Purpose
This paper aims to investigate adolescent English as a foreign language (EFL) learners’ digitally mediated multimodal compositions across different genres of writing.
Design/methodology/approach
Three Korean high school students participated in the study and created multiple multimodal texts over the course of one academic semester. These texts and other materials were the basis for this study’s qualitative case studies. Multiple sources of data (e.g. class observations, demographic surveys, interviews, field notes and students’ artifacts) were collected. Drawing upon the inductive approach, a coding-oriented analysis was used for the collected data. In addition, a multimodal text analysis was conducted for the students’ multimodal texts and their storyboards.
Findings
The study participants’ perceptions of multimodal composing practices seemed to be positively reshaped as a result of them creating multimodal texts. Some participants created multimodal products in phases (e.g. selecting or changing a topic, constructing a storyboard and editing). Especially, although the students’ creative processes had a similarly fixed and linear flow from print-based writing to other modalities, their creative processes proved to be flexible, recursive and/or circular.
Originality/value
This study contributes to the understanding of adolescent English language learners’ multimodal composing practices in the EFL context, which has been underexplored in the literature. It also presents the students’ perspectives on these practices. In short, it provides theoretical and methodological grounds for future L2 literacy researchers to conduct empirical studies on multimodal composing practices.
This study aims to review speaking and writing connections in L2 and discusses how multimodality is related to speaking and writing connections. The paper opens with a brief history of speaking and writing connections in the fields of both L1 and L2. Next, some major theoretical approaches related to speaking and writing connections are discussed. Following that, the major literature in the area is presented and discussed with a primary focus on L2 research. Additionally, the influence of speaking and writing modalities on each other, is presented by discussing writing-to-speak and speaking-to-write. Next, multimodal movement and the relationships between multimodality and speaking and writing connections are discussed. This study also investigates how multimodality is applied in speaking and writing connections scholarship. Finally, the future direction and pedagogical implications are provided.
This study is situated within the body of literature that addresses transfer in the writing pedagogy, in terms of (1) transfer of genre knowledge and (2) composing across media, rather than on multimodal composition itself. See the recent review articles (Pacheco et al., 2021;
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