There has been increasing effort in English as a second and foreign language education to incorporate a critical perspective, either highlighting the politics of English in terms of native-speakerism, standards, varieties, and accents or aiming to develop learners' critical awareness of issues pertaining to race, class, and gender. There has also been growing interest in the potential of multimodal pedagogies for language learning. However, very little research has engaged language learners in exploring the politics of English in the context of race, class, and gender power relations from a multimodal perspective. Thus, this study investigates how learners of English as a foreign language, through a multimodal approach, reflect on the politics of English as relating to race, class, and/or gender.Examination of learners' multimodal ensembles found that thinking multimodally rather than only linguistically may contribute to the consideration of an issue from a less dominant point of view, leading to critical reflection. In addition, multimodal ensembles may allow learners to express their critical engagement with an issue in ways that the linguistic mode might restrict. The pedagogical implications of these findings are discussed using examples from students' multimodal projects, and possible directions for future research are proposed. HUANG
Purpose
This paper aims to examine language learners’ critical multimodal literacy practices with a moving-image text, focusing on text comprehension and interpretation rather than text production. It takes a critical perspective towards multimodality and proposes the simultaneous emphasis on critical and multimodal literacies.
Design/methodology/approach
This qualitative teacher-inquiry adopts critical multimodal literacy as the framework for understanding learners’ literacy practices. The course implementation highlights images, sounds and words as encompassing the five modes of visual, aural, linguistic, gestural and spatial (Arola et al., 2014) in emphasizing the multimodal in critical multimodal literacy, and the purposeful organization of the images, sounds and words as reflecting the critical in critical multimodal literacy. The analysis also adopts Serafini’s (2010) concentric perceptual, structural and ideological perspectives as the tenets of critical multimodal literacy.
Findings
The findings show that focusing on images, sounds, words and their purposeful organization enabled the students to critically examine a moving-image text through considerations for the multiple modes and arriving at the structural and ideological interpretive perspectives.
Originality/value
This study fills a gap in the literature, as very little research has been done to investigate the ways in which language learners engage with, that is, comprehend and interpret, moving-image multimodal texts. In addition, it presents a critical multimodal literacy framework based on Serafini’s (2010) tripartite perspectives and offers pedagogical suggestions for incorporating critical multimodal literacy in language classrooms.
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