Teaching Literacy Skills through Multimodal Texts

Multimodal Discourse is a theory of communication in multimedia. The notion of modes refers to semiotic resources which allow the simultaneous realization of discourses and types of (inter)action. Media are the material resources being used for the production such as music, language, and images. This study examined Iranian EFL learners’ perception of multimodal texts. The objective of the study was to examine how Iranian EFL learners utilized their general literacy practices and multimodal repertoires to develop their meaning-making process. The participants were 18 intermediate EFL learners attending Iran Language Institute (ILI), and were exposed to advertisement materials. They were asked to reconstruct their perceptions both visually and verbally. The participants’ responses were analyzed according to the social semiotics model suggested by Kress and van Leeuwen (2001). Results revealed that the participants made contextualized perceptions of the advertisement materials indicating their sociocultural framework. Moreover, applying multimodal knowledge, the students promoted their learning status via transformative self-affected strategies. Multimodal/multiliteracies pedagogy could promote EFL students' critical literacy practices to develop new worldviews and question the imposing discursive moments.