Hope collection

How can teachers help students express emotions and opinions more effectively through digital multimodal composition?

Practical Advice/Tips for Practitioners

• Use digital comics to teach emotional expression 
  Incorporate digital comic creation tools to help students combine language, facial expressions, and gestures to express emotions effectively.

• Explicitly teach evaluative language 
  Introduce a structured framework (such as the appraisal framework) to help students categorise and use language that conveys emotions, judgments, and appreciation.

• Encourage multimodal storytelling
  Guide students in using text, visuals, and digital tools together to create richer narratives that show rather than tell emotions and opinions.

• Provide scaffolding and collaboration 
  Use teacher modeling, peer discussions, and exemplars to help students expand their use of evaluative language in both written and visual forms.

• Engage in professional learning 
  Teachers should participate in professional development to gain confidence in integrating digital multimodal composition into language instruction.

Abstract

This paper shows how a linguistic framework describing resources for expressing attitudinal meanings, and its extrapolation to images, informed a multimodal authoring pedagogy designed to extend year five students’ repertoires for evaluative expression. The teachers’ linguistic and visual semiotic knowledge of attitudinal expression and their knowledge and confident use of digital multimodal authoring software were developed through professional learning and collaborative lesson planning with the research team and through modelling of the pedagogy by a professional media artist in the classrooms with the teachers. The emphases were on student enjoyment, building competence and confidence with the authoring tools, extending their repertoires for multimodal expression of attitude, and concomitantly establishing their knowledge of a metalanguage describing types of attitudinal meaning. Students’ digitally created comics dealing with ethical dilemmas demonstrate their use of sophisticated evaluative language and of visual techniques such facial expression, gesture and focalisation. The students’ declarative knowledge of resources for expressing attitude was demonstrated in interviews through their prompt exemplifying responses and their use of metalanguage describing different categories of attitude. Pre- and post-test results also showed their expanded knowledge of nuanced expressions of attitude and their ability to identify different types of attitude in text examples.

Full paper access

Unsworth, Len and Mills, Kathy A.. (2020). English language teaching of attitude and emotion in digital multimodal composition. Journal of Second Language Writing. 47, p. Article 100712.

Contact the researcher

Professor Len Unsworth
len.unsworth@acu.edu.au

Learn more about Professor Len Unsworth’s research