Episode Transcript
[00:00:11] Speaker A: Hi, everyone, and welcome to talking ELT, the easiest place to learn about the big issues in language teaching. We're here to explore the areas that you're curious about. And today we're going to be talking about multimodal literacy. This is a concept of literacy that goes beyond the traditional four skills to include other modes of communication, like video, visuals, sound, gestures. And today I'm joined by Nick Peachy, one of our authors, and Charlote Murphy and Ed Dudley, who are members of our professional development team. And we're going to be really digging into this issue and exploring it so you can learn all about it.
So I want to start with our first question, which is going to be quite broad. So when people hear the word literacy, they traditionally think of the four skills. They think of reading, writing, listening, speaking. And I just wanted to ask, in today's world, is this definition of literacy? Is this traditional way of thinking about it still enough?
[00:01:18] Speaker B: Well, I would say no, obviously, because I'm working in multimodal literacy, but no, I don't think it is enough. I'm not sure if it was ever enough either. I think there are sort of elements of multimodal literacy that have been around for quite a long time, such as things like body language, for example, proximity, gesture, these things that you're not really taught about at school but are important parts of communication. And of course, the Internet has brought about huge changes in the way we communicate and our mediums of communication and delivery of information and the way those are mixed together. I think because the real key to multimodal literacy is the fact that these things are mixed together. Now, you're not just reading or just looking at a picture. You're experiencing media that combines those different things together and having to interpret them.
[00:02:17] Speaker C: I agree. I think if you think about the purpose of literacy is to understand or be understood, and there's so much more to it than the four skills that you mentioned, Chris. Things like body language or pragmatics behind the message that you're delivering can really affect what exactly it is we're trying to.
Yeah, I think you're right, Nick. It sort of never really been complete when it comes to learning a language and needing everything that's involved in being able to communicate with people or understand what's being communicated to you. And it's interesting. We were talking about multimodal literacy. It's showing the development of the literacy skills that we need nowadays to suit the world that we're currently living in.
[00:03:17] Speaker D: I'd also say that the way that we read also reflects the need to do more than just work on traditional literacy. So most people are no longer reading books or newspapers. They're looking at devices. And the way that the devices work means that we're going beyond just delivery of text on its own. So clearly there's now an opportunity and also a need to do something more than just work with literacy as it used to be.
[00:03:42] Speaker A: Yes, because, of course, all the media we encounter is going to have pictures in. If we have a news article, there might be a video embedded into, you know, if we're scrolling through social media, we're scrolling through videos and text all the time. And it's about, I guess, the interaction between all those elements in literacy, encompassing all of that as a whole, I guess.
[00:04:02] Speaker D: I think, Nick, you made a good point, though, that we've always really wanted to be able to do this. We were limited in the past by text not having that capability. And what's happening now, it's not human beings suddenly finding new ways to express themselves. It's actually technology allowing us to express the things we've perhaps always wanted to be able to express, but weren't able.
[00:04:22] Speaker C: To, and probably in a mode that suits us more than another mode. So we hear about people who find absorbing information through watching a video much easier than reading a text. And so if anything, it's making that whole process of language learning much more inclusive.
[00:04:44] Speaker D: Good point. Yeah.
[00:04:46] Speaker A: So by the sounds of things, it feels like this idea of multimodal literacy and different modes of communication have been part of the language and part of communication throughout history, as we've said. But they've not traditionally been a part of language teaching. We've often focused on reading, writing, listening, speaking. Those have been the four skills. And often language teachers and publishers, I think, haven't gone beyond that to incorporate all these other areas into language learning and language teaching. So I guess the question I want to ask is, looking back at your own experiences of language teaching, language learning, and working for publishers and materials designers, what is your experience with multimodal literacy and what has your opinion of it been?
When you were teachers, was this something you brought into your practice nowadays? Is it something you bring into your practice? What are your thoughts on it and experiences with it?
[00:05:45] Speaker C: I think it's always been there, but maybe we haven't really been too aware of the benefits of it. And I think when I first got into teaching, there was a tendency to maybe see as that the introduction of any kind of, maybe digital media into your lessons was maybe somewhat of a faff and was it really necessary, and were our students really learning anything from it? And it's that I've worked at schools where they've almost put a ban on showing videos in the classroom because they feel like you're not going to have anything to show for the learning by just putting a video on.
And maybe in some respects, that can be shown to maybe not add anything to the learning process that is taking place. But I think when it's done properly, when there's an aim and an objective to the reason why you've introduced this digital component into your lesson, it can really help to enrich the learning process.
That's my experience of it. And I guess I came into teaching when schools were just on the cusp of sort of investing in things like interactive whiteboards. And with that came the ability to be able to easily show videos, whether they were videos you'd sourced yourself or videos that came as part of a course that you were using.
So it was definitely sort of paving the way for it being a kind of core part of the methodologies that you were using in the classroom.
But on the flip side to that, I've been to schools where they've had the interactive whiteboards, and then they ripped them off the walls because they felt like they weren't adding anything to the lessons.
So I feel like it's maybe somewhat of a kind of divisive topic for teachers and institutions still.
[00:08:08] Speaker A: Yeah, I think you're right there.
[00:08:11] Speaker D: Okay, so my feeling about this.
[00:08:14] Speaker A: Have we got a confession coming, Ed?
[00:08:15] Speaker D: Well, just that I am aware that I worked in school situations in Hungary, as it happens for many years, where learning was a serious business. And the moment you started putting pictures into books, you were dumbing it down. It was somehow not as beneficial or not as prestigious. So I think that's interesting that in some learners'minds, and maybe in some teachers'minds, there's the idea that the skills of literacy require being able to decode text, and that if we're throwing in pictures and prefacing it with videos, then what we're actually doing is we're dancing around the difficult business of learning, which should be different from the world of the playground and the world of home. In other words, it should be less fun and should be more difficult.
[00:09:00] Speaker C: Not academic enough.
[00:09:02] Speaker D: Not academic enough. Right. But I think at the same time, I've also been aware that it has always been a part of really effective communicative teaching and learning. And to give an example, in a very, very kind of strict process at the school, that I taught in was the entrance exam for the english faculty. And one of the tasks was to look at a comic strip and to write down your own version of what was happening in the comic strip. And it was ambiguous. It was like a child opening a box and you could see the expression on their face, but not what was actually in the box.
[00:09:36] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:09:36] Speaker D: So I think there are opportunities there that we'd now be much more comfortable about exploiting, but perhaps at the time, these were the exceptions rather than the mainstays of how teaching and learning happened.
[00:09:47] Speaker A: That makes sense. And was multimodality something you were interested in?
[00:09:52] Speaker D: I would say I was conflicted. Conflicted about it. On the one hand, I could see the opportunities, but on the other hand, I guess this is the confession part. I guess I was afraid that students would switch off or would take the lesson, take the learning opportunity less seriously. Here comes the teacher watching a video. We're watching a video today. It's not going to be a proper lesson.
[00:10:14] Speaker A: I remember being in the classroom when the teacher put a video on and being like, oh, okay, great, this is a video day to day. Totally get that.
[00:10:21] Speaker D: Well, I'm sure we'll get on to this, but that's a really important point. Like, just having a video in your lesson doesn't necessarily make it an enriching multimodal learning experience.
[00:10:30] Speaker C: Yes.
[00:10:30] Speaker D: We have to use it in a smart way.
[00:10:32] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:10:33] Speaker C: The same could be said for anything, though, couldn't it? Just like giving a student a book.
[00:10:37] Speaker B: Yeah. I mean, I've been interested in video and images for a long time, particularly video, and even back in the kind of late 90s. But a couple of points that come out from what both of you are saying is this thing about how difficult it was to bring a video into your classroom. Back in 95, I had to wheel in a VCR with a TV on it and try and queue up this tape that I'd had to copy, probably illegally, from something that was broadcast media, and then sort of try and get it lined up for my students, get them to wait while all this happened. And it was difficult. It was challenging, but I think students did appreciate it at the time, and they appreciated when there was a good task to go with it. And for some of them, it was kind of a wow moment, whether that was about learning something about culture or learning something about body language, and that was great. But as I say, it was difficult. And to come back to some of the other points being made, it wasn't something that was in the test. So if it wasn't in the test. Why are we doing this? To some extent, testing is behind a lot of what we do in the classroom, which sometimes can be quite sad.
[00:11:54] Speaker D: Connected to that point of how much easier it is now. This is something that's changed definitely the way that I approach a teaching encounter. So whereas in the past I would bring in a special video to show to the students because I'd think, one, they haven't seen this, and two, this will really kind of get us going with a topic. It'll be great fun. Yeah, I've stopped doing it now. And the reason is that whereas in the past this was something novel and interesting, now I know for a fact that before I began the lesson, every single student was watching a funny video on their phone moments before. So the novelty value has gone. So there are still occasions when I do it, but I'm now kind of much less likely to think, oh, starting a lesson with multimedia equals a more engaging and interesting lesson just through the pure fact that it's there. I don't think that that's something which was always true.
[00:12:48] Speaker B: Yeah. And I think that sort of leads into the other point I was going to make, is that at the time, a lot of teachers did really use the video as it was a kind of end of term treat or end of week treat. Okay, well, just put a video on. It's in English, you'll watch it, and I'll maybe go do something else or mark some homework or something. And I think that kind of aspect of students becoming familiar with that as a kind of way of using video didn't really help that much.
[00:13:19] Speaker C: Yeah, because it was like a brain for students, wasn't it? Okay, we're going to subtitle it, but if you don't follow it, we're not going to test you on it, like talking about that whole assessment piece around it.
[00:13:31] Speaker B: But it was a very different time when video wasn't particularly accessible. I've worked in countries where it's very difficult to get anything in english language, whether it was a newspaper or whether it was a picture or a book or something like that. And so I guess in some ways there's some validity to it in that you can say, oh, yeah, I watched a real video and I understood it, but I think that's not the case anymore. And I think it is that much easier for students to get access to things like that now than it used to be.
[00:14:04] Speaker A: Looking at today's teachers and today's classrooms, how do you feel attitudes towards using multimedia, using videos, using books like picture books, using graphic novels, using memes, even all of this multimodal content.
How have attitudes changed? Is this something teachers are more open to? Is this something they need to be more open to?
Yeah. What's different?
[00:14:29] Speaker B: I think they are more open to it. It's become much more a normal part of life and a normal part of teaching as well. And I think course books have developed more of an open attitude to it as well. It's much easier nowadays for a publisher to get video into their courses, get it online so that teachers can download it and use it, so it's much more accessible in that way. And I think in terms of task design, I was looking at one of Oxford's books recently, and there were these tasks that focused on looking at the visual aspect of things and things like that. So I think that's a really positive development.
[00:15:06] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:15:07] Speaker C: And I think the technology is there more nowadays as well. Even if you're teaching in an institution that doesn't have a computer or a screen in the classroom, your students will have them in the palm of their hand much easier. Much easier to get students engaged with whatever the media is. But I think, again, it comes down to that importance of there being an aim and an objective to them watching or listening to whatever it is.
[00:15:37] Speaker A: Of course.
[00:15:38] Speaker D: And I suppose the whole process has become accelerated by the response to the pandemic.
[00:15:44] Speaker A: Yes, definitely.
[00:15:44] Speaker D: To online teaching clearly made this something which was integral to the way that online lessons were being taught.
[00:15:51] Speaker A: So, clearly, schools and teachers are integrating multimodality and multimodal texts into their classrooms a lot more. But is there anything that still needs to change? Are there any attitudes or approaches or mindsets that we still need to improve in order to promote multimodal literacy more effectively?
[00:16:13] Speaker D: I can think of a couple of things, and I think the main one is there's still a general tendency in education to stop talking and work on your own.
[00:16:21] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:16:21] Speaker D: Whereas the whole idea of creating multimodal content is it's collaborative, it's discursive, it's based on exchanging ideas and perhaps creating something together, or at least passing it back and forth from person to person and adding things to it. So I think that the perceived value of solitary study is something which we could question.
And I also think that there's still a kind of hesitancy to update the way that assessment works in many contexts. How many school students are still having to write letters of application or letters of complaint in the writing component of an exam? And in fairness, this is changing and changing fast. But I think if you talk to teachers in different parts of the world, maybe some of our viewers today will say, yeah, this is something that frustrates me. The kind of tasks that our students are being asked to produce on text and tests do not reflect the multimodal reality of how they're using texts and combinations of skills in the real life.
[00:17:21] Speaker A: In the real world. Yeah.
[00:17:23] Speaker C: And I guess you can kind of step away from that by thinking more about how you prepare your learners for the real world instead of just this idea that they need to be able to get this grade in this exam in order for them to continue their learning journey. And maybe that's a mindset shift that needs to happen higher up within ministries of education because we ask ourselves, what's the purpose to learning another language? What do our students want to get from this and what doors of opportunity are going to open for them?
I think probably the ways that we test that are quite dated and could do with a reform, but this is a very big fish to fry.
[00:18:22] Speaker D: The old fashioned way worked well. It was easy to test. It was easy to standardize it. I mean, how do you get an accurate and fair assessment of something which is multimodal?
There's a whole kind of assessment methodology required to kind of make that replicable. It's difficult to do.
[00:18:39] Speaker B: How do you test somebody's ability to interpret body language or their ability to use it in an exam? That's really difficult.
[00:18:48] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:18:49] Speaker B: And I think one of the things that I'd pick up from what you said is this shift, really, that needs to be made from passive consumption of video to active production for students that they get hands on with the technology, that they produce things.
It's not just about, okay, I'm going to put a video on. You're going to have a task, you're going to watch it and check whether you've understood it or not. It should be about putting this technology into the hands of students and getting them to produce something because it's in their hands or in their pockets already. They can do amazing things with a phone these days and a phone camera that it would have taken you a BBC studio to have done ten years ago.
[00:19:33] Speaker A: Yeah, of course.
[00:19:34] Speaker C: And I wonder actually how much of a kind of clill approach is taking place in institutions with learning about technology and how to use technology and seeing how it can support you in your english language learning at the same time. Probably not that much. That would be.
[00:19:50] Speaker B: I think in a lot of cases teachers are afraid of their students knowing more about the technology than they do themselves.
It can be quite intimidating to sort of tell your teenage students to get their phones out and you're going to teach them something.
No, you're not.
[00:20:07] Speaker C: So naturally you're going to avoid that.
[00:20:10] Speaker D: In my experience, the students that I've taught who specialized in it always had absolutely fabulous English. And that's perhaps the illustration of the thing that you were saying.
Reluctance to speak, perhaps. But certainly their passive understanding of English was always significantly higher than those who didn't have a specialism in it in the school that I was teaching.
Maybe to get back to what you were saying, Nick, maybe this idea of producing leads to this value of open endedness or divergence. We're not quite sure anymore what the students are going to come up with. Whereas in the past the idea behind teaching was to help students converge on the right answer, and we're now helping teachers go into situations where I don't know what they'll come up with. So there is no right answer necessarily. And that's not, I think, something that all teachers are happy about or comfortable with.
It takes a bit.
[00:21:09] Speaker A: It's a scary idea. Yeah.
[00:21:11] Speaker D: Teacher, teacher, look at this. And it's like, I really don't know what to say about this work. It's not in the answer book, not in the teacher's book, and I have limited experience with this and I'm not always entirely comfortable with it. So there are, I think, also really valid reasons for teachers being careful with this.
[00:21:29] Speaker A: Definitely.
[00:21:30] Speaker D: Because of course it can come back to bite them on the backside. Sometimes students might produce things or go places with the task that we weren't expecting them to go to, and maybe we didn't want them to go to either.
[00:21:42] Speaker A: And teachers have so much work already, having to then change your whole style of marking based on that is quite a lot of work.
[00:21:49] Speaker B: Yeah. Having to watch 2030 videos and assess them takes a serious amount of time, doesn't it?
[00:21:57] Speaker A: Thanks for listening to this episode of talking ELT, the easiest place to learn about the big issues in language teaching. Do don't forget to like and subscribe if you want to learn more about this issue and others like it. You can also get practical resources and more advice on this topic by downloading our position paper. Just follow the link in the description.
