Multimodal Narrative Texts, Creativity, and English Teaching as a Foreign Language

Introduction

Humans use language not only to communicate with each other but also to express themselves and create meaning. ‘Teaching the rules of language does not mean the end of creative uses of language’ (Kress & van Leeuwen, 1996, p. 3). However, the creative uses of language are frequently forgotten or set aside. In second language instruction, the primary focus of writing tasks is mainly on grammar and text structure. Educators often forget the integration of other semiotic modes, such as images, sound, music, colour, which can be used to complement or add extra value to the written word, while learning and being creative at the same time. The New London Group (1996) identified six different modes of meaning: linguistic, visual, audio, gestural, and spatial. Multimodality describes how these modes interact to create meaning.

The advent of new technologies – mobile devices in particular – changed the educational arena profoundly. These devices opened endless possibilities in education due to their portability; immediacy; data access; communication beyond the classroom walls; in-built facilities, and a wealth of resources. As a result of these developments, there has been an increasing interest in involving and engaging students with multimodality in recent years.

Today, multimodal ways of expression are increasingly being used both in the academic world – digital course books, PowerPoint presentations, educational and professional platforms; MOOC, etc.-, and in our daily lives – video tutorials, audiobooks, podcasts, etc. However it must be considered that new technologies per se do not generate meaningful learning experiences (Kukulska-Hulme, Lee, & Norris, 2017; Zhao & Lai, 2007), educators need to integrate them into the curriculum and design learning tasks in such a way that they provide meaningful learning experiences, and the devices’ full potential can be properly exploited in the classrooms.

The case study presented in this chapter shows the productions of 28 students from Secondary Education (Year 7) in Spain who created a narrative piece of writing in the ELT classroom using multimodality. The writing task goes beyond the traditional drilling of grammatical structures. The students are invited to design, create, and convey meaning through the multimodal functions the iPad offers. Letting the students use multimodality fosters creative thinking since they have to plan; imagine; design, and generate a final product. At the same time, multimodal iPad-mediated narratives strengthen their knowledge of the target language by combining the four skills of the language – reading, writing, listening, and speaking – in the same task generating meaningful communicative situations (Ellis, 2003; Nunan, 1998b; Oxford, 2001).

The introduction of a multimodal approach in this study addresses two aims. On the one hand, for language development to be well-rounded, the students must integrate the four skills of the foreign language simultaneously, which is the natural way in which humans use language to communicate (Ellis, 2003; Nunan, 1998a; Oxford, 2001). On the other hand, and apart from the linguistic value of the experience described here, multimodality engages the students and motivates them to focus on the task from a different perspective. They are meaning-makers, they are creators of their narratives, and they are involved in their learning process (Kukulska-Hulme, Lee, & Norris, 2017).

As a general hypothesis of work, we assume the iPad engages the students in a series of meaningful and motivating learning processes, in such a way that they get involved in the creation of narrative texts in the English as a Foreign Language (EFL) classroom working in cooperative teams, increasing, thus, the quantity and quality of their learning. Taking the narrative as an integrated text (Kress, 2010), where the different systems of representation are used to interact and convey meaning, we would like:

• 1.

  To understand how the students “live” the process of creation and recreation of meaning by studying the value the students grant to the semiotic resources present in their compositions and determine the relationship among them;

• 2.

  To analyse the value the students give to this way of learning a second language.