Multimodality

Over the past two decades, the concept of multimodality has garnered considerable attention from language teachers and researchers both in ELT contexts and beyond.The term multimodality refers to an individual's use of different modes (i.e.channels of communication) for the purpose of conveying meaning.Such modes can consist of those that are linguistic, visual, aural, gestural, or spatial in nature (Kress 2003).In the second language (L2) learning literature, Tardy ( 2005) was one of the first to note that many academic-related tasks were growing increasingly multimodal.For instance, both teachers and their students are now frequently required to construct slide-show presentations using various digital tools and software (e.g.Google Slides, Microsoft PowerPoint).Importantly, such tasks require individuals to employ multiple modes in order to convey meaning, including written text (linguistic), images (visual), sound clips (aural), hand gestures and facial expressions (gestural), and physical elements arranged in a manner that facilitates comprehension (spatial).Since Tardy's observation, multimodality is increasingly regarded as an essential component of ELT training, pedagogy, and education policy (Grapin and Llosa 2020).In particular, due to the ubiquitous nature of digital technologies, multimodality now permeates numerous facets of teachers' everyday practices.Many teachers may be unaware of the extent to which they rely upon and leverage different modes as a part of their pedagogic toolkit, using storyboard activities, picture description tasks, flashcards, audio-and video-based files, multimedia projects, and other multimodal materials.