Leveraging Multimodal Projects to Enhance Metacognition in Writing Instruction
by Titcha Ho
The concept of flow is abstract to someone whose English is a second language. One can recognize it, but teaching it so that others will notice flow is different. When a comment reads, “The essay does not flow very well,” what does that mean exactly? Concepts commonplace to the teaching of writing, such as flow, organization, and coherence, can be quite an enigma, especially to freshman students who perhaps only recently learned that there are more than five paragraphs in a typical essay. This article discusses using multimodality as a strategy to teach coherence.
In composition, attention has been paid to incorporating multimodality in classrooms to accommodate students’ experiences in composing and meet different expectations of different genres and media (Bowen & Whithaus, 2013, p.2). In the same vein, second language writing has embraced multimodal composition and implemented it in a multilingual classroom, as seen in numerous articles in Second Language Writing that featured the concept of multimodality. But why incorporate multimodality in the teaching of writing at all? Tan (2023) found that students who received tasks that were unfamiliar to them—in her case, a multimodal storyboard project—actively engaged in the process of problem-solving and decision-making (p.12). Like Tan’s experience assigning multimodal projects in her class, my students also reported that they learned more about writing when they created various multimodal projects that I assigned.
The following activity, on teaching transitions and flow for coherence, is based on one over the course of which I asked students to create potential class materials to teach future students about the concept. In terms of scaffolding, students were first assigned an exploratory draft, learned about transition and organization, and then did the following multimodal activity. I found it essential to have students engage in these tasks before the revision step. In this activity, I asked students to create a poster or infographic on canva.com explaining transition usage. As an example, here is a picture by former students Kanako, Hiroki, Jenny, and Jiaolingzi:
In this picture, students reimagined using a transition to build a bridge between the previous paragraph and the new paragraph. In doing so, students were encouraged to rethink the functions of transitions and create a visual representation of the concepts they learned.
After creating an infographic, students presented their poster to the class while explaining how transitions should be used. This technique was also applied to other concepts, such as punctuation and run-on sentences.
In the following instance, students compared a transition to a train, as in “train-sition,” since it helps ideas to be connected and travel together in order to understand their relationship to each other:
Also, students envisioned run-ons cinematically as crime scene-like mistakes they should not cross:
Part of the lesson’s success came from asking students to work with unfamiliar technology–in this case, Canva–and to use creativity to solve problems working with a concept that they have issues with. Distributing a handout and doing an exercise may teach students to get the correct answer for one exercise, but asking them to create a visual representation and teach it to the class should help remind them of the importance of the concept when they write in the future.
In another lesson on transitions, I emphasized making learning explicit by teaching students to notice. In this activity, you can use Perusall or Google Docs to ask students to annotate the concept on the board. In this example, I showed them a work by my previous student and then asked them to annotate transitional words. The work was exhibited on the screen in real-time. If students pointed out transitions that might not look like transitions but function as transitions, they would get extra points.
Overall, in this lesson, I tried to engage students in writing concepts they might not care about and may forget the minute they leave the room: grammar, transitions, and punctuation usage. Multilingual students might find abstract concepts challenging, and envisioning concepts as pictures to have them ingrained in their heads might help them comprehend the concepts better. For example, when I encountered the abstract idea of translingualism in my graduate class, I compared translingualism to a treasure chest where students can pick any means of making meaning (emoticons, text, gesture) from any linguistic repertoires they possess (code-meshing) as opposed to a multilingual model of drawers where students might have to close one drawer before using another drawer, with each language viewed as separate from one another (code-switching).The idea of using concepts and imagery (translingual, codemeshing, codeswitching) as visual representations stemmed from the necessity to understand them thoroughly before conveying them to others. Like my students, envisioning concepts in images and having to explain them to my classmates helps with comprehension and metacognition.
Since in an academic writing course, learning to compose essays is key, some may feel that creating non-textual essays is not a part of the class. However, my classroom experience and research show that creating multimodal projects encourages metacognition, with students being asked to reflect on the substance of their ideas continuously. In a special issue of the Journal of Second Language Writing, “Multimodal composing in multilingual learning and teaching contexts” (2020), the editors Youngjoo Yi, Dong-shin Shin, and Tony Cimasko relayed the sentiment that writing teachers may ask, “What counts as writing?” and “What counts as text?” (p.1), and therefore become resistant to using multimodality in a writing class. Nevertheless, applied linguistics has demonstrated how language expands beyond textual language. My argument is to use all available meaning-making repertoires to access understanding. Eventually, students will produce work in the textual form, informed by their time spent reflecting on cohesion in a multimodal way. Moreover, what I can report from my classroom when I assign this poster project is that students seem to be engaged in it as they have to encounter an unfamiliar project their professor has assigned. When assigning multimodal projects, students seem to care more about the concept after being asked to internalize the idea and create a concrete project that they have to show their understanding to their classmates.
References
Bowen, T., & Whithaus, C. (Eds.). (2013). Multimodal literacies and emerging genres. University of Pittsburgh Press.
Yi, Y., Shin, D., & Cimasko, T. (2020). Special issue: Multimodal composing in multilingual learning and teaching contexts. Journal of Second Language Writing, 47, 100717. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jslw.2020.100717
Xiao, T. (2023). Stories behind the scenes: L2 students’ cognitive processes of multimodal composing and traditional writing. Journal of Second Language Writing, 59, 100958. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jslw.2022.100958