I recently attended a BALEAP Professional Issues Meeting (PIM) hosted online by my former colleagues at Heriot-Watt University. The subject of the PIM was Multimodality, not something I knew much about or had given much thought to. The day really opened my eyes to the ways this concept could be interpreted. Here are some thoughts on the presentations I attended.
The plenary speaker was Arlene Archer, Professor in Applied Linguistics and the director of the Writing Centre, University of Cape Town. She explained how important a social justice agenda is in her context with students from diverse backgrounds aiming to access the privileged modes of communication in a university. She combines an Academic Literacies approach with the aim of developing voice, to examine ‘the ways individual sign-makers import their knowledge of resources from one context to another, altogether different context.’ (Archer, 2022). This presentation made me think about multimodality in a much wider sense. A writing Centre is a place which embraces the relationship between spoken and written text. By verbalising what they know in relation to other ways of knowing, students become aware of their voice as a negotiation among a set of choices. However, the affordances of a variety of other social semiotic resources also come into play, such as laughter and silence to convey meaning but also time as mode in text construction and pedagogical engagement. Writing Centres support slower and more thoughtful conversations. Time constraints can be limiting but constraints also release creativity, for example through the use of tiny texts to generate writing.
Judith Gorham presented her research on students preparing for a series of Academic Reading Circle (ARC) discussions. The aim of these discussions was to explore theory and practice in published journal articles with students taking different roles in the discussion. One of the roles was visualiser but many other students planned their contributions using PowerPointTM slides. The semantic Gravity dimension of Legitimation Code Theory (LCT) was used to categorise features of the students’ slides to identify visual-text relations and whether these led to successful exploration of theory-practice relations. The students tended simply to reproduce information from the source article but there were some examples where students attempted to link concepts to new contexts.
Another insightful presentation was entitled Multimodal communication in a Design and Engineering EMI module by Laetitia Monbec and Namali Tilakaratna. These researchers also used the Semantic Gravity dimension of Legitimation Code Theory (LCT) as the basis for a theory of language and communication in a multidisciplinary module for three different specialisms: engineering, design and architecture. The purpose of the module was to enable students to draw on visual and verbal resources to clearly articulate the valued knowledge in their disciplines to both specialist and non-specialist audiences. LCT proved useful during a preliminary needs analysis to enable lecturers from these disciplines to talk to each other about language and communication. Lecturers had difficulty comparing the concept of technicality in their own field to other fields. It became apparent that there was a kind of hierarchy with engineers having a very specific concept of technicality whereas designers were more used to working with ambivalent/fuzzy ideas. On the module, students analysed example presentations (3 Minute Thesis/TED talk/posters & leaflets) to see how visuals support technicality in their discipline.
The day was really well organised with several speakers recording their presentations in advance and hosting a Q&A session during the day. This modality enabled me to attend more presentations in the time available. It was also really pleasing to see how research evidence is supporting EAP practice with speakers drawing on a range of research paradigms relevant to EAP and exploring how these intersect. I recommend viewing the presentations when they become available on the BALEAP YouTube channel.
References
Archer, Arlene (2022) A multimodal approach to English for academic purposes in contexts of diversity. World Englishes, 41/4 available online at https://doi.org/10.1111/weng.12600
EAP Essentials 