Teaching Multimodal Literacy in an EFL College Children’s Literature Classroom

Teaching Multimodal Literacy in an EFL College Children’s Literature Classroom

Current study was an attempt to demonstrate how a multimodal approach to literacy teaching and learning can be implemented in an EFL college children’s classroom by providing multimodal literacy lesson units. The pedagogical activities for multimodal literacy were designed with the aim to develop students’ “interpretive repertoires” for how to read and write multimodal texts. In doing so, four resources model of reading postulated by Freebody and Luke was employed to scaffold students’ critical awareness on the multimodal texts. A variety of multimodal children’s literature genres, including postmodern picturebooks, postmodern fairy tales, animation and advertisements were also used as the reading resources. In addition, the study also investigated what students’ perceptions on the incorporating multimodal literacy activities were through the course evaluation survey. The analysis of students’ comments revealed that reading and writing multimodal texts promoted their reading and writing ability development and fostered creativity and critical literacy as well. With the positive students’ feedback, suggestions for further research on multimodal literacy education in the EFL contexts were provided.