Adolescent English language learners’ digitally mediated multimodal compositions: multimodal enactment across different genres of writing in the EFL context

Abstract

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.

EFL adolescent learners’ perceptions of digital multimodal composing tasks and task outcomes: A longitudinal study

“…Particularly, alongside the development of multimodal literacy, she appreciated the value of multiple modes in making meaning through DMC and believed that a variety of semiotic tools could assist her to convey her message effectively. This recognition of the value in multimodality and development of multimodal literacy has been also found to be an important aspect for reshaping students' perceptions of DMC in previous studies (Kang, 2021;Vinogradova et al, 2011) This longitudinal trace of learners' perceptions suggests that some positive effects of DMC were observed by the students over the period of 7 months. For all three participants, DMC tasks involved relatively high motivation from the beginning to the end of the year, as evidenced in weekly reflection survey results.…”

“…Only a few studies have taken a longitudinal approach to track perceptions of learners who perform different DMC tasks. Kang (2021) traced three Korean high school students as they perform two print‐based essays and two DMC tasks over one semester. Findings suggest that some students showed consistent negative perceptions that DMC does not have academic potential while others exhibited changes in their attitudes by starting to see the value of DMC in learning.…”

Composing Across Media for Rhetorical and Idiosyncratic Purposes: Text‐Based Writing and Digital Multimodal Composing

“…It is noteworthy that students need not stick to a unidirectional or linear process, from text-based writing to digital video editing. They can simultaneously revise text-based essays and edit digital videos (Kang, 2021).…”

Developing multimodal communicative competence: adolescent English learners' multimodal composition in an after‐school programme

“…Hence, when creating his argumentative multimodal text, Jae paid more attention to his print-based script than other non-linguistic semiotic modes, such as music and images. 2 In this regard, some study participants, like Jae, seemed to perceive that academic argumentation might be better delivered in a print-based way, while a personal narrative story seemed to be better conveyed multimodally (Kang, 2021).…”

“…Adolescents create PowerPoint slides (Cimasko & Shin, 2017), audio podcasts and video essays (Pandya, 2018), infographics (Howell, 2018), academic posters (Lim & Polio, 2020) and TikTok videos (Literat, 2021), as well as maintaining social networking sites (Georgalou, 2017) for personal, social and educational purposes. Responding to such engagement with multimodal literacy practices, scholars have explored how adolescents consume and produce multimodal texts while examining their multimodal composition perceptions, processes and products (Kang, 2021). Teachers have also engaged their students in multimodal composition to facilitate their learning of language and content knowledge (Pacheco et al, 2021).…”