Scaffolding Multimodal Composition With Emergent Bilingual Students

Abstract

Digital multimodal composition offers opportunities for emergent bilingual (EB) students to orchestrate semiotic resources in ways that develop their identities, strengthen their understandings of language, and help them to engage with content. To better understand how EBs can participate in varied multimodal composing practices, this study systematically reviews the literature on EBs’ digital multimodal composing in secondary classrooms. More specifically, it examines types of scaffolds, or planned and responsive instructional supports, used by teachers and students, as well as functions for learning associated with these scaffolds. Through an inductive approach, the authors analyzed 74 studies situated in classrooms. Findings showed seven types of scaffolding: collaboration, direct instruction, exemplar texts, translanguaging, discussion, encouragement, and questioning. In addition, eight scaffolding functions emerged that illustrate three major themes of scaffolding identities, scaffolding resources, and scaffolding contexts. The authors then discuss implications for classroom practice, implications for translanguaging and social semiotics theories, and directions for future research.

“It Made Me Think in a Different Way”: Bilingual Students’ Perspectives on Multimodal Composing in the English Language Arts Classroom

“…Although the classes participated in a scaffolded workshop model (Dalton, 2012)-which involved explicit technical instruction combined with opportunities for students to analyze a variety of examples, receive peer feedback, reflect on their process, collaborate, and follow their own modal preferences-some students still had difficulty with the openness and digital nature of the assignments. Students' perspectives emphasize the importance of scaffolding students' processes (Pacheco, Smith, Deig, & Amgott, 2021) and the need for additional research in this area. Furthermore, teachers need professional development and technical support to leverage the unique meaning-making opportunities of multimodal composing (Deroo & Ponzio, 2021).…”

Elementary Translanguaging Writing Pedagogy: A Literature Review

“…Literature reviews on literacy and bi/multilingual learners frequently review a broad range of studies, such as Reyes’s (2012) review of biliteracy and children and youth, and Williams and Lowrance-Faulhaber’s (2018) review of both bilingual children's writing development and pedagogies that support it. In addition, reviews are often focused on the secondary level, for example, Bacon’s (2017) review of critical literacies in English language teaching and Pacheco et al’s (2021) review of secondary emergent bilinguals’ digital composing practices. I chose to focus on writing rather than reading or other content areas for several reasons.…”

“…It is critical that we research writing because through student autonomy over their topic and language use (e.g., Machado & Hartman, 2019), writing has the possibility to represent students’ full funds of knowledge (Moll et al, 1992). Second, while there is an established body of research on translingual writing at the secondary and university levels (e.g., Canagarajah, 2011; Li & Zhu, 2013; Pacheco et al, 2021), research on translingual writing at the elementary level is an emerging field (Zapata & Laman, 2016) and there is a need for a synthesis of the existing research.…”

Composing Across Media for Rhetorical and Idiosyncratic Purposes: Text‐Based Writing and Digital Multimodal Composing

“…This study is situated within the body of literature that addresses transfer in the writing pedagogy, in terms of (1) transfer of genre knowledge and (2) composing across media, rather than on multimodal composition itself. See the recent review articles (Pacheco et al, 2021; Smith et al, 2021) for more details on L2/multilingual writers' multimodal composition.…”