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As a result of recent developments in digital technologies, new genres as well as new contexts for communication are emerging. In view of these developments, this article argues that the scope of English language teaching be expanded beyond the traditional focus on speech and writing to the production of multimodal ensembles, drawing on a range of other semiotic modes. The article describes an undergraduate course in English for science at a university in Hong Kong, which incorporated elements of digital literacies. Students were engaged in a project to conduct a simple scientific experiment, reporting their findings (1) as a multimodal scientific documentary, shared through YouTube with a general audience of nonspecialists, and (2) as a written lab report aimed at a specialist audience. This article focuses on the multimodal scientific documentaries created by students and evaluates their potential in terms of language learning by drawing on data from student interviews, student comments on a course blog, and the students' documentaries themselves. The analysis shows that students met the challenge of writing for an authentic audience by combining a range of modes (with language playing an important role) to develop an effective rhetorical "hook" and appropriate discoursal identity in their efforts to appeal to their audience.

The zebrafish embryo toxicity test has been proposed as an alternative for the acute fish toxicity test, which is required by various regulations for environmental risk assessment of chemicals. We investigated the reliability of the embryo test by probing organic industrial chemicals with a wide range of physicochemical properties, toxicities, and modes of toxic action. Moreover, the relevance of using measured versus nominal (intended) exposure concentrations, inclusion of sublethal endpoints, and different exposure durations for the comparability with reported fish acute toxicity was explored. Our results confirm a very strong correlation of zebrafish embryo to fish acute toxicity. When toxicity values were calculated based on measured exposure concentrations, the slope of the type II regression line was 1 and nearly passed through the origin (1 to 1 correlation). Measured concentrations also explained several apparent outliers. Neither prolonged exposure (up to 120 h) nor consideration of sublethal effects led to a reduced number of outliers. Yet, two types of compounds were less lethal to embryos than to adult fish: a neurotoxic compound acting via sodium channels (permethrin) and a compound requiring metabolic activation (allyl alcohol).

A number of scholars maintain that the affordances of digital media to easily copy, edit, and share digital content has led to the development of a remix culture in which the amateur creation of cultural artifacts—often remixes, mashups, or parodies based on the creative works of others—has proliferated. At the same time, in TESOL there is increasing interest in engaging students with processes of digital multimodal composition, focusing not only on language proficiency as it is traditionally conceived but also on the strategic use of multimodal resources and collaborative tools to reach a wide authentic audience on the Internet. One issue which such approaches must face is the tendency for some students to draw upon and remix existing creative works in their digital compositions. In particular, the issue is whether this practice of remix promotes or compromises the expression of learner voice. This article considers these questions by examining the multimodal compositions of students in a course in English for science at a Hong Kong university. The analysis generates a theoretical model of remix practices, which can be applied to the teaching and evaluation of multimodal compositions in English language courses.

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