrooms.

Students’ Perceptions of Using Roblox in Multimodal Literacy Practices in Teaching and Learning English

The need for digital technology involvement in education is increasingly apparent, so learning techniques are required to be prepared in various digital formats. Using digital learning materials enables teachers to implement the current concept of literacy, i.e., multimodal literacy. This study aims to find out the students' need for digital literacy and their perceptions of using the Roblox game as the learning media to improve their multimodal literacy. This descriptive study used a survey method, taking the second-year junior high school students in the 2021-2022 academic year in one of the state junior high schools in Medan, Indonesia as the respondents. The data were collected using two sets of closed-ended questionnaires. The data obtained from the first questionnaire were analyzed using a forced choice technique for yes or no answers, while the data obtained from the second questionnaire were analyzed using a 4-Point Likert Scale. The results indicate the students' need for digital literacy and their good perceptions of using Roblox as the learning media in improving their English multimodal literacy. It is concluded that teaching English at junior high school is expected to be designed in a digital format by involving games as the media, facilitating the students to improve their English multimodal literacy.

Critical multimodal literacy practices in student‐created comics

AbstractIn the wake of grim events such as Russian invasion on Ukraine, Taliban takeover in Afghanistan, the death of George Floyd in America and mosque shootings in Christchurch, New Zealand, all occurring amid the pandemic of COVID‐19, it became increasingly more important to recognise literacy work that promotes a critically informed and just society. Thus, through the lens of critical literacy and intersectionality, this study sought to examine how pre‐service teachers drew on critical multimodal literacy practices to create open educational resources (OER) or openly licensed comics that motivate local, global and/or transnational literacy education. Data collection took place at a four‐year public university in Upstate New York. They included student‐created comics, student reflections, researcher's fieldnotes and course syllabus. Findings from the study reveal that the pre‐service teachers incorporated either a local, global or transnational connection to enact a social change. Further analysis shows that the OER or student‐created comics inherently involve actions which are aligned with the three principles of social justice: redistributive justice, recognitive justice and representational justice.

Diverging Ideologies of Disability: A Critique of Literature on Inclusive Literacy

Although the concept of literacy has continued to evolve through the work of innovative scholars and educators, conventional understandings of literacy still abound within published scholarship. Pushing past these traditional notions of literacy, a small subset of scholars has advocated for a broadened conceptualization of literacy. Labeled inclusive literacy, this relatively new approach to literacy draws from both socially and cultural situated literacy practices (Street, 1984) and multimodal literacy practices (Kress & VanLeeuwen, 2001), as it takes into account diverse symbol systems and acknowledges literacy’s part in daily practices. Further, inclusive literacy values all literacy experiences and works to include children with disabilities, a group that is so often overlooked in regard to literacy learning (Flewitt et al., 2009). Grounded in Critical Disability Studies and language ideology theories, this literature review seeks to explore the diverging disability ideologies found in research published on inclusive literacy practices and the ways researchers position students with disabilities. Specifically, this analysis examines the myriad ways scholars take up or fail to acknowledge the term disability as a means to understand the ways that language use is connected to disability ideologies (Irvine & Gal, 2000).

Maintaining Connections, Cultivating Community: The Role of Transnational Translingual Literacy Sponsorships in One Adolescent’s Literacy Practices

Context: Transnational emergent multilingual (TEM) adolescents are young people who maintain emotional, social, economic, and physical connections and networks to more than one country, often a home country and a host country. Because of their linguistic identities and varied schooling experiences, when they enroll in U.S. public schools, many are designated as English Learners and subsequently positioned as “illiterate” or having “limited” linguistic and literacy skills through additional labels such as “limited/interrupted formal schooling.” Such linguistic and cultural erasure mirrors the systematic invisibility and intra-racial stereotyping that many adolescents, particularly those from Indigenous backgrounds, faced in their home countries. However, despite such positionings, many TEMs are highly literate and engage regularly in complex literacy practices. Purpose: The purpose of this article is to showcase the kinds of literacy practices that one TEM adolescent, Paula, engaged in, how, and to what end, as well as how those literacy practices reflected unique aspects of her multifaceted identity as an Indigenous transnational being. The languaging and literacy practices that TEMs like Paula engage in allow them to maintain their cultural and linguistic identities and social ties in multimodal, local, and transnational dimensions; yet, such practices and skills are not recognized or built upon in schools. As findings of this study indicate, TEMs’ engagement in such practices is also made possible through the support of both local and transnational “sponsorships” from individuals, including family, with whom TEMs actively maintain or establish relationships; yet, this kind of familial engagement often goes unrecognized by schools. Research Design: This article draws on ethnographic data gathered through sustained participation in the field. Data collection occurred across one school year and consisted of ethnographic observations, interviews, and artifact collection at a combined middle/high school newcomer school in an urban community. This article draws on a subset of data centered on Paula’s out-of-school literacy practices. Data analysis drew directly on the theoretical framework: Literacy sponsorship theory was used to identify who, if anyone, facilitated Paula’s participation in literacy practices and in what ways; translanguaging theory was used to identify how translanguaging was evident in the ways language was used and discussed; and border theory was used to identify the social significance of the literacy practices in Paula’s daily life, as well as how they embodied and represented her transnational identity. Such an analysis allowed for the understanding of how the literacy practices Paula engaged in reflected her life experiences as an Indigenous TEM, not only in terms of how she engaged in them, but also in terms of the significance they held in her day-to-day life. Conclusions: Findings indicate that Paula engaged in multimodal literacy practices, across languages, cultural contexts, and national boundaries, that were personally, spiritually, and intellectually sustaining. Outside the classroom, Paula was positioned as a sophisticated communicator who leveraged language and literacy knowledge to build relationships and meet the responsibilities of her daily life. Yet, the wherewithal and critical thinking visible in Paula’s life in her community were rarely visible or elicited in the classroom. As such, findings provide insights around how teachers and school personnel can better bridge the diverse community and classroom spaces TEMs navigate, thereby making school a more welcoming space for students and their families.

“The dinosaurs are so loud; they can’t sleep. Zzzz”: Supporting emergent bilingual children’s reading comprehension through digital literacies

As classrooms worldwide become diverse, the ways teachers engage children in literacy learning must be inclusive to accommodate the multitude of languages spoken. Multimodal literacy practices using digital tools provide innovative opportunities for emergent bilinguals to express their meaning-making processes. This paper details a year-long investigation into the multimodal literacy practices of eight young children who spoke different languages within an English-only classroom setting. The children showcased their reading comprehension through digital ensembles produced in responses to picturebooks. Transcribed small group interactions were analyzed to capture how one mode influenced another, and content analysis was applied to the student work samples. The findings reveal specific ways the emergent bilinguals transformed available resources to make sense of texts.

Profiling high school students’ multimodal posting in a digital literacy SPOC and examining teachers’ and students’ perceptions

ABSTRACT Given the changing nature of literacy, it is critical to investigate how learners communicate using the multimodal affordances of digital platforms. Guided by metafunctions of Systemic Functional Linguistics, this study developed a multimodal analytical framework to quantify multimodal composing with indicators of functional meaning to evaluate students’ multimodal literacy practices from an overall perspective. Based on a high school digital literacy SPOC (Small Private Online Course), this study adopted a mixed-method approach to profile students’ multimodal posting and examine teachers’ and students’ perceptions. The empirical findings included that: (1) Five profiles were identified based on students’ ideational, interpersonal, and textual meaning differences: academic posters, sensational posters, visual posters, all-round posters, and perfunctory posters. Academic posters viewed multimodal posting as a presentation of research findings; sensational posters viewed multimodal posting as a connection with classmates; visual posters valued the formal beauty of multimodal posts; all-round posters remixed the ideational, interpersonal, and textual functions of multimodal posting; perfunctory posters viewed multimodal posting as a have-to-do task. (2) Teachers underestimated multimodal posting’s interpersonal meaning that students valued. The SFL-based multimodal analytical framework and empirical findings provide implications for explicitly evaluating and guiding students’ multimodal composition in digital environments.

‘I read webtoon every day!’: young adult k-pop fans’ language learning and literacies with korean webcomics

ABSTRACT This paper considers the transnational multimodal literacy practices of non-Korean college students in America who use the webtoon app, which showcases Korean webcomics (also called webtoons). The findings suggest that these practices promoted agency in reading, learning the Korean language, and developing critical cultural awareness. Along with the burgeoning outgrowth of Korean pop culture in the United States, Korean webtoons have become popular among adolescents and young adults. Yet, there is no literacy research on webtoon readers in a Western country. This qualitative study is drawn from three cases of non-Korean avid webtoon readers to examine their experiences. The findings showed that these young adults do not read webtoons just for pleasure. They had an explicit learning goal related to improving their Korean language skills and learning about Korean culture, which they had little opportunity to learn about during primary and secondary school. The purpose of this paper is to reiterate the importance of out-of-school literacy and transnational multimodal literacies by introducing how webtoons promoted reading and learning for its readers.

Engaging students in multimodal literacy practices in a university ESP context: towards understanding identity and ideology in government debates

Abstract This paper focuses on issues of multimodal literacy practices in ESP higher education settings. In particular, the research explores how students become engaged in various literacy activities aimed at enhancing their critical-thinking skills and interpretation of images. For this purpose, two datasets consisting of video clips were extracted from a larger multimodal corpus and developed for teaching applications: one involved a UK live parliament debate and the other a US House of Representatives debate. The main objective is to identify the key verbal strategies reflecting persuasive, argumentative rhetoric and the non-verbal features accompanying these verbal utterances such as prosodic stress, body/head movements, gaze, gesture. Thus, the focus of the analysis is on how different semiotic modes of communication construct meaning, especially in terms of how they reinforce the construction of identity and ideological stance. The results were systematically categorized and applied on a practical level to a teaching unit on ‘identity and ideology’.

Learning Ecologies in the Digital Era: A Challenge for Primary Education in Low-Income Contexts

This research focused on the study of learning ecologies utilizing digital technology. The qualitative methodology used has allowed the analysis of the interactions children establish with digital technologies and the manner in which they construct a learning ecology. A total of 46 12-year-olds, their families, and their teachers participated in this study. The children’s schools and homes were in neighborhoods where structural situations of poverty and social and cultural marginality concurred. The children integrated researchers into their digital community, which allowed access to the events that the community was developing through digital technologies for two years. This information was complemented by the development of systematic observations and interviews with each participant. The participants’ multimodal linguistic and literacy practices were analyzed using a social semiotics approach. The results of the research describe and interpret the interactions that took place between participants and digital technologies. The research has identified the processes of recontextualization, transduction, and transcontextualization of the discourses developed in the frame of the participants’ learning ecologies. Digital ethnography has been revealed as an adequate method for studying learning ecologies.

Bus riding leitmotifs: making multimodal meaning with elementary youth on a public school bus

PurposeThis study explores student sensemaking based on the creation and interpretation of sound on a public school bus, operating as a result of a desegregation settlement. To understand these multimodal literacy practices, the authors examined students’ journeys, sonically as passengers in mobile and adult-constructed space.Design/methodology/approachAs a qualitative study, the authors used ethnographic methods for data collection. Additionally, the authors used a design-based research approach to work alongside students to capture and interpret sound levels on the bus.FindingsFindings from this study illustrate how students used sounds as a means to create community, engage in agentic choices and make meaning of their surroundings. Moreover, students used sound as a way around the pervasive drone of the bus itself.Research limitations/implicationsResearch implications from this study speak to the need for research approaches that extend beyond visual observation. Sonic interpretation can offer researchers greater understanding into student learning as they spend time in interstitial spaces.Practical implicationsThis manuscript illustrates possibilities that emerge if educators attune to the sounds that shape a learner’s day and the ways in which attention to sonic design can create more equitable spaces that are conducive to students’ learning and literacy needs.Originality/valueThis study demonstrates the use of sound as a means of sensemaking, calling attention to new ways of understanding student experiences in adult-governed spaces.

Nurturing Kindergarteners’ Early STEM Academic Identity Through Makerspace Pedagogy

Children’s attitudes about STEM are formed early. As such, the ecology of early childhood classrooms can either afford or deny access to relevant experiences that help children nurture early self-understandings and ways of positioning themselves in relation to STEM. This early positioning and the funds of identity they afford are critical to early STEM academic identity development. While Fasso and Knight (2020) offer Makerspace Pedagogy for fostering identity development, Marsh et al. (2017) note a lack of wide-spread application and related research on deliberate employment of Makerspace Pedagogy in early childhood classrooms. To address this gap and to explore the adoption of Makerspace pedagogy in an early public-school setting, a university research team joined with a kindergarten teacher to pilot an emergent curriculum focused on tinkering and making. Initial findings suggest that design-based activities may support kindergartners taking on the role of STEM practitioners, that Makerspace activities seem to help produce a syncretism of early STEM and multimodal literacy practices and that Makerspace Pedagogy may offer a unique opportunity to explore the intersection of various aspects of children’s early identity formation.

Unpacking the multimodal discourse demands of microscopy in a bioscience laboratory

ABSTRACT To become scientifically literate, students must learn to proficiently utilise and fluently integrate a suite of specialised and contextualised multimodal literacy practices. While the frequency of explicit reading and writing instruction in the sciences is increasing, the wider range of multimodal practices are often not adequately addressed. We explored the multimodal literacy demands and challenges in a first-year biology microscopy practical, using a teaching case-study approach which included a task analysis, evaluation of student reports, and direct observations of students during the practical. The task analysis indicating a substantive level of component and coordinative complexity which required student to use six different literacy practices, and integrate three different modes, necessitating 12 mode switches. Student observations highlighted challenges with identifying cells under the microscope, while analysis of reports provided evidence of students’ difficulties with making estimations, producing biological drawings, and appropriately integrating quantitative and qualitative information into their drawings. Underpinning these challenges was the requirement to integrate multiple modes simultaneously. These findings should inform critical reflection on the teaching of multimodal literacy practices and the need to make these practices explicit to students and provide sufficient opportunity for them to develop individual modal fluency, prior to the requirement for multimodal integration.

Meaning-making in fifth-graders’ multimodal texts

Despite a growing body of research on multimodal writing, scholars still express a need for formal frameworks for discussing multimodal literacy practices and call for research on multimodality in education that develops a vocabulary to approach multimodal texts in teaching. This study answers this call by presenting an analysis that adds to the field of multimodal writing research, and thus furthers the knowledge of different semiotic potentials of modes in student-produced texts. Drawing on a social semiotic approach to multimodality, a total of 299 texts, written by fifth-grade students from three schools in Sweden and Finland, are analyzed. The aim is to explore semiotic modes used in the student-produced written texts. The guiding research questions are: (1) What modes are used in the texts, and (2) what meanings are realized through the different modes in the texts. Results showed that six different modes were used to realize meanings in five categories: create representative meaning; visualize phenomena and assignments; foreground important areas; design the text; and decorate the paper. These categories offer a vocabulary that can describe semiotic potentials of the modes and how they realize different meanings in multimodal texts. Such a vocabulary can aid teachers in cultivating, supporting, and assessing students’ multimodal writings that contain multiple modes. From these results, we suggest that acknowledging the diversity of the modes and their meanings in student texts can help raise the awareness of how students also make meaning in modes beyond writing and image.

Creating Love Letters to Nature: A Case Study of Children’s Multimodal Literacy Practices

Canada welcomes large numbers of immigrants each year, including children. It is certainly important to understand immigrant children’s educational experience beyond standardized tests in reading and math. This paper draws on a sociocultural approach by situating language and literacy learning in social and cultural contexts and by emphasizing the active role of learners in different contexts. Specifically, the multiliteracies framework (The New London Group, 1996) is used to understand how culturally and linguistically diverse (CLD) children choose to use different literacies and modes to make sense of their surroundings and to create artistic texts to express their understandings of nature, such as water and forests. A qualitative case study was conducted to understand five CLD children’s meaning-making process in a community setting. Data was collected through observations, informal conversations, semi-structured interviews and artifacts. The initial findings of the study indicate that CLD children are active and creative meaning-makers who select different linguistic, cultural and artistic resources as well as various modalities to effectively express their ideas and perspectives according to audience, purpose and context. The presentation discusses two nature projects and shares the artwork of the participating children to highlight a range of multilingual, multicultural and multimodal literacy practices.