interacting with multimedia and digital texts " (p. 213). This definition is clearly inspired by the notion of multiliteracies, which was originally formulated by New London Group in 1996. This was a group of scholars (including Norman Fairclough, James Paul Gee, and Gunther Kress) who met to propose ways to change teaching and learning paradigms in response to changing forms of communication. They stressed the need to go beyond the traditional interpretation of literacy in terms of the capacity to read and write (Gee, 1996), and urged educators to utilize new technologies to enhance multimodal literacy (New London Group, 1996). Thus, multiliteracies can be seen as drawing from (1) New Literacies Studies that interpret literacy as a sociocultural (vs. cognitive) phenomenon, driven by changing social practices involving digital communications and new media (Gee, 1996; Street, Pahl, & Rowsell, 2014) and (2) Multimodal Studies that apply new theoretical and methodological frameworks for analysing communication which integrates modes beyond verbal language (Kress & van Leeuwen, 1996;O'Halloran & Smith, 2011). The concept of multiliteracies is now widely applied in general education and the need for educators to develop multiliteracies among learners is beyond dispute (Royce, 2002; Jewitt & Kress, 2003).Multimodal literacy has also become highly relevant for language teaching thanks to an increasing awareness that the multimodal approach can help students learn to exploit semiotic modes beyond verbal language (e.g., visual, gestural, spatial) to both understand and produce texts in the target language more effectively (O'Halloran, Tan, & Smith 2016). It may also heighten their awareness of the target culture, particularly in relation to different styles of non-verbal communication across cultures (Busà 2010(Busà , 2015. Of particular interest in the context of language learning is how non-verbal elements reinforce and/or add meaning to verbal expressions and thus facilitate comprehension, but also how multimodal approaches can serve to motivate learners (Shih, 2014). Over the years, there have been some studies pointing to the advantages of using techniques and resources that highlight non-verbal modes, such as images, gestures, and facial expressions,