Writing assets: Multimodality’s role in academia

Contributed by: Cameo Flores

Why multimodality is useful

With increasingly different types of communication used today, we must meet the demand of our society’s diverse communication styles. Mass education systems were founded on a factory model of education, which gives individuals a consistent education for basic factory job functions. Now that society is moving away from factory-based jobs, creative jobs that require a different type of education are in higher demand. Multimodal composition has been designed to accommodate the creative ways of thinking needed in education today. Multimodal communication ranges from visual movement to audio recordings (Mehu, 2014).

Diversifying the writer

Writers who partake in multimodal assignments are shown to be more fluent in a wider range of communication, diversifying how they approach their education. Diversification from multimodal composition include but are not limited to the following areas of academic improvement (Marchetti & Cullen, 2016).

• Lexis— an increased vocabulary, which is appropriate to the new medium style and its audiences.
• Jargon— a specialized vocabulary range is increased while writing in non-essay modes.
• Technology— an increased fluency in various technological mediums are typical of multimodal composition transfers.

Uses for multimodality

Clarifying thoughts: Using a drawing to convey an idea instead of an essay can help visual learners clarify their thought processes.

• If you cannot get your thoughts across in a paper, try drawing the idea or talking about the idea with a friend. This is multimodalism at work!

Creating an effect: conveying some ideas through images or spoken words can be more effective than writing these ideas down.

• Reading a play and watching a play create two different experiences and create different effects on their audiences where reading a play can create a mental image, but staging can be difficult to imagine. A stronger visual and aural effect is created when acting out a play because you don’t have to imagine a scene happening.

Multimodalism is very useful for ELL/ESL individuals because the ways in which we communicate are  diversified through multimodalism, breaking down language and translation barriers.

• An image may help an ELL writer convey their ideas more effectively than words can because images can eliminate language barriers.  

Multimodal composition allows for more creativity and flexibility for multimodal writers and their compositions (Marchetti & Cullen, 2016).

• By turning an essay into a video or podcast, the writer is forced to look through different mediums and points of views on the same topic.

Increased awareness

• Genre— Reworking the essay medium through other modes creates a higher awareness of how a genre works rhetorically because creative and critical thinking is required.
• Audience— Target audiences can potentially shift between different modes. Increasing your awareness of an audience shift will help you understand who is viewing your composition.

References

Cullen, P., & Marchetti, L. (2016). A Multimodal Approach in the Classroom for Creative Learning and Teaching. In CASALC Review: (Psychological and creative approaches to language teaching). Retrieved from https://www.cjv.muni.cz/cs/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2016/02/cr-11516-marchetti.pdf.

Mehu, M., & van der Maaten, L. (2014). Multimodal integration of dynamic audio–visual cues in the communication of agreement and disagreement. Journal of Nonverbal Behavior, 38(4), 569-597. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10919-014-0192-2