A Grounded Theory on the Comprehension Processing of Teachers as ESL Readers of Multimodal Still Visuals

Abstract

Contemporary society demands from individuals new and relevant literacies that go beyond the basics of reading and writing. Furthermore, texts now appear less confined to a single semiotic resource. The proliferation of different forms of communication like visuals, among others, encourages people to use literacy in multiple modalities. Nevertheless, not all individuals are capable of understanding and producing information in modalities other than the usual linguistic texts, and teachers are not exempt in this phenomenon. Ironically, school curricula burden teachers with the demand to develop visually literate learners even though most teachers themselves were not formally trained for visual literacy and visual grammar. Consequently, this study sought to identify and describe the processing strategies and the sources of information that teachers, as ESL readers, deliberately use when they make sense from multimodal still visuals. The think-aloud method, as an introspective procedure, was used to collect, analyze, and code 42 sets of verbal protocols from 14 teacher-respondents who read three different multimodal still visuals in three sectional rounds. Results reveal four integrated categories or themes of comprehension processes that teachers used when making sense of the visual stimuli. These are (a) anticipation or preparation; (b) sampling; (c) deepening; and (d) regulation. As regards to the sources of information they use in building meaning, a dismal number of verbal protocols manifest that the majority of the teachers do not use all the elements of the visual grammar and they lack the ability to integrate reader-based, text-based, and context-based sources of information in order to establish a closer match between their meaning and the intended meaning of the multimodal still visuals. Ultimately, the paper provides a theoretical model which can serve as basis for teacher development with regard to visual literacy in an ESL context and offers future directions in multimodal language learning and teaching.

Unpacking the Teachers’ Multimodal Pedagogies in the Primary English Language Classroom in Singapore

“…While multimodal curricula modifications and evolution are necessary, they are not sufficient to ensure deep instructional change over time. As many studies around Asia such as Bautista and Gutierrez (2020), Nabhan andHidayat (2019), andTan et al, (2019) have highlighted, teachers' professional development remains key to enacting the curricular changes. An approach towards teacher-change, as part of the broader research project from which the present study is drawn, is described in (Lim and Nguyen, in press).…”

Editorial: What is at the Heart of Teaching and Learning in a Post-pandemic Recovery World?

“…• in making sense of visual stimuli, teachers engaged four integrated categories of comprehension processes, namely: anticipation or preparation, sampling, deepening, and regulation (Bautista and Gutierrez, 2022); • the New Concept English (NCE) textbook series used in China provided opportunities for learning mid-frequency vocabulary (Yang and Coxhead, 2022); • while both self-assessment and indirect feedback helped learners develop selfregulation, self-assessment reduced maladaptive behavior more than indirect feedback (Vasu et al, 2022); and • a teacher's beliefs about the appropriateness of a particular approach may not be reflected in actual instructional practice (Jeon, 2022).…”