Multimodal Perspectives of University Students’ Language Attitudes towards Languages of Instruction in EFL Clasroom Discourse: Revealing Meaning through Integrated Semiotic Resources

This study is about Multimodal Discourse Analysis in an EFL (English Foreign Language) classroom involving both students and teacher discourse. Drawing from the perspective of multimodality, this study examines; how do students’ language attitudes and languages of instruction of the teacher integrated in classroom interaction. The writer’s interest is the interpretation of semiotic resources, including oral language, gestures, and visual products as meaning making within the classroom. The results will facilitate both researchers and educators in the future to examine the multimodal instructional design in terms of its effectiveness for EFL classroom.


A. Previous Researches Finding


Many researchers had reported the alternatives way to show students’ language attitudes and teaching instructional in EFL clasroom. Some of other aspects related to research findings that closely related to this study as follows;


a. Webster, Mavies, Timothy, and Cordial (2012) conducted study that was aimed to investigate influence of language attitudes of secondary school teachers and students on their choices as to whether Shona as language policy in Zimbabwe can be used as medium of instruction in secondary schools. The attitude of principal users and implementers of language change has been examined. Their finding showed that the majority of secondary school teachers and students prefer using English to Shona as medium of instruction. They finally assume that attitudes of users regarding the proposed language innovation, negatively affect the implementation of the proposed change. The similarity between Webster et al. (2012) study and the writer’s study is that; it involves both students language attitudes and teacher instructional language. The difference can be clearly seen at the method of collecting data. The data from Webster et al. (2012) research were collected and organized into graphs and tables which is the result of questionnaire for interpretation of teachers and students’ language attitude, and this study itself concern about Discourse Analysis in the perspectives of Multimodality where video data as a representation of the whole environment in classroom or the spatial arrangement of objects, which includes visual communication and the material combine with visual, written, spoken and gestural modes..


b. A thesis by Assefa (2002) investigated students' attitude towards Sidama language as a medium of instruction and its determination on the language achievement. By using questionnaires to measure their inclination towards the native language instruction, he suggests that teachers and educational practitioners should give due attention to attitude and motivation during instruction besides the cognitive factors. It is obvious that there is similarity of Assefa (2002) research to the writer’s research that both researches are under investigation of students’ attitudes toward the language of instruction but in in the writers’s study, it is more focussed on English and Indonesian alternately used as medium of instruction in classroom context. Multimodal interaction wil be analyzed in details.


In sum, this study is quite different with the others as mentioned above since none of the latter researchers have used Multimodal Discourse Analysis (MDA) as their primary approach. The writer hopes that the result of this study is expected to give new perception about students’ language attitudes and language of instruction used by teachers, principally in English Language Learning (ELL) process, and particularly in Indonesian area.


B. Review of Related Literature


Since the study specifically for multimodal perspective and simultaneously addresses several issues, including multimodality, educational context, students’ language attitude, language of instruction, and classroom discourse, the literature review is divided into two sections: Multimodal Discourse Analysis which covers researches point of view of several issues related to writer’s study, and Clasroom Discourse which covers students’ language attitude and teaching instructional.


1. Multimodal Discourse Analysis


Another area of Discourse Analysis that has commonly been approached is multimodal discourse analysis (Hencefort MDA). MDA is introduced by Gunther Kress and Theo van Leeuwen (1996, 2006) and Michael O’Toole (1994, 2010) who originally provided the foundations for multimodal research in the 1980s (O’Halloran, 2011). This research has expanded in mid-2000s onwards as systemic linguists and other language researchers became increasingly interested in exploring the integration of language with other resources. There was an explicit acknowledgement that communication is inherently multimodal and that literacy is not confined to language.


MDA procedures acknowledge meaning not only to written discourse, but also to visual images. Theorists such as Ferdinand Saussure believed that signs had a role in society and were part of social life. According to Saussure in Gonzalez (2011), a sign consisted of a signified (our concept and definition of the sign) and a signifier (the actual picture and its meaning).


Bower and Hedberg (2010) stated that Multimodal discourse analysis is an increasingly important technique for analyzing contemporary learning contexts because it attends to the multiplicity of modes of communication that may be active. In contrast to single channel discourse analysis techniques where one mode of communication is considered (as is the case with text-chat transcripts), multimodal discourse analysis allows all modes of communication to incorporate into an analysis. Where many channels of communication are being used, only analyzing a subset suffers the risk of leaving out much of what is being communicated which can potentially result in incomplete or inaccurate conclusions.


In short, Multimodal Discourse Analysis is where language and many modes (resources) are integrated to create meaning. From the perspective of a producer of the information, we can descibe the modes in form of Head movements in which information about feedback, acknowledging, agreeing, rejecting and turn-taking, Gaze which is information about attitudes like interest, Pupil size indicates increased or decreased interest, Lip, arms and hands movements, Posture which is about attitudes like shyness or aggression. Distance which indicate friendliness and "closeness". And the linguistics such as spoken and non-linguistic sounds about specific types of activity or about specific tasks within an activity.


a. The Nature of Meanings in Multimodality


Multimodal discourse analysis draws upon systemic functional linguistics to deconstruct the types of meaning that occur within the communications that transpire. Types of meaning including the three distinct ‘metafunctions’ which are consisted of; Ideational Meaning, ideas about the world involved Experiental and Logical Meaning, Interpersonal Meaning or enactment of social relations and Textual Meaning, organization of the meaning as coherent text and units (O’Halloran, 2011).


As resources, the interpersonal, ideational and textual elements form a system of meaning making that allow discourse to be formed through the discursive flow they enable. Modalities can represent all three types of meaning (Jewitt, 2008). For instance, in the visual mode ideational meaning is purveyed using narrative representations (that show the unfolding of actions, events, or processes of change) or conceptual representations (that relay the generalized, categorical and stable characteristics of elements). The visual mode can be used to deliver interpersonal meaning by depicting relationships between viewers. Finally, the placement of elements in a composition can affect the information value they have in the context, influencing the textual meaning (Jewitt, 2008). It is clear that, we employ many activities (modes) in the process of communication and interaction since we live socially.


In addition to the process of communication, specific means of the way humans communicate have been subdivided by expert (Allwood, 2002) in this area it consist of three means of communication;


1) Primary: Primary means of expression are means of communication that can be controlled directly without extra aids, e.g. bodily movements, voice, speech, gestures, touch, song, etc. Possibly production of molecules related to smell and taste could also be included. An argument against including smell and taste is that even though they are directly causally related to man, they are usually not controllable. Concerning the other primary means of expression, they include both spontaneous indexical and iconic means as well as symbolic means dependent on social conventions (speech, gestural language and certain types of song).


2) Secondary: Secondary means of expression simply consist of the instruments which are used to augment and support the primary means of expression. Secondary means are used, for example, to overcome spatial distance and to preserve information over time, e.g. using pen, chisel, typewriter, computer, megaphone, microphone with a loudspeaker, semaphore, radio, TV, audio and videotapes, telephone, telegraph, fax or e-mail. As we can see some secondary means directly reproduce primary means, e.g. radio, megaphones, audio tapes while others require more advanced recoding of primary means, e.g. writing. In some cases, this recoding requires several steps, e.g. telegraph or e-mail.


3) Tertiary: When we come to tertiary means it might be objected that the label "means of expression" is not entirely adequate. Tertiary means are simply all human artifacts (no negative evaluation intended) that are not secondary means of expression, e.g. tables, chairs, houses, roads, household appliances, cars, etc. All such artifacts express technical, functional and aesthetic ideas and intuitions. Perhaps the artifacts which are easiest to regard as means of expression are those which mainly have an aesthetic purpose like paintings and sculptures, etc. Second to these, there are artifacts, the construction and shaping of which has been under relatively direct causal control by the person who has made them. In most traditional cultures involving "handicraft", such control was usually individually exercised by both masters and apprentices. The artifacts in industrial societies, however, have less and less of such individual control and are instead often products of teamwork and industrial mass production. If they are to be seen as means of expression they must perhaps be seen as an expression of a collective rather than an individual mentality. In fact, this was perhaps also true of older traditions and artifacts where the creation of a single individual often was constrained by tradition and for this reason difficult to discover.


b. Research on Multimodality


Some researches about the use of multimodal semiotic resources in classrooms generally have been conducted (Kress et al., 2001; Hoban and Nielsen, 2012; Jaipal, 2010; Marquez et al., 2005; and Jewitt, 2008). These studies focus on how certain concepts are represented and communicated multimodality. For example, Kress and colleagues (Kress, Jewitt, Ogborn, & Tsatsarelis, 2001) examined how nonlinguistic modes, such as gestures, can fulfill ideational, interpersonal, and textual meta-functions in classrooms. Hoban and Nielsen (2012) explored pre-service teachers’ perceptions of using a slowmation technique to represent the science concept. They believed that slowmation provides potential of preservice teachers seek information, represent it using different modes and then use their own technology to combine them as a multimodal representation. In addition to Jaipal (2010) finding that teaching is a complex process, involving the use of multiple modalities. The multimodal semiotic analysis highlighted how different modalities scaffold each other to enhance meaning-making possibilities, and most importantly, it highlighted important features of semiotic modalities that should be taken into account by teachers during the meaning-making process. Marquez, Izquierdo, and Espinet (2005) study draws a more accurate picture of the role, speech, gesture, and visual language (through the use of diagrams and arrows) play in modeling the water cycle in secondary science classrooms. Based on this idea, the process of teaching and learning process is based on the semiotic resources because in the end it is difficult to create meaning in a single mode. Additionally Jewitt (2008) claimed that the most fundamental aspech which is called knowledge is represented as well as the mode and media chosen.


Following the trend in multimodality applied in clasroom, a small number of studies on multimodal teaching, learning, and assessment for ELLs has also been conducted in different content areas (Ajayi, 2012; Early & Marshall, 2008; and Pandya, 2012;). Ajayi (2009) studied on semiotics to argue that multimodal textbooks encode specific knowledge that offers teachers and learners new possibilites for design teaching and learning of English language. He claimed that ESL teachers were faced with problems on teaching English language learners how complex multimodal resources combine and integrate to design meaning in the textbooks they teach. In the same context but another researcher, Pandya (2012) tackles the complicated issues surrounding the assessment of English learners’ literacy skill development in the multimodal classroom. She contends to open Pandora’s box in order to prove links between multimodality and literacy skill development. Early and Marshall (2008) study explores how using a multimodal approach to integrating language and content teaching, high school students with limited English proficiency can be supported to engage in rich, complex interpretations of literary works in English and to realize their interpretations linguistically in written academic discourse. They suggest that a multimodal approach, in combination with cooperative group work and L1 use, has considerable potential in promoting ELL students’ academic success.


More recently, some studies began to link the multimodal representations into learning effectiveness (Zang, 2016 and Howell et al., 2015). For example, Zang (2016) studied about multimodal science discourse in sheltered classroom involving English Language Learners only, this ethnographic approach examined how the learning is constructed in science lecturers through multiple semiotic resources. Obviously Zang’s research is the closest one with the writers’ study. However the research tend to focus on how the incorporation of multiple modes enable teachers and students to represent the science content where the writer study try to explore broader aspect include the students’ language attitudes and teacher instructional aspect if we look at the multimodal perspective in a searching of relevant meaning. Howell, Reinking, and Kaminski (2015) propose the perspective of multiliteracies frames writing instruction as the creative construction of meaning across various modalities, and they illustrate how that view might be instantiated instructionally by engaging students in the creative design of multimodal arguments.


It should be noted that multimodal discourse analysis is a developing field and that while some excellent qualitative research has been performed in this area (Kress et al., 2001; Jewitt, 2006; Jaipal, 2010; Hoban and Nielsen, 2012; Ajayi, 2012; Zang, 2016). This study extends and adapts previous approaches to conduct a large scale qualitative analysis of teaching and learning in an EFL environment in relation with students attitude and teacher instructional.


2. Classroom Discourse (Multimodality)


In this section, the writer only focus on variety of modes in range of educational contex. The are a number of semiotic modes available to practice the students and teacher. Educational context is the most suitable place and at the same time provoke many elements to create meaning in order to fulfill our learning needs. Furthermore English as a special subject in that students and teachers have to understand and be able to switch between a number of different representations of the same phenomenon. The students and teacher may immerse with a variety of modes including aural (e.g., music) visual (e.g., pictures, art), aural/visual (e.g., television, video games), linguistic (e.g., storytelling), gestural (e.g., body control, emotion), and spatial (e.g., geographical, architectural) modes (L, Linebarger, & Norton-Meier, 2016). They subsequently use these modes to make sense of their worlds. For instance, very young children will frequently draw pictures that reflect their mental representations about various objects, events, or persons


However, as Hammond (2011) point out in their introduction to Discourse and Education (volume 3 of Encyclopedia of Language and Education), in current literature, classroom discourse refers both to ‘talk-in interaction’ in classrooms, and to the critical post structural view of discourse as ‘ways of understanding and constituting the social world’. The writer emphasis is primarily on any meaning aspect of language both students and teacher influenced by semiotic resources in process.


Below there will be explanations about the students language attitudes and language of instruction.


a. Students’ language attitudes


One of the issues that have attracted the attention of scholars regarding language learning is the issue of students’ language attitude. Attitude is considered as an essential factor influencing the students language performance. Students’ language attitude is one of the main factors that determine their success in language learning. There was a strong correlation between the students’ attitudes toward learning language and their performance in their linguistic skill. Attitude has cognitive, affective and conative components; it involves beliefs, emotional reactions and behavioral tendencies related to the object of the attitudes.


Attitudes is strictly related to cognitive dimension, According to Ecless and Wigfield (2002) students’ attitudes influence their willingness to en­gage in tasks from the teacher.


Some researchers (Eshginejad, 2016; Momani, 2009; and Mitchell and Myles in Yang Yu, 2010) have conducted on the role of students’ attitudes in language learning and indicated that they have positive attitudes toward learning English (Momani, 2009). However, qualitatively we need to point our view into more broader look, it means rather than looking the one-sided perspective, the writer tends to look at both side between positive and negative perspective of the students’ language attitude. As Mitchell and Myles in the dissertation of Yang Yu (2010) that attitudes towards the target language, its speakers and the learning context may all play some part in explaining their success or failure, based on this idea, we can claim that there is positve attitudes and negative attitudes playing essential role and better teaching strategies, classroom management and good social environment can help reduce negative attitudes.


There are many reasons why this study concerns more about students’ language attitude rather than other mainstream aspects. First, it takes an essential part of the succesfull in the language learning process, second the attitude is not as simple as it exists as intellectual capacity, such as the students willingness of selecting their best prepared material or reading matter to support learning but more into their action such as speaking in certain language. It sounds logical when they can show their spoken performance in the end of the class since they deal with language learning. However another research found that language learning should be approached primarily as a social and psychological phenomenon rather than as a purely academic one (Eshghinejad, 2016). Furthermore given from another perspective, language learning should balance those components.


The studies on attitudes of learners in language research have explored a number of settings due to the complex nature of attitude and the breadth of its impact on various fields of language learning. In line with this, the methodology used in studying language attitudes is varying. We may found the majority of research data on people’s attitudes gathered using questionnaire like Likert-scale but other methods may be useful in order to give a broader perspective of students’ attitude.


Having regard to the multimodality, attitudes may also in form of discourse, as it express passions and hates, attractions and repulsions, likes and dislikes and represent one’s idea (Gilbert, Fiske, & Lindzey, 1998), there will be something to make them all real for instance it is observable since vision is very powerful that amounts of information can be presented visually at any time. Both gesture and language are the easiest way to describe attitudes (behavioural intentional attitudes). However attitude in this context is considered as the students’ language attitude toward the triger. Many multiple modes may be appear in the process of whether gaining gain nuanced understanding of subject-matter, powerfully express what they learned, and discover a psychological refuge.


The challenges of ELLs in clasroom discourse appears on the surface where it involves communication process., relating to the students’ language attitude, they often create unrecognizable kind of modes. The teacher spend a lot of time looking up or guessing meanings of students which might result in regressive eye movement or gaze, body language and gesture and eventually creating spoken language. However the meanings made are not always able to be understood. Furthermore by the works of multimodality we are able to see how meaning is constructed through this multimodality


b. Language of Instruction


Due to widespread use of English as medium of instruction and object of learning. Some contries decide to use English as their primary language of instruction. Many researcher also become interested to investigate this phenomena since naturally some of them do not live with English as their national language. In addition this aspect, Indonesia as on of them, there is no clear mandate concerning the language to be used in the classroom.


In Indonesia, the sole medium of instruction is Indonesian, except in the first three grades of elementary school in areas where the learners do not know enough Indonesian for classroom interaction. In the usual situation, the local vernacular can be used as a transitional medium of instruction to ease the learners into the use of Indonesian as a medium of instruction and classroom interaction. The curriculum also has changed from time to time, many books especially in English are all written in English but the main spoken laguages are still the national language or Bahasa Indonesia in many secondary downward. However, this circumstances may change when many unversities tend to use English as their language of instruction in their courses, but still this is just an individual willing.


Given the possibilites of multimodal applied in pedagogy area, many scholars (Kajee, 2011; ) have evaluated language of instruction from various aspect. The most important key aspect of the studies are as folows;


Kajee (2011) explores the multimodal engagement of English as an additional-language (EAL) students in a classroom in Johannesburg. Within a social semiotic framework, and using constructions of design and identity to understand the students’ multimodal engagement, the paper argues that multimodal representations offer EAL students from under-resourced contexts opportunities for creativity and agency to redesign meaning. It demonstrates how they use the opportunities provided to reconstruct their identities as black South Africans and to communicate a sense of their own social world. The analysis focuses on two texts produced by the students, a digital narrative text and a poetry performance to illustrate their multimodal engagement with literacy. The paper concludes with an examination of the broader implications for teaching and learning EAL.


Having regard to the teachers’ role and multimodality, while conveying the their instructions, the teacher are usually supported by other modes, it can be by in form of disambodied mode for example, batons, or may be in form of embodied modes which consisted of eyebrow raising, high intensity or pitch of a tonic vowel. Another specific modes while teacher neeed to list something (e.g. first, second third and so fort) they may perform gestural modes like counting on finger, or marking all the items in the list with the same intonational contour; topic shift may be expressed through posture shift. Furthermore, the way of teachers convey their language instructional not only inclined to be influenced by one single mode (spoken discourse) but many semiotic resources in process, including gestures, emotional intonation, facial expression, gaze and posture.


A teacher in classroom interaction conveys all of these meanings; but some are conveyed more frequently, because of the teacher’s particular role. Starting from the taxonomy above, then, we can predict the specific communicative profile of a teacher’s communication. Of course these predictions stem from our stereotype of the teacher’s role, but they can be tested on real data.


A great part of the teacher’s classroom communication informs about the contents of different disciplines that include both concrete and abstract information. In some cases, concrete information like the shape of an object or a space, or a sequence of actions is better conveyed by iconic signals, like pictures, paintings, pantomime or iconic gestures. But gestures have proved to be useful also in the explanation of abstract (for example, mathematical) concepts [8].


3.2 Information on the Speaker’s Mind. This is the realm in which teacher’s multimodal communication is most informative.


Beliefs. Starting from information on the Speaker’s beliefs, namely the degree of certainty of the beliefs she mentions (a.1.), we predict a teacher will not convey uncertainty or doubt so often, given the image of a self-confident person she must generally project in front of her pupils. So, her most frequent expression will be the small frown showing that she is serious in what she says, and that she believes it strongly. As to the metacognitive information about the source of her current knowledge (a.2.), during a lecture the teacher will rarely gaze side-downward, or raise eyes up, because she is usually supposed to remember the things she reports very well, without needing to retrieve them from long-term memory, or to reason long about them.


Goals. The teacher’s communication (as opposed to the layperson’s) is supposedly particularly rich in providing information about her sentence, discourse and conversational goals. As shown by studies on teachers’ behaviour [1], the teacher’s performatives, i.e. the specific communicative intentions of her sentences, are a great number: question, peremptory order, advice, approval, praise, blame, reproach, question with an indirect meaning of command, praise with an ironic meaning of blame; but they are rarely conveyed by the classical performative verbs (I order, I advice, I propose... [18], [19]); they are generally expressed by intonation, gaze or facial expression. Instead of saying “I order you to turn off you cellular”, the teacher will express the propositional content of the speech act (“Turn off your cellular”) while conveying its performative by a severe directive intonation, and/or by a serious ace, no smile, head up, gaze staring at he pupil. Performative intonation and performative facial expression [20] are sophisticated devices of human communication, devoted to convey even the most subtle nuances that distinguish performatives from one another. This is why the teacher’s voice and face behavior are important in educational interaction. One more frequent and important information the teacher conveys, but mostly not by verbal language, is about the relative importance of the different parts of a sentence of discourse: the topic-comment distinction. More than in everyday communication, the teacher needs to distinguish, within her sentence or discourse, the beliefs that pupils have to retrieve from their long-term memory (topic) from the new beliefs to connect with them that are the object of the teacher’s present communication (comment). Often, to explain new concepts that to be understood require reference to previous contents, the teacher has to recall a lecture or an activity performed even months before. This distinction between what is to be retrieved from memory and what is coming as new is generally expressed by facial and intonational devices [10].


Again, gesture and intonation are of help when the teacher makes explicit the rhetorical relationships among different parts of the discourse she is delivering. An aid to understand and memorise a discourse is to know the Author’s outline. This is why a teacher often says: “I’ll now speak of X… now I come to topic Y…”. But this can also be done in nonverbal ways: a posture shift, for instance, signals we are moving to another topic or starting a digression [21]. Another way to stress transition to another sub-topic is counting paragraphs, not only verbally (“first… second…. third…”) but also gesturally, by counting on fingers. Intonation has an important role too: a recurrent intonational contour signals we are listing different items of the same class, while we can mark a parenthetic clause through lower pitch and intensity [22]. The signals to regulate turn-taking and to provide back-channel are particularly important in classroom interaction, both for teacher and pupils; and the teacher must be particularly aware of these signals, whether delivered from herself or the pupils. A trivial example is when a pupil raises a hand to ask for a speaking turn. But while this holds in a classroom with a quite asymmetrical structure and rigid interactional norms, it could not hold in a democratic group or while working in a small team. In this case, a teacher that wants all members to talk must be aware of more subtle ways of asking for a speaking turn: leaning forward, opening mouth as in starting to speak, opening eyes wider. Finally, a back-channel signal is any communicative verbal or nonverbal act performed by an Interlocutor to provide a feed-back to the present Speaker about whether the Interlocutor is a. understanding, b. believing, c. approving, and d. finding interesting what the Speaker is saying. I can say “I see” or simply nod to tell you I understand what you are saying; if I don’t understand I’ll say “I can’t follow you” or frown; if I understand but I don’t believe it, I can say “I don’t believe it”, shake my head or show a facial expression of doubt or perplexity; I can nod also for approving, and shake head, shake index finger, or frown for disapproving; if what you say is very interesting I’ll say “You don’t say!”, or “Oh!” emphatically, or raise eyebrows to show surprise; but if I am not very much concerned or definitely bored, I can cyclically repeat “oh”, with a very flat intonation, or even yawn. Now, some back-channel signals may be emotionally loaded, since they imply an evaluation and then may touch or hurt the Speaker’s image or self-image: letting the speaker know that I don’t believe what she says, or that her talk is boring, may be offensive. So we can predict 1. what back-channel signals are more frequently provided by teachers and pupils, respectively, and 2. what back-channel signals are more relevant for, respectively, teachers’ and pupils’ behaviour. A very young pupil will not perform many back-channel signals of incredulity, not only because it is implausible for him to have a knowledge base sufficiently larger than the teacher’s enabling him to know things contrasting with what she says; but also because, even if the pupil really does not believe the teacher, he might be afraid to offend her by showing it. Again, a pupil will be particularly sensitive to back-channel signals of approval and disapproval. Conversely, if a teacher thinks motivation is an important basis for learning, she will pay attention to signals of interest or boredom.


Emotions. As to information about emotions, a teacher may feel various kinds of emotions during class work: joy, stress, anxiety, enthusiasm; tenderness, compassion, love, hatred, worry, anger, interest, curiosity, boredom. Of course, the very fact that a teacher expresses her emotions may be subject to sanction; so some teachers may claim they do not express their emotions to pupils, but yet their emotions can leak out from nonverbal behavior: anxiety or anger may be not expressed by a specific signal, but by some aspects of how one performs verbal or nonverbal signals: some subparameters of gestural or bodily behaviour like rhythm or muscular tension may vary producing a particular muscular tension in making gestures, a higher pitch of voice in speaking, a higher speed in moving around in the classroom.

The first thing we need to consider as teachers and researchers is how to rethink our current focus on transmission. In addition, we need to review how we assess achievement and progress if we are to harness what our students bring to the classroom in the form of their own meanings, through the use of image, gesture, dress, technology and so on. As teachers we do not seem to have a sufficiently strong semiotic sense, a capacity which is often inadequately promoted teacher training.


Multimodality, through a paradigm of social semiotics, has the potential to transform the teaching and learning by providing students with new opportunities for agency and voice. The multimodal environment facilitates the emergence of shared moments of learner participation, negotiation and renegotiation of meaning within the classroom as a community of practice.









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