This pedagogy is about making meaning and thus can appeal to instructors looking to introduce skills of interpretation right from the start of language instruction. Multiliteracies pedagogy is based around four knowledge processes: experiencing, conceptualizing, analyzing, and applying.^[1] The name comes from the fact that it embraces a wide variety of texts (or modalities) such as infographics, images, advertising, TikToks, memes, and other media to help students move beyond basic communicative skills into advanced interpretive ones. Using a variety of authentic texts can effectively convey a cultural context while affording students the opportunity to view the culture from diverse perspectives. Moreover, when supported with appropriate vocabulary, such modalities encourage not just a more nuanced understanding of culture, but also emotional and creative responses, which in turn increase student engagement. The approach is based on the idea that “[…] language (text and speech) is not positioned as the central and privileged mode, but instead the focus lies on the full range of meanings in the world and their inter-related forms (text, image, space, object, body, sound, and speech).”^[2] The knowledge created is thus of a practical and social nature and accordingly contributes to the achievement of a more just society. ^[3]

As a language educator, it sounds like you could hardly ask for anything more, but the approach does demand the deprivileging of the written word, which could be a hard pill for many instructors to swallow, as the written and spoken word is often what drew us into the profession in the first place. Along the same lines, assessment in multiliteracies needs to reflect the prefix, i.e., test different types of communication (interpersonal, presentational, and interpretive) in a variety of formats (written work, partner work, blogs, etc.), preferably without separating the skills into distinct categories. All this, in addition to the time needed to stay up to date on all the modalities, might cause some instructors to think twice before going all in on this approach. That said, you can start small by incorporating more visual media and spending more time on interpretation and analysis rather than jumping directly to written communicative output. You could make memes or advertisements a recurring feature of a course at any level with a focus on students’ personal reactions to and cultural interpretations of the “texts.”

Resources

Cope, Bill and Mary Kalantzis. “Towards Education Justice: The Multiliteracies Project Revisited.” In Multiliteracies in International Educational Contexts: Towards Education Justice, edited by Gabriela C. Zapata, Mary Kalantzis, and Bill Cope. Routledge, 2024, 1 – 33.

Denman, Lorraine and Lina Insana. “Rebuilding an Italian Program from the Ground Up: Content-Based Instruction, Multiliteracies, and the Flexible Foreign Language Curriculum.” ADFL Bulletin 47, no. 1: 46 – 57.

Warner, Chantelle. “Playful Designs: Multiliteracies and Literariness in the Beginning Language Classroom.” Foreign Language Annals 55, no. 3 (2022): 704 – 724. https://doi.org/10.1111/flan.12643