Remix Culture and English Language Teaching: The Expression of Learner Voice in Digital Multimodal Compositions

Abstract

A number of scholars maintain that the affordances of digital media to easily copy, edit, and share digital content has led to the development of a remix culture in which the amateur creation of cultural artifacts—often remixes, mashups, or parodies based on the creative works of others—has proliferated. At the same time, in TESOL there is increasing interest in engaging students with processes of digital multimodal composition, focusing not only on language proficiency as it is traditionally conceived but also on the strategic use of multimodal resources and collaborative tools to reach a wide authentic audience on the Internet. One issue which such approaches must face is the tendency for some students to draw upon and remix existing creative works in their digital compositions. In particular, the issue is whether this practice of remix promotes or compromises the expression of learner voice. This article considers these questions by examining the multimodal compositions of students in a course in English for science at a Hong Kong university. The analysis generates a theoretical model of remix practices, which can be applied to the teaching and evaluation of multimodal compositions in English language courses.

Multimodality in Education: Some Directions and Some Questions

“…It is a dilemma which forces many of us into precarious balancing acts. We may for instance (Hafner, , this issue) teach traditional modes of scientific inquiry, yet encourage students to recontextualize them as media genres. This undoubtedly engages them, and undoubtedly fosters initiative, personal engagement, and teamwork, values which are highly prized in today's corporate culture.…”

Creativity in language learning and teaching: Translingual practices and transcultural identities

“…Although such discussions certainly have merit, they sometimes suffer from the fact that they tend to construct the idea of creativity (and the idea of 'language' for that matter) in a vacuum, as an abstract quality of this or that technique or activity that can be easily slotted into any cultural context. In other words, with some notable exceptions (see for example Alim, 2007;Hafner, 2015), notions of creativity are often removed from the actual situations of people in the concrete physical and cultural spaces where they teach and learn, spaces where the idea of 'creativity' may be given lip service while at the same time being resisted or devalued (Coffey & Leung, this issue;Robinson, 2007). In short, what is missing from most discussions of creativity and language education is an honest engagement with the 'messiness' of most situations in which people are trying to learn language, the 'messiness' of creativity, and the 'messiness' of the whole business of language itself (Jones, 2018).…”

EFL learners’ critical multimodal reflections on the politics of English

“…Much has been discussed about the transcription and analysis of multimodal videos (e.g., Baldry & Thibault, ) due to concerns about the capacity of textual forms to represent embodied communicative practices (Mavers, ), especially those captured through techniques aimed at particular artistic expressions (Rose, ). However, students’ multimodal texts are often different from commercial audiovisual materials in their strategies of remix (Hafner, ; Knobel & Lankshear, ), best described as involving a process which “re‐mixed a variety of audio, visual, and written texts retrieved mainly by going to the [various] Internet sites that they referenced in their presentation” (Mahiri, , p. 58).…”