Episode Transcript
[00:00:12] Speaker A: Hi, everyone, and welcome back to talking ELT, the easiest place to learn about the big issues in language teaching. We're joined again today by Ed, Charlotte and Nick, and we'll be continuing our conversation on multimodality.
[00:00:27] Speaker B: We've been talking in the previous episodes a lot about viewing multimodal text, very much about receptive skills. How do you think critically about videos and images, and how do you help students develop these skills? But I want us to move more towards the productive skills, which we refer to as representing. So how can we help students create multimodal texts? How can we help them create videos? How can we help them create PowerPoints, like whatever skill set we're doing? How can we help them create memes, which we discussed in the last episode? So I want to move us on to creating multimodal texts. So I suppose my first question again, I'm going to start us very broadly, is how can we really help students in what approaches and mindsets and activities do we need to take into account to help students develop this skill of creating multimodal texts?
[00:01:19] Speaker C: I think in a way, they're kind of linked, the two, and you kind of link them through the tasks that you get students to do when they're looking at texts and viewing texts. And those should feed into how you help them to create and represent texts. So they're like deconstructing what the person who created this was thinking and trying to achieve, whether that's analyzing things like the different shots a cameraman would take. For example, you have a close up shot for a reason, whereas you have a different reason for having a distance shot. You know, if you start to break those things down when you're doing the understanding and observing kind of thing, then you can help train students to use them when they produce their own work. And I think that's the way the two links. It's a bit like, you know, reading and writing. To become a good writer, you have.
[00:02:12] Speaker B: To be a good reader and they feed into it. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.
[00:02:16] Speaker D: Yeah, it's like a guided discovery approach, isn't it? So creating your own media, noticing how other media has been formed, and then how you're going to form it yourself.
[00:02:27] Speaker E: I would do something with my students, which was to combine what they felt to be the easier part of two productive skills. So you'd have students who like, oh, I don't really want to write something, and I definitely don't want to give a presentation about something. So what do you do? Okay, do something simple and do something which combines those two things. So I would use graphic organizers as a way to help students plan their ideas or to organize their ideas about something. And then they'd say, what do we do with this graphic organizer? Do we hand it in and say, no, you come to the front and talk us through it. Or we'd beam it onto the board, talk us through it. So you have there a structure and you have there a kind of map of what you want to talk about. But the combination of writing and speaking is kind of combined. And the overall effect of that is, I suppose it's a kind of mediation, but it's mediating the medium of the graphic organizer through speech and also having something interactive where the other students in the class are asking questions.
[00:03:28] Speaker C: Yeah, I mean, also you've given them the chance to think through what they're going to say as well, because so many speaking activities, we drop students straight into them and I'll talk about this. Whereas if they've done that preparation, they know what they want to say. And that makes speaking a lot easier, doesn't it?
[00:03:45] Speaker E: Yeah, for sure. I also, on the topic of graphic organizers as the vehicles for productive tasks, had lots of success with flowcharts as well. So get students to like, should I do my homework? Was the kind of the starting question, and they create a flowchart to make that decision about whether they should. Is there a test tomorrow?
[00:04:05] Speaker C: Yes.
[00:04:06] Speaker E: No, that kind of thing. And what makes this so kind of engaging in the classroom is that it's interactive. And so how do you decide whether a flowchart is good or not? You try it out yourself. So this kind of genuine audience participation testing, checking to see if it works or not, and the same thing. Present your flowchart to the class. Well, that's something which is a combination of presenting that kind of graphic organizer, but also describing it, explaining it, taking questions and things like that.
[00:04:36] Speaker D: I like the kind of academic slant that that takes as well. I think when I was teaching a group of teenage learners and the majority of them were taking their ielts exam, and there was a graph aspect to it with the task, one of the writing exam, and it can be very dry.
So a way to sort of make it a bit more interesting and a bit more engaging was to. To get them to really understand how data can be put together to create graphs and charts and things.
And so I got them all to go out and conduct a survey.
They all conducted, you know, the same survey, but they actually went out onto the streets of the city I was living in and you know, actually using the language and speaking to real people and then came together and used all that data that they had to then create something a bit more kind of academic with it. And I think that ties into what you were saying about, you know, it's showing them how they can, you know, recognize and understand by doing it themselves so that they know then, you know, how to produce it themselves by also using a model that already exists.
[00:06:04] Speaker F: Yeah, that makes sense.
[00:06:05] Speaker C: It's nice to get onto graphs and away from video for a little while because I really love infographics.
[00:06:10] Speaker B: Everyone always talks about video.
[00:06:13] Speaker C: Infographics are great and it's a great way of transferring quite dense information as well. And it combines all those different things. You've got a big bit of text, you've got some images, you've got use of icons and things like that.
I can never say multimodal sort of means of transferring information.
Really nice things to use.
[00:06:35] Speaker B: Yeah, I really like that.
[00:06:39] Speaker E: What I love also about infographics is that there's a great possibility to give different students different tasks or roles collecting data, as you mentioned, Charlotte, using whatever tool it might be to represent the data and then having someone else who mediates or communicates the information to an audience.
Yes, you could say that. One way to kind of raise students critical skills about how they receive this kind of information would be to have different groups of students making different infographics using the same data or using the same topics to see how they differed or how they compared in terms of what they looked like and what they were drawing their audience's attention to.
[00:07:23] Speaker D: Interesting.
[00:07:24] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah. Lots of interesting things about the use of color and use of fonts for those things as well, which communicate different things, know the different font that you choose, you know, gives a very different impression, doesn't it?
[00:07:38] Speaker E: Some people, I think, are much more sensitive to this than others. I think I spent many, many years being quite unaware of the importance of typeface and what different people saw in different, different fonts.
[00:07:52] Speaker B: Comic sans.
[00:07:53] Speaker E: Yeah, exactly. And even the size of a word. Right. So the idea, the idea of hierarchy within a text in terms of how the different typeface indicates the importance of the words which appear there, it's not self evident to everyone. That's the kind of thing that can be used wisely or can be used as a manipulator, I suppose.
[00:08:16] Speaker D: Yeah. It can definitely be used to emphasize messaging within data, and then it sort of ties into what we were talking about earlier about, you know, how people are influenced by, you know, the media worlds that they live in and how messaging can be tweaked to form some kind of bias with the messaging. Yes, of course, coming from the creators of it.
[00:08:47] Speaker E: We also, I guess in some cultures, have a, have a left to right bias in terms of the direction that we read. So are we, are we also aware of that in terms of when we look at a page or eyes drawn to a certain part of the page, depending on our expectations of where the important information tends to be on a page? In an english language context, it's a.
[00:09:06] Speaker C: Really interesting thing as well. When you start looking at web pages in terms of this left to right and different scripts, if you go to a chinese webpage or an arabic webpage, they work in very different ways.
I mean, I used to love timelines when I was teaching and was taught to do them. You know, you had the past started in the left, it went left to right, the timeline. But for my arabic students, that didn't make sense at all. That was not, that's really interesting. Wasn't something that was just intuitive at all.
[00:09:39] Speaker B: Well, and I think. I think I've taken down a bit of a tangent here, but this extends even to, like, film, because I've watched a couple videos about this, and one of the interesting things is because of the whole left to right bias in movies, they will often have the say in a battle scene or anything like that. If it's like an action movie, they'll have the good guys coming in from the left and moving to the right, and the bad guys will be coming from the right, moving to the left. And that's all very much about, we identify that direction because it's the way we read. And it's interesting seeing where, like, that kind of language, visual language, is just built into the film in a way.
[00:10:20] Speaker E: Did you guys know that when you look at an image of yourself, you're more likely to think it's a good image if it's mirrored?
[00:10:28] Speaker F: Yes.
[00:10:29] Speaker E: And so a lot of the social media apps will actually have a default setting of, you see yourself mirrored, because that's the version of ourselves that we like. And when we combine images with text, of course that becomes significant. And again, a whole aspect of how we look at a picture and how we judge a picture can sometimes be below the level of our consciousness, something as simple as whether it's a straight, ordinary image or a flipped one.
[00:10:53] Speaker B: But I think it is interesting making those sorts of ideas and processes that are very unconscious.
I suppose a big part of multimodal literacy is about understanding those how they influence us and how to think critically.
[00:11:07] Speaker D: And actively about those challenging the way that we think about things.
[00:11:11] Speaker F: Yes. Yeah.
[00:11:12] Speaker E: So you mean like raising awareness, raising students awareness of how things are operating.
[00:11:15] Speaker B: But then also being able to use that as a means of critically analyzing a piece, for example, like knowing. Knowing that that is something that is being used.
[00:11:26] Speaker E: Sure, I guess, yeah.
[00:11:28] Speaker D: Yeah.
[00:11:29] Speaker B: I've taken us back onto reading images now, but, um, that's all.
[00:11:33] Speaker D: Well, it shows how it's all interconnected, doesn't it?
[00:11:35] Speaker F: Yeah.
[00:11:36] Speaker D: Once you start drilling down on one aspect, you realize the connections it has to all these other areas as well.
[00:11:41] Speaker B: Absolutely, absolutely. So we've talked quite a bit about infographics and ideas like that in the classroom. What about helping students create other multimodal artifacts, like, say, videos or presentations?
[00:11:56] Speaker E: One thing that I've done in my teaching and also in teacher education is to encourage people to capture their thoughts using their cell phones to make a video or just an audio memo as an addition to or an alternative to written text.
[00:12:11] Speaker C: Okay.
[00:12:11] Speaker E: Yeah, I think that's a great way. And it could be a combination of those two. Like read what someone's written and then record a voice response to that using a platform where such things are possible.
[00:12:20] Speaker D: Yeah, I've done that, too, actually. I had an activity with a class where I'd get them to do audio diaries just like, once a week. Send me through, you know, a short two to three minute audio snippet of your day, which, you know, might traditionally be a writing activity to keep a diary.
But it was such an easy task to set up because all of my learners had mobile phones, which had some kind of audio recording tool on them, and then they could just email. Email the snippet to me. And actually that activity because I think, you know, it comes back to, well, what's the purpose of them doing that? And, you know, what's my aim? It's not really that I want to know what they're doing with their day.
This was a class that a lot of the learners really struggled speaking in the class. We had a few very confident students who would very happily, you know, take the stage and talk throughout the whole lesson if they've given the chance.
And so this activity was a really nice way to. For me to hear the other learners speaking.
[00:13:27] Speaker F: Yeah.
[00:13:28] Speaker D: And actually, it sort of had a sort of an additional benefit in that it raised their confidence. So I think by the end of the term, you know, they were speaking a lot more in the classroom.
[00:13:44] Speaker C: I think there's an awful lot of value as well, in students being able to hear themselves too, you know, that they can record themselves and they can hear well. That's what I hear like, I sound like that could be really great, but it also gives them the chance to improve on it as well.
[00:13:59] Speaker D: Absolutely.
[00:13:59] Speaker C: Doesn't it?
[00:14:00] Speaker D: Yeah. Reflective practice.
[00:14:01] Speaker E: I wanted to say, actually, when listening to you, Charlotte, that Nick's point, I think is so kind of crucial to the success of these activities. If I'm not using a recording device and I'm saying, okay, I'd like you, student, to tell me this thing, and I'd like you to do it six more times. And their student would rightly say, well, no, what's the point of that?
[00:14:21] Speaker B: Yeah, what are you doing?
[00:14:22] Speaker E: But if you ask them to record themselves, what happens? They record it, they mess up, they delete it, they try it again, second time. I don't like that. I'll delete it and try it again. We always want students to practice and improve through practice. They resist that until there becomes, you know, there's a reason to do it again. And I think recording yourself is the perfect reason to aim higher and to, you know, try again.
[00:14:45] Speaker C: And if you include that into their digital portfolio and they can look back on that six months from now, that can be really powerful. It can be really powerfully bad as well.
But, you know, then you need to do something. But, you know, but it can be a really powerful kind of motivational thing to think, wow, I sound so much better now than I did then.
[00:15:05] Speaker D: Absolutely.
[00:15:05] Speaker E: Do you find that students are more comfortable hearing their own voices than perhaps we were back in the day?
[00:15:11] Speaker C: Well, as somebody who's not comfortable hearing my head, probably, maybe they're just more familiar with it. It's more of a normal thing to do, you know, and more voice communication. And recorded communication, you know, lots of apps like WhatsApp, you know, you record your voice and send a voice recording instead of writing something like that. So it's becoming more acceptable.
[00:15:33] Speaker E: I think students, I agree. I think students are much more comfortable hearing their voices now than 1020 years ago, for sure.
[00:15:41] Speaker C: But it must, I mean, you know, to hear your voice in another language as well, it's probably quite, quite an interesting experience as well.
[00:15:49] Speaker B: Yeah, more challenging.
[00:15:52] Speaker C: It's funny, this exercise, I used to do the same thing with my students back when I was teaching in Kiev in 90, 94, 95. But we used to do it with audio cassettes. So each lesson I'd take home this big bag of audio cassettes to listen to them all and then record, record a reply and then go back to the next lesson, hand out the audio cassettes and everybody had their cassette, took it home, recorded a bit to reply to me. And it was so much work then. It's so much easier now. But what we really got from it was that we really got to know each other really well. And the way it affected the sort of dynamic of the classroom as well was really great. And we. I made it optional, so only the students that wanted to, had to do it. But as you know, the other students saw that, you know, these students were getting more out of it. They were, okay, I'll do it, I'll give it a try. And that was really nice as well.
[00:16:48] Speaker D: You know, oh, lovely.
There's a nice safety in numbers thing as well, isn't there? When everyone else is doing it, you feel like, oh, it's okay for me to do it.
[00:16:57] Speaker F: Yeah.
[00:16:57] Speaker E: There's a real strong sense of audience as well in the way you describe that task, which adds that kind of motivation to something which is so often.
[00:17:05] Speaker C: Lacking audience, genuine communication, and sort of getting one to one time with your teacher, which I didn't have time to do in the classroom, I think.
[00:17:14] Speaker E: So often the problem lurking in the background of a failed classroom activity is that unanswered question of what's the point? What's the point of this? And with multimodal tasks, very often the point is self evident and students are motivated to do it because they know there will be an audience for it or someone to respond to it.
[00:17:29] Speaker C: I remember when blogging first became popular, you know, lots of teachers, I'm going to get my students to write a blog. So, hey, we're going to write a blog and oh, we're going to write a blog, and then they'd write one and that would be it. Because, you know, it takes more than just that, doesn't it?
[00:17:45] Speaker F: Yeah, of course.
[00:17:45] Speaker C: You need to know, you need to have something to write about or something, you know, that you can't, you know. And that hadn't been thought out. It was, you know, at that time, it was like, it was enough, we'll write a blog, they'll just do it kind of thing, because it's a blog.
[00:18:01] Speaker B: So we've talked a bit about audio quite a bit now I'm wondering what kind of in with the world evolving so much and technology becoming ever present, what kind of new multimodal skills in terms of production might our learners need today and how can we help them develop those?
[00:18:28] Speaker C: I think that the video can help to make our students much more aware of their body language, and I think that's becoming much more important when we have so much communication going on through video conferencing these days. Yeah, of course, you know, if you work in any profession nowadays, we're having meetings through video conferencing and being able to get the body language right in that kind of environment, I think is very important. You know, and there's a big difference between seeing somebody sit and read something to their camera than there is with somebody who can genuinely communicate through the camera as well. You know, I think it's an important skill for teachers as well. Yeah, I found that, you know, during COVID when I was giving loads of presentations online, and, you know, you're just stuck to the space in the camera, you become very much aware of your body language because you're watching yourself the whole time. And it really helped me a lot, I think, to work on my body language for when I give physical presentations and things like that. I think that's sort of a really good key to improving body language, which has been very difficult to do in the past.
[00:19:36] Speaker F: Yeah, that's really interesting.
[00:19:38] Speaker A: Thanks for listening to this episode of talking ELT, the easiest place to learn about the big issues in language teaching. 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.
[00:19:54] Speaker B: More advice on this topic by downloading our position paper. Just follow the link in the description.
