Andrés Felipe Pacheco Pérez.

Luis Javier Pérez. Ramos.

Andrés Felipe Ochoa Gaviria

Literacies in Second languages

Professor P. H. D. Mora

Semester 2 – 2017

New challenges for literacy in Colombian language education.

Colombian contemporary language education has been experiencing many challenges in literacy teaching and learning processes. Some of them can be observed in the new implementation of ICT to contexts, in which some scholar institutions do not count with the sufficient technological resources due to the economic situation of the country and the low investment in education. That is why not all Colombian population can have free access to ICT, even more the use of Wi-Fi and access to technological devices is constrained. Besides, technology must not be taken as mainstream for teaching processes but as one channel to convey knowledge. Such implementation of ICT’s implies not only vantage points according to Mora (2010) but also some pitfalls that come from the adaptation process of Colombian society to this new educative approach. Therefore, in this paper we will try to underpin the concepts of Multimodality from some theorists’ perspectives and how these perspectives can help us to propose new solutions to the challenges that Colombian education

Multimodality is a very new word to the field of education. Through

complete decades teachers have not paid attention to this concept as

something relevant or something that really could be a ground-breaker in terms

of the education scope it sure can reach. However, in the early 80’s with the

advance of technology, many were the educators who began to discover the

endless potential this powerful term could contribute to the education field in

general. Not only technology but also many other strategies and techniques

with the use of a great variety of instruments and materials were also

considered ways of multimodality in teaching and learning processes in the

Colombian context. Going more specific, in EFLT, Colombian teachers got even

more interested as they saw the potential this term has to provide and

contribute in biggest amount of possible ways. We will examine how

multimodality has been defined by many experts and authorities in the

education field; how they analyze multimodality in its plethora of aspects and

features; and how these definitions can contribute to the field of education

according to their visions and our personal experience as Colombian

second language teachers.

The first author that we will recall is Jewit (2009) who describes

multimodality as a multidisciplinary approach that involves more than the basic

language to study communication as a research concept. He implies that

beyond basic language, there are many other features of symbolic language

that also provide and produce new meanings that are bound to conversation or

to an act of speech.

He suggested that one of those modes that can add more meaning go in

a different layer in which the written texts could be; e.g., the gestures. He talks

about gestures as an extension of the language speech. While a person is

talking, he or she is not only trying to convey with his or her orality, but he or

she is also communicating his intentions and implicit tone in his gestures and

even facial expressions.

The Author of this study raises that these gestures happen sometimes in

mind in a subconscious way, in which the person can even ignore what his or

her body is meaning. Intentionally or not, humans use this body movements to

express more than their words can say, or also as an extension of their speech

to provide the listeners a better understanding of their spoken messages.

However, we dare to contradict this argument where he does not consider those

extra ways to communicate intentions and tones in a speech language. In our

opinion as teachers, we think that even those components that go beyond the

language have to be considered symbolic language. All marks of

communication that convey meaning, in an implicit or explicit way, no matter if

they are words or not, must be deemed as language in diverse communication

media and typology.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Raa0vBXA8OQ

According to Crystal (1969) to Lyons (1972) and to Sebeok (1964) those

other resources used to communicate, that are not words are called

paralinguistic resources. Paralinguistics is the field of study that analyses this

type of communication and it is also considered language in different ways of

expression. Sebeok (1964) argues that these subtypes of communication from

time to time can play a more relevant role than the spoken words in a speech.

He explains that sometimes through voice tone or gestures for instance, an

individual can be conveying the main idea and using the words as a secondary

resource, or even not saying what he really means with his words. This

symbolic type of communication is used according to him to try to escape the

obvious meaning and to go for deeper and more implicit interpretations. He

continues arguing that this type of communication that is mostly based on

gestures and voice-tone rather than in words is normally used when trying to

convey strong emotions and feelings that would sound very tough or aggressive

if they are communicated with words.Finally, language is a very complex

expression system that has many components, and those components that

have to be considered language are only one of those ways of expression. In

this first argumentation, we as teachers would like to propose a new framework

for language teaching based on implicit communication that would challenge the

students’ minds to develop critical thinking. This teaching framework would

involve a lot of activities in which students will play an active role in providing

their own opinions and solutions to problems proposed by the teacher in class.

Most of these activities could be critical reading passages that would be tools to

create debates and round tables that would stimulate or foster students’

participation and own voices as a response to societies’ issues and hot topics.

Kress (2009) on his own argues that multimodality is a social semiotic

approach to contemporary communication. He means by social semiotic the

fact that the resources are socially manipulated and constructed through time to

transform into even more resources that are able to produce more meanings for

the people of those societies manipulating the resources of communication.

This complex idea he meant attempts to explain that society is in charge of

producing more resources and materials to create more meanings going far

from the conventional ones. We agree with him specially in the fact that society

seems to adequate the use of media for the production of more fruitful meaning

to feed its own needs in terms of affective interaction.

He raises that when those resources begin to be collectively used, they

become modes of communication that after some time, they get integrated to

language as a multimodal way of communication. To us, this is exactly what

happened when YouTube became mainstream.

Nowadays, society little by little discover its use, and many people

started to implement it; until it was completely integrated as a communication

channel with more potential than television. Since people can choose the

content they want to watch and the time they want to watch it. In this process,

society realizes than this new mode has some special features about comfort

and demand than the old television mode did not reach to have. That

phenomenon let to a high-range of acceptability that nowadays video-streaming

multimode has. Not only as users but also as producers, society began to take

action to pluralize the use of video-streaming. People all around the world

started to design videos and uploading them on the internet so all the people

can watch them. It went from business to knowledge-sharing and so on and so

forth. It has not only happened to video-streaming, according to Kress (2009). It

has been a similar history to all kinds of media that we know until today; from

written text to images, from images to music, from music to television, from

television to video-streaming, from video-streaming to music streaming, and

even the brand-new third dimension are ones of those examples.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7hKwPHRLz58

Kress argues that technology and media evolution are intrinsically linked

to multimodality development. He argues that as long as more modes are

created, more ways to interpret media are going to be an inevitable result; and

therefore, literacy as we know will suffer more and more changes. Bearing in

mind what has been mentioned previously, as Second Language teachers we

are advocated to recognize the multiple forms of symbolic language that

technology offers and each time most hybrid children are exposed and

immersed to multimodal manners in virtual spaces such as Twitter, Facebook,

WhatsApp, Instagram, etc. We underline a framework in which we promote the

creative skills in our students through video making through social networks.

This methodology embraces the role of producers in learners as well as

transformative agents of their knowledge. As all the videos are shared in class,

they have the opportunity to become critics and evaluators of their palls’

artworks. This way, collaborative work not only helps students to grow their

understanding about the class contents but also creates new tendencies in

students’ thoughts about topics and different learning modes.

Bezemer and Mavers (2011) on their own way talk more specifically

about the potential of multimodality for the educational field in a concept that

they made up as multimodal transcription. They refer to this concept as the

application of multimodal resources or the various modes of communications for

the academic practice. They argued that this multimodal transcription had an

immense contribution to the field of research by stimulating data collection and

generating more channels and ways to get more information in many other

ways used than the conventional ones. Multimodal transcription, according to

them, is the action of reporting through written texts all the processes, results,

findings, and happenings that occur when using a specific multimode,

regardless it is for research, education or other intentions. This factor has

amplified the amount of written analysis not only about one mode, but about

every single mode in which a particular speech is studied. They also suggested

in their assumptions and ideas that many different types of variables and data

types could be researched thanks to the multimodal transcription. They implied

that this situation has favored the amount of study that can be carried through

about the same speech in terms of analysis. We agree with them both all the

way. Thanks to the support of multimodal transcription many action research

studies and many other types of research have been benefitted and the amount

of information collected and analyzed has highly increased. This fact has only

dealt to more effective and accurate research processes and results. I think that

if an act of speech is viewed from a multimodal perspective, it is going to gain

much more depth and it is going to offer a huge amount of material to work with

in the field of education.

Another new expert that contributes to the field of multimodality is Zapata

(2013), which is a Colombian young researcher that performed studies for Luis

Amigo University on the multimodality field. She claims that there could exist

new literacies as the result of multimodality effect in education. She states that

the advancement of the mode of image as a complete innovation to the mode of

writing transformed the way in which people in the world are learning literacy.

She suggests that there are changes in something called domain of meaning

that would be like the mode in which meaning is broadcast in the more

common way. Finally, she mentions that those changes have an enormous

force and impact on the literacy education since they provide more ways to

analyze texts of any kind, not only written ones. We personally appreciate her

analysis on this conception of multimodality because she talks about the

changes in domain of meaning as the main ducts through which knowledge and

meaning navigate and towards the ones we all gravitate. However, we all are

willing to change them; as we discover, as society new ways to interpret

meaning and texts.

Three more authors getting even more specific into the field of second

language learning who are Farias, Ovilinovic and Orrego (2007) presented in

the Colombian Applied Linguistics Journal mention some implications of

multimodality in second language learning and teaching. In their research

project, they argue that the potential of multimodality through information and

communication technologies for language learning processes is innate in the

most appropriate designs of multimodal texts. This multimodality analysis is

comprehended in discourse analysis and learning psychology’s influence on

ESL. They claim that also hypertextuality and literacy deal completely with the

multimodality conceptions of reading and writing. If there is something that we

can agree more with in this essay is the fact of the huge impact ICT has had on

ESL Colombian education. Many modes have been designed to create more

ways to produce meaningful input for our students to be exposed to the target

language that are not only written text nowadays. Hypertextuality, namely, has

provided many new ways to interpret text outside the written way in which the

plurality of text typologies has increased the possibilities for text analysis in our

students. This way, our students can be provided with more different ways to

learn to analyze and interpret text and therefore strengthening their language

comprehension skills using multimodality advantages.

Another scholar who talk on the field of multimodality is Ledema (2003) in

his paper about resemiotization and discourse analysis. His core ideas gravitate

towards the development of the multimode of discourse analysis and its

influence in literacy as well as in research. Another one of his main ideas is

about the potential of description and analysis that discourse is given and

contributed thanks to the multimodality advantages on the discourse itself. He

proposes along his investigation work that new multi-modes have nest for new

ways in which discourse can be interpreted and viewed. He even claims that

those multi-modes like visual, tactile, and even smelling-like could add to the

discourse very different perspectives to enrich its analysis. Therefore, he

acknowledges that this multimodality-effect on discourse analysis begins to

globalize the uses of discourse, and that way, it extends its impact on society.

By this reasoning, he means that more interdisciplinary areas can be integrated

to the analysis and description of discourse in general, making discourse

analysis impact transcend to all fields of human life, and even having way

deeper social implications. This idea of his proposal about the variety of modes

socially constructed in which the discourse can reach to touch more fields of

society itself is what he calls resemiotization. This is the process in which

multimodality, through discourse analysis and descriptions manages to

permeate human life in a more impactful way, aside from the academic field and

education fields respectively and predictively. In our opinion, Multimodality

absolutely transforms the concept and context of discourse analysis by

maximizing their scopes. Not only does multimodality offer more ways in which

society can analyze and describe discourse, but also it adds more levels of

complexity to the discourse enriching its content and the fruitful results that can

be produced and extracted from those descriptions and analyses processes.

This happens because the many modes of analyzing and describing discourse

will have to be taken into account when working on one of them. This

phenomenon strengthens the discourse outcome at the end of the investigation,

and offers more interest from people to keep working on a specific discourse.

Nevertheless,

When those many different analyses from different modes clash or go

against the others, they could revoke each other by making theories and

assumptions about that discourse analysis completely uncertain or wrong.

There are issues and advantages of multimodality’s influence on discourse

according to ideas and reflections on Ledema’s ideas; nonetheless, it is up to

the researcher and society to overcome the issues and to profit from the good

findings and results of discourse analysis and description towards multimodes

and their social impact.

To continue, Gilakjani (2011) Ismail (2011) and Ahmadi (2011) from

University of Malaysia are other authorities in the field of multimodality that have

very interesting concepts, definitions and ideas about it related to SLA and SLL.

Fields. They first began by mentioning a very attractive term called multimedia

learning. They argue that this type of learning was first introduced with the rise

of the mass media consumerism that started in the 19th century and continued

until now. They mention technology as the main axis of their multimodal

reflection.

Gilakjani (2011) claims that this type of learning, using technological

devices as its main transport medium, modified the way in which we learn a

second language. He raises that not only our learning styles changed but also

the way in which we think and act towards the information communication

technologies. He proposed that the resulting change was a complete identity

shift that individuals in a society can have that is totally connected to those

technology tools. He says that nowadays society thinks acts and lives around

those tools, and that many behaviors have been adapted to the way in which

we use those tools to optimize the processes that we do in our normal life. Our

entire behavior is affected by this technology we are using all the time.

Ismail (2011) on his own thoughts argued that in the field of SLA and SLL

the most important aspect goes in the way in which communicative skills have

been impacted in its aspects of interpretation and production. He continues his

analyses by marking the advantages and disadvantages of the new

communicative skills based on ICTs. The main advantage he mentions perhaps

is the globalization of communication opportunities. By this, he means that as

these technological devices have connected the world in a more instantaneous

way, the opportunities of learners to communicate have grown exponentially.

Students have more time to practice and many more tasks oriented to the

development of communicative skills can be created by teachers using those

tools. Nevertheless, he also cares for a huge disadvantage. This happens when

learners try to communicate and there is no adequate control of error-correction

in both oral and written ways. This issue makes students to lose consciousness

on the language they are producing, and that lack of checking makes it easier

for students to fossilize mistakes and errors along the time. All the features of

the disadvantage he raises go in the absence of monitoring that a teacher

needs to have to carry out his or her teaching process to prevent fossilization.

Finally, he states that writing is the skill that can get more affected due to the

keyboards usage that the learners have to deal with, aside from their writing

spelling and punctuation knowledge. We cannot agree more in this point with

Ismail. In our daily life we interact with many English teachers using English

always in our chats for example. We have evidenced and experienced myself

how much mistreated the language is when it comes to using the keyboard.

This happens because most people try to write fast and do not pay much

attention to the keys that they are pressing, causing mistakes in the words and

the messages that they are producing. However, we have to say that the

keyboard is not the only guilty factor. People invent shortcuts all the time to

what they try to mean in phrases and words. Some of our friends write words

like “Ik” which means “I know” or “bc” to mean “because” or even an “x” to

symbolize a hug and an “O” to represent a kiss. The worst thing we have

noticed is not that, but the fact that when people are writing long message

sentences, they commit mistakes and they do not care for correcting them.

They only care for sending the message fast, because they trust that others are

going to understand them. Sometimes people do, but some others people do

not even get the farthest idea of the message, and then they ask for message

repetition. We find this phenomenon very interesting in relationship to what

these three scholars argue; however, it is sad to me that it seems like ICT

instant communication chatting would be advancing into a destiny of lack of

accuracy and precision in terms of meaning, syntax, and also morphology.

According to Ahmadi (2011), the whole global communication system is

changing the way in which it was first conceived because of multimodality. He

talks specifically on the classroom context about classroom interaction and

relationship between students and teachers. That is to say, the new multimodes

cultivate new ways of interaction not only between the learners but also

between the teachers and the learners. He wants to say that the teacher can

use more ways through the multimodes to foster interaction and learning

opportunities. The good deed about this situation is that thanks to the use of

ICT those moments for learning not only happen in the classroom, they can also

happen through the technological devices like computers, tablets, smartphones

and other technological devices. He mentions that the role of the teachers can

evolve into a more personalized one thanks to the text chats and use of

personal devices. Through this method, the teachers can directly impact

students’ learning development by focusing their attention on all of them as if

they are each one alone, problem that is very difficult to overcome in

classrooms with many students. We have to agree with him because in our

experience as a teacher we live it every day of my life. We have created

“WhatsApp” groups for each of my English groups and we orientate half of my

teaching processes through smartphone applications. We have observed that

my students using this method are more willing to participate, as they are not in

front of all class personally. This situation prevents embarrassment, anxiety and

nervousness and all bad feelings and affective factors from the fear to speak in

public.

In conclusion, new challenges of literacies in Colombia involve the way in

which teachers should incorporate ICT in their classes to exploit all

multimodality potential, in our opinion. Multimodality has come to stay and to

show the implications and benefits that this huge approach can have on the

field of education, and more specifically on ESL. It is very relevant to reflect on

our teaching practices to involve multimodal strategies and techniques as well

as multimodal materials to stimulate and to reach diverse ways for our students

to understand and to internalize the language information that we are trying to

teach them in the Colombian context. Nevertheless, we need to admit that

multimodality is an approach that occurs as a resulting phenomenon not only

from the technology advance, but also from the way in which we as a society

learn to interpret text in more ways through time. It is equally important to

acknowledge the very special political and social conditions that this country

has, in order to contextualize the use of multimodality, not limiting it only to

technology. Even, it is more relevant to recognize that we would never know

what other multi-modes are going to appear in the future and how literacy is

going to evolve and transform; or how multimodality is going to modify ESL

education. Finally, it is necessary to recall and to remark the great contribution

that multimodality has provided to the field of research in terms of variety of

data collection and vastness of information analysis. The endless potential

multimodality has in Colombian literacy permeates every single aspect of

human life since it first appeared and it will continue to do it.

References.

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Bezemer, J. and Mavers, D. (2011) Multimodal Transcription as Academic Practice, International Journal of Social Research Methodology Vol. 14, No. 3, May 2011, 191-206.

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Sebeok, T.(1969) A., Hayes, A. S., and Bateson, M, C, eds., Approaches to Semiotics, Mouton, The Hague, 1964

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