Volume 11, Issue 1 - Multimodal Approaches in ESP: Innovative Research and Practice; Guest Editors: Belinda Crawford Camiciottoli and Inmaculada Fortanet-Gómez

In this article, we provide an introduction to this special issue of Multimodal Communication entitled “Multimodal approaches in ESP: Innovative research and practice”. The Special Issue showcases innovative research presented at the 2019 International Conference on Knowledge Dissemination and Multimodal Literacy: Research Perspectives on ESP in a Digital Age. After briefly discussing the multimodal approach in language teaching and specifically in English for Specific Purposes (ESP) and its key role in developing multimodal competence, each of the five featured contributions is previewed. The contributions offer theoretically grounded and research-informed applications of the multimodal approach in the ESP classroom.

Recent changes in Higher Education (HE) approaches to content delivery, coupled with breakthroughs in the Information and Communications Technology field, have led to a whole new multimodal approach to teaching (Jewitt, C. 2009). In: Jewitt, C. (Ed.), The Routledge handbook of multimodal analysis . Routledge, London & New York; Jewitt, C. (2013). Multimodal methods for researching digital technologies. In: Jewitt, C. and Brown, B. (Eds.), The SAGE handbook of digital technology research . Sage, London, pp. 250–265; Kress, G. and van Leeuwen, T. (2001). Multimodal discourse . Bloomsbury Academic, London). Multimodality in language teaching increasingly draws on multiple channels of communication and not simply text on a page. Multimodal awareness and competence are also paramount in intercultural and interpersonal communication, which has become increasingly common in today’s global workplace. Through the description of the activities implemented in the English for Professional Purposes (EPP) course entitled English for the World of Work, held at the University of Verona, we will illustrate our multimodal, EPP framework based on Littlewood’s learning continuum, which ranges from analytical study to experiential practice (2014). Our principal aim, however, is to highlight ways in which the didactic framework fosters an awareness of and competence in key areas such as multimodal competence and intercultural awareness as skills required for effective communication in today’s world of work.

ESP teaching has traditionally centred on the discourse practices of specific genres to develop students’ discursive competence in the target language. However, with the advent of studies on multimodality, there has been a growing recognition that new pedagogical approaches are required in ESP teaching. In this study, we discuss a research-informed pedagogical proposal to deal with job interviews, a highly routinised spoken genre that is typically addressed in Business English courses. Drawing on previous literature (Cope, B. and Kalantzis, M. (2015). The things you do to know: an introduction to the pedagogy of multiliteracies. In: Cope, B. and Kalantzis, M. (Eds.), A pedagogy of multiliteracies. Learning by design . Palgrave MacMillan, Hampshire, pp. 1–36; Lim, F.V. (2018). Developing a systemic functional approach to teach multimodal literacy. Funct. Ling. 5: 1–17), we present a pedagogical proposal that aims to promote students’ awareness of the multimodal nature of job interviews and develop their multimodal communicative competence through instruction, practice and feedback.

Teaching English for Tourism at university involves both developing specialized language skills and forming knowledgeable professionals capable of appropriate intercultural communication. The distinctive feature of most instances of tourism discourse is the fact that it draws from a range of specialized domains. It mediates the tourist experience and contributes to closing the gap between the home- and the destination’s culture by making culture-specific knowledge and specialized concepts accessible to non-specialists. The article discusses the instructional effects of authentic multimodal materials within task-based project-work carried out with learners at the University of Pisa. The focus is specifically on the communicative strategies used to make specialized terminology or concepts easily understandable for the hearer. This study reports on a multimodal analysis of two sets of videoclips created by the students before and after dedicated instruction based on authentic English L1 clips from documentaries, “docu-tours” and guided tours. It discusses the positive changes observed in the learners’ use of popularization strategies to create conceptual accessibility.

This paper focuses on issues of multimodal literacy practices in ESP higher education settings. In particular, the research explores how students become engaged in various literacy activities aimed at enhancing their critical-thinking skills and interpretation of images. For this purpose, two datasets consisting of video clips were extracted from a larger multimodal corpus and developed for teaching applications: one involved a UK live parliament debate and the other a US House of Representatives debate. The main objective is to identify the key verbal strategies reflecting persuasive, argumentative rhetoric and the non-verbal features accompanying these verbal utterances such as prosodic stress, body/head movements, gaze, gesture. Thus, the focus of the analysis is on how different semiotic modes of communication construct meaning, especially in terms of how they reinforce the construction of identity and ideological stance. The results were systematically categorized and applied on a practical level to a teaching unit on ‘identity and ideology’.

Many studies investigating the use and effectiveness of multimodal communication are now confronting the need to engage with larger bodies of data in order to achieve more empirically robust accounts, moving beyond the earlier prevalence of small-scale ‘case studies’. In this article, I briefly characterise how recent developments in the theory of multimodality can be drawn upon to encourage and support this change in both scale and breadth. In particular, the contribution will show how refinements in the degree of formality of definitions of the core multimodal constructs of ‘semiotic mode’ and ‘materiality’ can help bridge the gap between exploratory investigations of complex multimodal practices and larger-scale corpus studies.