Beyond language: multimodal literacy and ELT. Opportunities and challenges

In an already highly digitalised world, the Covid-19 pandemic has further amplified the need for computer-mediated communication. In turn, this has increased the need for those working with English as the Lingua Franca in professional or education settings to add to their communicative repertoire, beyond the mere linguistic knowledge. It is within this context that the idea of multimodal literacy has come to play an even more dominant role. Multimodal literacy can be defined as the ability to communicate using two or more modes of meaning (Mills, 2016); examples of modes are writing, speech, gestures, images, music and sound to name a few. It is easy to see how virtually all communication (digital or not) is multimodal in nature.

A focus on multimodal literacy and expertise in designing and running curricula that fully address the multimodal nature of communication in professional and educational settings can provide institutions with opportunities to offer courses that are not only more appealing to the digital native, but also better representative of the international contexts in which communication occurs and, hence, functional to the global professional. The talk will give an overview of the potentials and challenges of multimodal ELT courses by looking at curriculum design, teacher professional development and marketing strategies for both face-to-face and online teaching contexts.