www.ircelt.ibsu.edu.ge E-mail: ircelt@ibsu.edu.ge ENGAGING ENGLISH STUDENTS THROUGH MULTIMODAL LEARNING ENVIRONMENT Nato Pachuashvili Bank of Georgia University Georgia npachuashvili@bog.edu.ge Abstract With the rapid move to more computer-based teaching, traditional printed materials have been converted into more multimodal, interactive, technology mediated e-learning. Information is now shared through diverse media, such as online social and work-related networks, and in diverse social settings that “extend well beyond the traditional classroom” (Flewitt 2011, p. 1). Images and other semiotic modes have become incorporated on the pages more than they used to appear. If writing used to be seen as the primary information carrier and images- secondary, now, visuals and other modes are increasingly prominent as carriers of meaning. The study of multimodality offers a fundamentally different perspective on communication - it takes into account many different communicative modes that people use to interact and considers how these modes work together to create meanings. These modes have found their way into learning resources with significant affect and have substantial implication for the classroom habitus as students increasingly engage in multimodal design. The aim of the project is to explore the relationship of the designs of students’ class assignments and their potentials for learning. In particular, t he project concerns to explore how the different modes such as images, writing, typefaces, layout, and other semiotic resources of the power point slides created as part of the students’ class assignment, can make meaning and thus create potentials for learning. It will also assess whether selecting certain semiotic modes have been successful in creating and communicating meaning. The participants in this project are year 1 Business English university students and the interest as a lecturer is to explore pedagogies that work with students’ diverse representational resources and how the classroom can become a space founded on multiple modes of representation. Key words: Multimodality, Social Semiotics, Computer Assisted Language Learning, (CALL), Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), Teaching-Learning Process, Collaborative Learning Practice. Introduction In the 1990s, researchers in social semiotics started to focus on the study of multimodality. People started to use language, pictures, scripts, images, colours and other semiotic resources as ways of communicating to show what meaning they want to transfer (Bezemer & Kress, 2008, pp. 171-172). Multimodality itself refers to a diverse way in which a number of distinct semiotic resources are co-deployed and co-conceptualised (Van Leeuwen 2005, p. 281). In other words, all modes are independent, but they are held in balance and are created in what is called “multimodal ensemble” (Jewitt 2008, p. 241). This led to an understanding that a language is not the only mode of communication. Multimodality stepped away from the notion that language always plays a central role in interaction, without denying that it often does (Bezemer & Kress, 2008, p. 166). It is now no longer possible to understand language and its uses without understanding the effects of all modes of communication that are coherent in any text (Ajayi 2008, p. 210). This change in perspective can offer radically new insights into understandings of communicative and learning processes. The study of multimodality offers a new opportunity to go beyond recognition of language as a channel of expression in the classroom and extend beyond it into images, gestures and other semiotic modes. Theoretical framework The project draws on the theoretical framework on social semiotics from the perspective of multimodality, which deals with “all t he means we have for making meanings – the modes of representation - and considers their specific way of configuring the world” (Kress 2004, p. 24). This is a recent field that has derived from Michael Halliday’s (1973) theory of social semiotics and it drew attention to the interdependent relationship between language and social context; how communicative events are shaped by both social and linguistic processes (Flewitt 2011, p. 6). According to Halliday (1973), when analysing the texts, it is essential to determine why did the speaker/writer choose this particular grammatical structure in that particular social context. (Flewitt 2011,p. 2). This theory of choices in text making is central to multimodality which focuses on what motivates sign-makers to choose that particular mode to communicate and make meanings in given contexts (Kress & Van Leeuwen 2006, pp. 7-8). In other words, meaning making in social semiotics approach to multimodality is not heavily relied on language, rather on a variety of multimodal resources in a way that language interfaces with visual, audio, spatial etc. (Ajayi 2008, p. 201). This new theory was developed by Kress and Van Leeuwen (1996; 2001) and shares the basic theoretical tenets of Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) (Flewitt 2011, p. 2). This combined framework provides tools for investigating discourse “which can account for the way in which language combines with other semiotic resources“ (Coffin 2009, p. 514). Kress & Van Leeuwen (2006) argue that a social semiotic approach to multimodality regards the modes as relatively independent, unless they are brought together by sign-making in a newly made sign (Kress & Van Leeuwen 2006, p. 8). In other words, the modes of image and the modes of words are independent, but they are both needed to understand the whole. (Ajayi 2008, p. 210, p. 5). Meanings created are made of different modes and each mode contributes