No abstract

No abstract

Digital multimodal composing (DMC) has attracted language instructors’ and researchers’ increasing attention during recent years. Previous studies mainly investigated the students’ DMC processes and perceptions, but DMC products are underexamined, and in particular, scarce is research comparing collaborative DMC products and individual DMC products. This article reports an empirical study conducted with 185 EFL college students in an English for specific purposes (ESP) course in Vietnam, in which they completed two infographic tasks using Visme, one collaboratively and the other individually. The DMC products were graded according to a rubric assessing the aspects of content/organization, multimedia/visual effects, and language use; the accuracy of the students’ infographics was also evaluated. The results of variance (MANOVA) test showed no statistically significant difference in the overall qualities of infographics between the two work conditions (i.e. collaborative composing and individual composing) as to both tasks, but the between-participant effects showed that collaborative DMC products were advantageous in visual effects for Task 1 and in content/organization for Task 2. The findings of the Welch’s t-test revealed no statistically significant difference in the accuracy of students’ DMC products between collaborative work and individual work. This study fills the research gap by comparing the qualities of collaborative DMC products and individual DMC products, and meanwhile highlights the role of infographics in writing pedagogy. Implications of the study for research and pedagogy are also discussed.

No abstract

This chapter begins with a general overview of collaborative multimodal writing which arose in response to the social turn (Trimbur, 1994) and visual turn (Li & Storch, 2017; Purdy, 2014) in writing studies occurring during this decade. A plethora of empirical evidence indicates that collaborative writing (CW) fosters language negotiation and mutual scaffolding (Li & Zhu, 2013; Storch, 2019; Swain & Lapkin, 1998) and improves writing development (Bikowski & Vithanage, 2016; Strobl, 2014). Meanwhile, multimodal writing (MW) heightens students’ awareness of the metafunctions of semiotic modes (Shin & Cimasko, 2008; Shin et al., 2020), improves their multiliteracy skills, motivation and autonomy (Hafner, 2014, 2015; Jiang & Luk, 2016; Yi & Angay-Crowder, 2016), and affords multiple opportunities for self-expression, identity development, and language development (Belcher, 2017; Jiang et al., 2020; Vandommele et al., 2017). Despite flourishing research on CW and MW in L2 contexts, little research has explored CMW using digital technologies (Smith, 2019). A collaborative approach towards digital multimodal texts is likely to foster the development of learners’ collaborative skills and L2 digital literacy skills, both considered indispensable for learners to complete authentic tasks in the digital world (Li & Zhang, 2021). Therefore, our study aims to examine how French FL learners in a university Elementary French class jointly produce MW via Google Docs, focusing on both writing processes and products. To echo the themes of this book (e.g., contextualization and socialization), this chapter also discusses how technologies are adopted and writing tasks are devised to meet learners’ needs in the specific context; how technologies and learning environments afford meaningful interaction, particularly interaction amongst learners. The chapter concludes by re-addressing the “smartness”-related themes, pedagogical implications, and future research directions.