Abstract
This study assesses and analyses the written production of undergraduate Media Studies students in English as a Foreign Language (EFL), through the production and experimentation of pedagogical resources which associate visual (or multimodal) literacy to the genre-based approach to teaching writing. The aim was to describe and analyse how students interpret multimodal print advertisements and how they assimilate the contents of the teaching materials.
Within an applied linguistics framework, the research aims to empirically apply two theories drawn from Michael Halliday’s Systemic Functional Grammar: the theory of multimodal social semiotics which supports the Grammar of Visual Design (Kress and van Leeuven, 2006) and the Sydney School genre-based approach (Rothery, 1996; Martin, 1989; Martin and Rose, 2007, 2008). On the one hand, the grammar of visual design provided students with the necessary tools to understand the semiotic resources of the print advertisements used as visual stimuli and, on the other, the genre-based approach offered the methodology for the writing pedagogy used in the project. Framed within action-research in a collaborative context, in the pilot phase we had the valuable collaboration of one colleague who taught the subject in 2009/10 and the following year, in 2010/ 11, of three colleagues who also agreed to use the teaching materials. The research is qualitative-based and covers the analysis of a small corpus of twelve texts produced by three students of three different levels (good, average and weak) in the context of three assessment moments: diagnostic test, midterm test and final test. Although the sample is too small to be truly representative, the aim was to observe the EFL writing skills development of the three students concerning mastery of the genre, and to see how the classroom discussions and input on analysis of multimodal texts were revealed through the students’ writing. Generally speaking, this study aims to provide reflection on EFL writing pedagogy and, ultimately, to help university students become more critical and perceptive readers of the texts they read and write.
Within an applied linguistics framework, the research aims to empirically apply two theories drawn from Michael Halliday’s Systemic Functional Grammar: the theory of multimodal social semiotics which supports the Grammar of Visual Design (Kress and van Leeuven, 2006) and the Sydney School genre-based approach (Rothery, 1996; Martin, 1989; Martin and Rose, 2007, 2008). On the one hand, the grammar of visual design provided students with the necessary tools to understand the semiotic resources of the print advertisements used as visual stimuli and, on the other, the genre-based approach offered the methodology for the writing pedagogy used in the project. Framed within action-research in a collaborative context, in the pilot phase we had the valuable collaboration of one colleague who taught the subject in 2009/10 and the following year, in 2010/ 11, of three colleagues who also agreed to use the teaching materials. The research is qualitative-based and covers the analysis of a small corpus of twelve texts produced by three students of three different levels (good, average and weak) in the context of three assessment moments: diagnostic test, midterm test and final test. Although the sample is too small to be truly representative, the aim was to observe the EFL writing skills development of the three students concerning mastery of the genre, and to see how the classroom discussions and input on analysis of multimodal texts were revealed through the students’ writing. Generally speaking, this study aims to provide reflection on EFL writing pedagogy and, ultimately, to help university students become more critical and perceptive readers of the texts they read and write.
Original language | English |
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Supervisors/Advisors |
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Award date | 24 Jul 2017 |
Publication status | Published - Jul 2017 |
Keywords
- EFL writing
- writing genres
- genre pedagogy
- multimodality
- Grammar of Visual Design
- The Sydney School Teaching and Learning Cycle