ALT 8: PAULA WOOD PRESENTS HER TAXONOMY OF MULTIMODAL ANALYSIS TO EXPLOIT AUDIOVISUAL MATERIAL IN EFL CLASSROOMS
Paula Wood-Borque was one of our InterGedi members that presented at Applied Linguistics Today. From the 23rd to the 25th of May 2025, at the Faculty of Philology (Belgrade), the congress brought together international researchers to discuss “Modern approaches to old and new challenges” in Applied Linguistics, the thematic axis for this 8th edition.
Her paper was entitled “A multimodal analysis of films and series for English as a Foreign Language Teaching”. She explained her taxonomy of multimodal analysis and presented the results from the analyses of two scenes from the CAMELLS corpus – one which was primarily verbal and another one which was chiefly non-verbal. To wrap up, she also provided some suggestions for EFL exploitation, showcasing some activities that she designed.
You can read more about the abstract of her presentation below:
A multimodal analysis of films and series for English as a Foreign Language Teaching
As communication is multimodal, communicative competence in a second language cannot be fully developed by focusing solely on the verbal mode, since it is just one of many diverse sign systems we rely on to communicate (Hafner, 2024). As a result, and considering that most texts students encounter nowadays are multimodal, language teachers need to be aware of the need to incorporate multiple modes into their practice to develop learners’ multimodal communicative competence (Royce, 2006; Kessler, 2022). A way of doing this is through the integration of audiovisual materials such as films and series in the language classroom.
The main aim of this paper will be to explore how scenes from films and series can be multimodally analysed in order to use the results in the EFL classroom. For this, I will present an analytical model designed to examine the main verbal and nonverbal elements that convey the communicative purpose(s) of a given scene. The verbal elements in the proposed analytical model encompass syntactic-discursive features and vocabulary in the scripts, while the nonverbal ones encompass the embodied modes (those generated by people/characters, such as facial expressions and gestures) and disembodied modes (those present in the environment, such as the setting and music) (Norris, 2004) that communicate meaning in the scene. Using this analytical model can help users understand how meaning is communicated through different modes, which can, in turn, inform the scenes’ exploitation in the EFL classroom.
I will present the results of the application of this model to two different scenes; one heavily relies on nonverbal features to communicate meaning (from the film Wall-E) and the other on verbal features (from the series The Office). It will be argued how the analysis results might inform exploitations for EFL learning, developing learners’ multimodal communicative competence.
References
Hafner, C. (2024). Multimodal discourse analysis and second language research. In B. Paltridge, & M. T. Prior (Eds), The Routledge Handbook of Second Language Acquisition and Discourse. New York, Routledge.
Kessler, M. (2022). Multimodality. ELT Journal, 76(4), 551-554. https://doi.org/10.1093/ elt/ccac028
Norris, S. (2004). Analyzing multimodal interaction. A methodological framework. New York: Routledge.
Royce, T. D. (2006). Multimodal Communicative Competence in Second Language Contexts. In: T. D. Royce & W. Bowcher (Eds.), New Directions in the Analysis of Multimodal Discourse. New York: Rouledge. (pp. 361-390)